A street game or street sport is a sport or game that is played on city rather than a prepared game field. Street games are usually simply play time activities for children in the most convenient venue. Some street games have risen to the level of organized tournaments, such as stickball.
When street games are based on organized sports, the rules are highly modified to fit the situation, i.e. manhole covers for bases with cars or buildings for foul lines in stickball. When balls are used in street games, are often used.
Street sports
Street sports are sports held in
urban area environments. Street sports are an expression of the spontaneous, improvisational and creative origins of sport adapted by human ingenuity to the urban environment. In historical terms their origins are traceable to the very earliest evidence of sports in Greek and Roman civilisation.
[ Urbanization and the Evolution of the City; Reader, J.; Vintage; (2005)] Street sports are a hybrid form of sport and reflect the adaptation of conventional sports to the cityscape.
Viewing the city through as a living, bustling, and thriving organism helps to cast light on the nature of that which is urban and to begin to home-in on particular features of urban life. It is only with the advent of this relatively modern perspective on the urban that it has become possible to speak in terms of street sports.
Parkour artist Sebastien Foucan has defined the sport of Freerunning as a ‘physical art’.[Foucan, S; Freerunning: Find Your Way; Foucan, S.; Michael O'Mara Books Ltd.; (2008)] In the words of Foucan, street sports are "...a philosophy concerned with the quest of personal and social realisation..."[ To Reach the Clouds; Petit, P.; Faber & Faber; (2002)]
Examples of street games
This is a list of games that are traditionally played by
urban area children in
playgrounds,
parking lots, and back streets. They are all games that may be played on a hard surface, like
Asphalt concrete. They are part of children's street culture, and are notoriously hard to classify rigorously.
[Milberg, Alan (1976). Street Games, p.202. McGraw-Hill. .]
Utilizing a rubber ball
Other games
In popular culture
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Street sports in the Middle East: The Kite Runner and The Kite Runner (the film adaptation)
[Housseni, K.; 2003]
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Highwire Walking: Man on Wire, film documenting the background to Petit's high-wire walk between the WTC Towers.
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A 2010 PBS documentary, New York Street Games, shows the best-known street games played in New York City in the twentieth century, as well as discussing the decline of those games in recent decades.
See also
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Children's game
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List of traditional children's games
External links
