Healthy cities and instrumental leisure: the paradox of fitness gyms as urban phenomena

Abstract

As urbanisation has come to characterise contemporary societies, large cities have become quite ambivalent places for the human species: they are removing the human body from its perceived natural condition, while increasingly attempting to provide a cure for the ills of a sedentary life. Fitness gyms are presented as the ‘natural’ solution to our ‘unnatural’ lifestyle as urban dwellers and as a therapeutic fix to the ills of metropolitan living. This paper deploys a mix of qualitative methods (ethnographic observation, interviews and discourse analysis) to explore fitness culture as an urban phenomenon. Using data from Italy and the UK, it develops a micro-sociology of the spatiality of the gym that helps to approach this institution from within, deconstructing those claims which contribute to its cultural location as a key ingredient in contemporary urban lifestyles. The paper first looks at how fitness culture is negotiated through the marshalling of structured variety within the spatiality and temporality of gyms. It then explores the specificity of fitness as urban, instrumental leisure as compared with other forms of active recreation or sports available in urban contexts. It finally considers, on the one hand, the way in which fitness activities are continuously renovated, drawing on the fields of both sport and popular culture and, on the other, the kind of subjectivity and embodiment that fitness culture normatively sustains.

Keywords::

• fitness culture
• spatiality
• urban leisure
• embodiment
• nature

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

^1. Increasingly, as commercial urbanisation proceeds with globalisation, fitness is becoming fashionable in many countries beyond the West (see, for example, Landa 2009 for Argentina; Spielvogel 2003 for Japan; Srivastava 2011 for India). While we may individuate a global gym culture (Andreasson and Johansson 2014), national traditions contribute to the global reservoir of physical techniques that impinge on fitness culture (see, for example, Newcombe 2009 for the globalisation of India-born yoga or Bowman 2010 for Chinese martial arts).

^2. See for example Wacquant (2004) for a study of the boxing gym, and Sassatelli (2012) for a sustained comparison of fitness embodiment with the boxing habitus in the context of a genealogy of bodies and selves in consumer culture.

^3. This is resulting in formats such as body weight training, which, mixing acrobatic elements and an emphasis on bare body performance, somehow mimics the extraordinary stunts of super-heroes and super-heroines from the film industry.

^4. While different gyms may cater for different populations (in terms of ethnicity, class, sexuality and gender, see for example Leeds Craig and Liberti (2007), by and large, especially in global fitness chains, the clientele is mixed and gym etiquette is at work: the progress of a gym career from novice, to regular, to fitness fan is partly to be understood as the acquisition of a locally specific capacity to manage ceremonial risks by filtering external social identities in ways that highlight involvement in training (Sassatelli 2010). A number of different studies have documented the way ethnicity (Sherman 2009) and gender (Dworkin 2003) are deployed, engaged and kept under control in various gym environments.

^5. Still, fitness discourse itself is currently growing in reflexivity with regard to the role of fitness gyms and their mechanisms, in urban dwelling – especially at its expert core, as opposed to its commercial edge – participating in a current trend towards promotional reflexivity (Sassatelli 2009). Fitness discourse increasingly acknowledges the contradictions of contemporary urban living, and that the gym may just add to it. The gym becomes a balancing tool, I have often heard, only if it is itself taken with a sense of balance: allowing time, reconsidering priorities, enjoying and making it into something beneficial to ordinary life. This suggests that a sense of balance may require quite fundamental choices, other than a simple gym pass. Choices that require a more radical, less individualistic take on urban life – from the possibility of reconsidering mobility and spatiality in urban spaces to the way food is provided from rural areas to the city.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Roberta Sassatelli

Roberta Sassatelli is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Milan (Italy). She has published widely on the historical development of consumer societies, the theory of consumer action and the politics of contemporary consumer culture. She has also worked on the sociology of the body, the sociology of sport and leisure, gender and sexuality studies, visual methodology and ethnography, and cultural theory. She is co-editor of the Journal Studi Culturali. Among her books in English are Consumer Culture: History, Theory and Politics (Sage, 2007); Fitness Culture: Gyms and the Commercialisation of Discipline and Fun (Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2010 [2014 paperback ed.]).