Healthy Cities and Instrumental Leisure. The Paradox of Fitness Gyms as Urban Phenomena

As urbanisation has come to characterise contemporary societies, large cities have become ambivalent places for the human species: they are increasingly removing the human body from its perceived natural condition while attempting to provide a cure for the ills of a sedentary life. Fitness gyms are presented as the ‘natural’ solution to our ‘unnatural’ lifestyles as urban dwellers and as a therapeutic response to the ills of metropolitan living. This paper draws on a combination 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, approaching this institution from within and deconstructing the claims that contribute to its cultural positioning as a key ingredient of contemporary urban lifestyles. The paper first examines how fitness culture is negotiated through the orchestration of structured variety in the spatiality and temporality of gyms. It then explores the specificity of fitness as a form of urban, instrumental leisure in comparison with other forms of active recreation and sport available in urban contexts. Finally, it considers, on the one hand, how fitness activities are continuously renewed by drawing on both sport and popular culture and, on the other, the forms of subjectivity and embodiment that fitness culture normatively sustains.