Sport in the City

The Role of Sport in Economic and Social Regeneration

Chris Gratton, Ian Henry

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• eBook ISBN: 9781134544424
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Cities now seek to attract major sporting events and activities to re-image themselves, and frequently invest in community sports development to fund economic growth and regeneration.

Including a range of case-studies from global (the Sydney Olympics) to local (urban school sports), this book looks closely at how sport has been used in contemporary cities across the world, and evaluates policies, strategies and managment.
Five key areas are examined:
* sport and urban economic regeneration
* sports events: bidding
* planning and organization
* Urban Sports tourism
* Sport and urban community development
* Urban politics and sports policy.
Sport in the City therefore represents an essential resource for urban policy makers and the sports policy community. It will be invaluable reading for sports studies students and urban geographers.

Part I

Introduction

1 Sport in the city
Research issues

Ian Henry and Chris Gratton

Although until relatively recently sport might have been described as a neglected topic in social analysis, the significance of sport in contemporary societies seems undeniable. In economic terms sport is estimated to represent 3 per cent of GDP in the OECD countries. In cultural terms more than two-thirds of the world’s population saw some part of the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games via television (LIRC, 1998). In political terms sport has been employed as a policy tool by nation states, as for example in the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, and in the Olympic Games’ boycotts of the 1980s, or more recently in promoting the new or reviving nationalism of the post-communist Central and Eastern European states.

However at the same time that sport has come to be recognised as being of considerable significance for the nation state as a social, economic and cultural concern, ironically, the role and significance of the nation state as the primary policy influence has been subject to pressures (della Sala, 1997). Developments in economic policy such as the advent of the Euro, and associated harmonised economic planning, have de facto reduced national powers, while globalising trends have also impacted considerably on social policy (Wilding, 1997) and cultural life (Featherstone, 1995; Negus, 1993).

Globalisation is of course not a unidirectional phenomenon, nor are its effects uncontested at the local level (Hirst and Thompson, 1995; Keil, 1998). Nevertheless recognition of its significance does imply the need to move beyond state-centric approaches to analysis, and to incorporate a recognition of both transnational and sub-national elements of governance. The city in particular is considered to play a key role in the evolving system of governance (Andrew and Goldsmith, 1998; Wilheim, 1996). As cities compete with one another for inward investment and struggle to deal with problems of social and economic disruption, increasingly cultural policy, including policy for sport, is developed to address the twin aims of economic development and social inclusion (Mayer, 1994).

A concern related to the diminution of the role of the nation state is that of the ‘hollowing out of the state’ (Patterson and Pinch, 1995; Rhodes, 1994). This phenomenon relates both to the movement of policy concerns upwards to the transnational level and downwards to the sub-national level, as well as to the growing trend in privatisation and contract culture, and the involvement of the commercial and voluntary sectors that is evident in policy areas previously considered to be the province of government. Ironically, while one might expect sport to be one area of policy in which the principles of vertical and horizontal subsidiarity would most effectively be applied, in the past decade in the European context, some far reaching policy developments have been initiated by transnational bodies, particularly by the European Union. The Bosman ruling effectively imposed on professional sport a requirement to allow free access for employment to any national market within the EU for any citizen of a member state, while sporting bodies themselves lobbied for sport to become a competence of the European Union. Although the revision of the Treaty on European Union which was signed in 1997 by member states in Amsterdam, did not incorporate a treaty article on sport, it did incorporate a declaration on sport for the first time (Henry and Matthews, 1998).

In the British context, sports funding on the part of the state declined, as local government budgets were effectively squeezed, with only partial compensation attained by the introduction of National Lottery funding for sport (Henry, 1999), and sporting investment by the state as a social service has thus declined. Competitive tendering for the management of public sector sports facilities, as a means to generate efficiencies and save on public sector budgets, and privatisation in the sports sector have become popular strategies in developed economies. However, mindful of the potential costs of social exclusion, cities have continued to focus some sporting investment on targeting disadvantaged groups and communities with programmes such as opérations d’été and équipements de proximité in France (Henry, 1997), or schemes targeted at the unemployed in Britain and Spain (Glyptis and Pack, 1989; González Ferreras and Urkiola, 1989) or at ethnic minorities (Arnaud, 1999; Augustin, 1996; Rijpma and Meiburg, 1989) in Britain, France and the Netherlands. However, such programmes tend to be marginal rather than mainstream.

In addition to the decline in sport as social investment, the nature of sporting provision made by local government has also been greatly affected by the changing nature of local governance and local economic development concerns. Sport as a welfare service may be in decline, but as an element in city marketing, an attractor of the tourist market or of inward investment, sport has grown in significance for local government and in particular for cities. Sports facilities may be seen as triggers to further growth (Page, 1990). A classic strategy of inter-urban competition has been the bidding for the staging of major events (Cochrane, Peck, and Tickell, 1996; House of Commons, 1995) very often linked to a reimaging process (Dobson and Gratton, 1996). Such a process of urban competition through sport may be conceptualised as occurring on the global, continental, national, or regional/local level.

In a quasi central place theory approach, one might develop a hierarchy of sports places at each of these levels. At the global level there are perhaps only three major sporting events, the Olympics, the soccer World Cup, and the World Athletics Championships, which carry with them the potential to establish global place recognition. Of these only the Olympics and the Athletics Championships are ‘city-located’ rather than staged in multi-urban centres, and while the Olympics carry instant global recognition, the World Athletic Championships are less effective. Most sports fans could cite the location of the last six or eight summer Olympic Games, while many would have difficulty in identifying the last four locations for the World Athletics Championships. The World Cup is of course not city-based and while providing income and some recognition for host cities, is also not of the same order as the Olympics. Thus while Barcelona, Seoul, or Los Angeles may be instantly recognisable as world sporting cities, the same may not be true for example of Stuttgart (host to the 1993 World Athletics Championships).

The Commonwealth Games does generate interest across the globe though only in respect of those associated with Commonwealth activities, in a sense raising identity in a global sub-set of locations. There are in addition some ‘location bound’ world sporting events or facilities which promote strong identities though these are not always city-based. The establishment of the Royal and Ancient, Golf’s governing body at St Andrews, or the All England Club and the tennis championships at Wimbledon are cases in point, while the world’s major soccer stadia (for example the Nou Camp, Maracanna, Wembley, or even Old Trafford) are also symbols with global currency.

At the continental level, for example, one might identify European cities of sport as those which host major athletics competitions (European Athletics Championships, the Europa Cup, or Grand Prix meetings), soccer finals (European Championship, European Champions League, UEFA Cup), other major championships such as the European Swimming Championships, or even ‘national’ events of international significance (for example those cities that host a stage of the Tour de France). At this level in particular, cities are often second cities, or at least those which lie in the shadow of the dominant (usually capital) city. Lyon for example, and Stuttgart, have both sought to establish themselves beyond the shadow of Paris, and Berlin/Munich/Hamburg respectively (Henry, 1997). At the national level support of some local authorities for local professional clubs is commonplace and the system of inter-urban competition evident in the North American scramble to host sports franchises represents this level of competition (Leone, 1997; Shropshire and Dunn, 1996). How the hierarchy of identities from global to local is developed is not of course restricted to place promotion through sport, but sport has come to play an increasingly significant role in such processes.

Given the above range of issues, social, symbolic, economic and political, how has commentary on sport and the city developed? What are the key themes and perspectives in the literature, and how does this book contribute to the literature? There are perhaps five broad areas of literature on sport and the city which we might identify as follows.

Sport and economic regeneration

Perhaps the largest set of studies in relation to recent literature on sport and the city has focused on economic impacts, and broader evaluations of economic costs and benefits of sport-led development. The role of sport in urban economies is one which has begun to be recognised, particularly in the context of deindustrialisation and the growing importance of the service sector in such circumstances. There is also a literature relating to the costs and benefits of stadium development, particularly in the US (Baade and Dye, 1988a; Baade and Dye, 1988b; Pelissero, 1991; Shropshire and Dunn, 1996), but with some more recent contributions relating to Britain (Black and Lloyd, 1994; Churchman, 1995; Page, 1990; see also Williams, 1997 for a detailed discussion of related material).

The role of sports events in urban regeneration

A particular sub-set of the literature on sport and economic regeneration is about the promotion of urban sporting events. A number of authors have addressed the role of the promotion of single large-scale events in economic development (for example Foley, 1991; Kidd, 1979; Roche, 1992), while others have focused on the economic impact of programmes of significant sporting events (Baade and Dye, 1990; Crompton, 1995; House of Commons, 1995; Law, 1994; Turco and Kelsey, 1992) or on the social impact (Hall, 1992; York, 1991). Thus there is a mix of positive prescription (KPMG Management Consulting, 1993) and critical analysis (Bramwell, 1997; Hall, 1992; Law, 1994). Within this literature, there is also some critical material on the application of economic impact analysis (Crompton, 1995; Turco and Kelsey, 1992).

Urban sports tourism

In addition to the social scientific analysis of sport in urban areas, there is a growing literature on urban sports tourism and on sport and city marketing. This literature has a predominantly managerialist set of concerns (Kotler, Haider, and Rein, 1993; Law, 1996; Smyth, 1994), though with some more critical approaches (Hall, 1992; Hall, 1997).

Sport, social division and the development of urban communities

The notion of the two tier city has grown in the literature (Jones, 1998; Lash and Urry, 1994), particularly as the result of the marketisation of services (Lorrain and Stoker, 1997). Thus the impact on ethnic, gender, and class groups of development decisions and the marketisation of public sector sports services are treated more or less directly by a number of authors (Pitter and Andrews, 1997; Tatz, 1995; Verma and Darby, 1994; Yule, 1997). The pervasive growth of the individualistic philosophy of neo-liberalism is seen by many to ignore and (thereby) reinforce the growth of such cleavages (McKay, 1994). As market freedom is prioritised over welfare provision, so access to sport as a welfare service is likely to decline, fuelling the differences between those who can afford to avail themselves of market provision and those who cannot.

Politics and urban sports policy

The urban politics literature has recently burgeoned with studies of the development of the city as a growth machine (Logan and Molotch, 1996), or the development of urban coalitions and partnershi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Tables
• Figures
• Contributors
• Part I: Introduction
• Part II: Sport and Economic Regeneration
• Part III: Sports Events: Bidding, Planning and Organisation
• Part IV: Urban Sports Tourism
• Part V: Sport and the Development of Urban Communities
• Part VI: Politics and Sports Policy
• Part VII: Conclusion