Authors

Discussion

The activity of roofing refers to the recreational trespass of a city’s rooftops. Practitioners appropriate the spaces of the city’s rooftops, gaining access through courtyards and stairwells and, in extreme cases, freeclimbing. The roofs provide the perfect location for urban exploration as they are, by and large, unused and undetermined spaces withing the city: in the eyes of roofing’s practitioners, they are spaces filled with inexhaustible potential. As a means of escape, of mastery over the built environment and the creation of experiences outside of the everyday, central to roofers’ risk-taking decisions is the concept of azart. Its meaning is multifaceted, encompassing passion, risk and reward, a sense of accomplishment, whilst often also linked to competition, prestige and self-improvement. For practitioners, it is the physical and mental challenges posed by the activity, and the sensations that the embodied experience elicits which continue to be the primary motivations for participating in roofing. Drawing on archetypal azartnye figures from Russian culture as well as my research on roofing, this paper will provide a conceptualisation of azart as both an idealised experiential state and a set of internalised strategies which motivate a person’s actions.