Sport in the City

Cultural Connections

Michael P. Sam,John Hughson

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317990772
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Social Sciences
• Sous-sujet: Customs & Traditions

Sport is seen as an increasingly important aspect of urban and regional planning. Related programmes have moved to the forefront of agendas for cities of the present and future. This has occurred as the barriers between so-called 'high' and 'popular' culture continue to disintegrate. Sport is now a key component within strategies for the cultural regeneration of cities and regions, a tendency with mixed outcomes - at times fostering genuinely democratic arrangements, at others pseudo-democratic arrangements, whereby political, business and cultural elites manipulate a sense of sameness and unity among their fellow citizens to smooth the path for the pursuit of what are actually vested interests. Almost any active enactment of a 'sports city of culture' risks divisiveness. Recognizing controversies, with both potentially positive and negative outcomes, this book examines sport within contexts of urban and regional regeneration, via a number of rather different case studies. Within these studies, the role of sport stadium development, franchise expansion and sports-fan (and anti-sport) activism is addressed and articulated with issues concerning, inter alia, public funding, environmental impact, urban infrastructure and citizen identity.

The 'sport in the city' project commenced as a research symposium held at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand and number of the essays originate from this occasion.

This book was previously published as a special issue of Sport in Society.

Sport in the city: cultural and political connections

Michael P. Sam^a and John E. Hughson^b

^aSchool of Physical Education, University of Otago, New Zealand; ^bSchool of Sport, Tourism and the Outdoors, University of Central Lancashire, UK

There is little doubt that sport holds a prominent place within cities. Clearly the most glaring examples of sport’s influence on the city are in relation to infrastructure. Facilities such as arenas and Olympic-sized swimming pools are what many now come to expect of a modern city. Stadiums in particular are some of the most striking (though not always aesthetically appealing) structures on urban skylines, and are significant for the simple fact that they generate so many spillover effects including: the need to relocate or displace nature, heritage buildings and even citizens; and the need for added public transport and parking facilities. Beyond these structural effects, contemporary civic connections with sport are also significant because they so often reveal a complex process of constructing a credible (but fragile) sense of identity for local citizens. It is telling, for instance, that when civic elites extol (and conflate) sport’s links with ‘community’, they do so for the simple reason that to speak out against one is to speak out against the other.¹

Indeed the strong connections between sport and the city arise from the almost infinite claims that can be placed on sport in terms of its benefits. In municipalities the world over, the main justifications and debates when it comes to sport concern its capacity to achieve health benefits, reduce crime, relieve neighbourhood tensions, induce economic regeneration, retain ‘human capital’ and so on. Regardless of the truth of these claims (and the fact that sport can just as easily exacerbate urban problems as ‘fix’ them), sport’s malleable qualities make it a strategic and resilient instrument for any number of interests to mobilize around.

We are grateful to be given this opportunity to pursue our interests in these connections. The seeds for this volume were planted at the ‘Sport in the City’ symposium held at the University of Otago, Dunedin, New Zealand, in November 2007. The symposium was generously funded by Otago University’s School of Physical Education, owing much to the support of the School’s then Acting-Dean Michael Boyes. Three of the papers in the volume were presented in earlier versions at the symposium (others have been published in a special issue of the International Journal of Cultural Policy 14, no. 4, 2008), viz., the papers by Davies, Kohe, Sam and Scherer, and Spirou. Other papers have been subsequently commissioned.

It has now been a decade since Chris Gratton and Ian Henry’s edited collection entitled Sport in the City: The Role of Sport in Economic and Social Regeneration. The book is still relevant today because the issues of urban regeneration, mega-events, sport tourism and sport policy remain as interlinked, perennial concerns for cities, aided in large part by the mandates of city economic development units. ‘Sport tourism’ is now part of the parlance of ‘place positioning’ strategies and the competition for corporate investment as a means of increasing a city’s tax base, has translated directly into cities competing with each other for prominent (as well as not-so-prominent) sporting events.²

Despite Gratton and Henry’s concluding hopes, for improved output measures and better monitoring of regeneration projects, we are at something of an impasse when evaluating economic and social impacts. The promise of ‘better’ decision-making and conflict resolution through econometrics is as elusive today as it was throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, the contradictory interpretations between those who see higher property prices, for example, as a positive economic indicator versus those would argue this to be evidence of a burden on the poor, are indicative of the ease with which impacts can convey contrasting political stories. Perhaps as a consequence of this impasse, there are detectable signs of convergence in how cities portray the influence of sport. Whereas previously the language of sport-city investments revolved around economic spin-offs, the emphasis tends now to be placed on ‘legacies’.

On the surface such evolving discourses appear to be a positive development because it means cities now have to demonstrate and plan for the prospect of longer-term benefits to citizens and communities. It is therefore insufficient to simply say that this event or a new stadium will ‘put us on the map’ (though of course such rhetoric is as common as ever). Instead, proponents now speak of fostering sustainable economic development or of retaining a pool of social and human ‘capital’. One popular legacy claimed of large sport events, for example, is the creation of a massive volunteer workforce whose goodwill and skills can be potentially harnessed in the future. In other cases the legacy is meant to be the fostering of a ‘cultural common ground’ – though, as Hughson points out, civic attempts to bring the arts and sport communities together are more akin to ‘bureaucratically engineered amalgams’ than genuine efforts towards building a city’s cultural citizenship.³

Thus while contemporary assurances of deep-seated societal changes and sociopolitical reforms may well be prophetic, these are often manifested in unintended or unanticipated ways. Time and again we see sport bids and facilities become a polarizing issue, not only because they involve large capital expenditures but also because they invite the consideration of ‘opportunity costs’ – that is, debates about what other strategies are being foregone. Indeed, successful bids such as those for London 2012 are just as likely to result in delaying needed infrastructure as they are in inducing it. This is not to say that legacies and their spillover effects are all bad – in some cases one might say the acrimonious debates accompanying bids and stadium proposals create a certain (valuable) public ‘restlessness’.⁴ Though often painted as the result of oppressive forces from the neoliberal order, we should not overlook that stadium plebiscites tend also to generate a wave of interest in civic affairs.

But in the absence of public revolt, there appears no discernable change in the desire for cities to use sport as a policy instrument for economic stimulus. Indeed what we seem to be witnessing in this subsequent generation of public spending is the ‘triumph of hope over experience’, where such strategies are arguably not chosen because they work, but rather because they fulfil a ‘logic of appropriateness’.⁵ Put simply, the imperative to ‘market’ the city is now taken to be a universal axiom and civic officials see the preservation and growth of sport as part of the roles they are expected to play. But as David Whitson warns, ‘we have to recognise that our interests as fans, however powerfully felt, may not coincide with our interests as citizens’.⁶ One of the key dimensions of sport and cities is therefore the way in which identities are created, changed, exploited. That civic elites and the media have explicitly used sport as a means of creating a sense of sameness is hardly new, but as experience tells us, moulding identities across neighbourhoods that are ethnically, culturally and linguistically diverse can be problematic. This is a common theme and raises questions regarding the extent to which sport in the city shapes civic aspirations, goals and identities. Event bids and stadium redevelopments have often served as the basis for civic elites to encourage citizens to ‘think big’ and become ‘global leaders’.⁷

Costas Spirou’s essay in this collection is instructive in this regard, suggesting that US cities are now akin to corporations in their seeking a competitive edge through ‘image building activities’. This paper provides an insightful view of the connections between private interests, civic politics and community resistance. It begins by tracing the historical development of urban renewal paradigms along with the growing influence of professional sport. Spirou’s case studies then provide a rare view on the intersection of race, class and political representation in Chicago. More uniquely still, the analysis of multiple stadium projects makes it possible to see the overlapping interests and the ‘policy learning’ that can take place for both proponents and opponents. Typifying the pluralist nature of American politics, Spirou points to the capacity for community groups to extract benefits, but only after observing the fate of other unsuccessful community resistance groups. Business interests meanwhile are entrenched through the legitimacy of public-private partnerships and their role (and influence) is thus assured for the next era of stadium updates and redevelopments.

To stem the tide of what Schimmel calls the fundamental irrationality of public financing of mega sport projects, there remains a need to develop more sophisticated means of evaluating impacts and legacies or at the very least to discern what other variables might count as evidence.⁸ An important consideration is therefore: does sport ‘work’? To this end, Larissa E. Davies explores the body of evidence surrounding sport-related regeneration initiatives in the UK. Davies outlines how sport has increasingly become part of urban policy initiatives, while at the same time national-level sport policies have themselves embraced the new rationales of regeneration. Thus at both national and local levels, there is a growing demand for evidence to support the view of sport as an industry worthy of local investment. Based on a synthesis of the most common research themes and instruments, Davies argues for a more comprehensive agenda that would include both quantitative and qualitative measures ultimately used for establishing appropriate baselines for future policy makers. In her view, short-term impacts take precedence over more meaningful evaluations of legacies. As Davies suggests, the 2012 Olympic Games therefore represent a timely opportunity to explore local initiatives and the extent of their regenerative capacities. The question, of course, is whether there can be a genuine political will to understand the consequences of large-scale sport investments, particularly when the stakes and risks are so high.

These tensions are at the heart of Sam and Scherer’s essay, which investigates the processes of deliberation on a proposed new sport stadium in Dunedin, New Zealand. There are few studies that take the perspective of local government as a starting point; the authors explore the conundrum for local authorities to be both entrepreneurial and publicly accountable. In their view, a key dilemma for decision-makers is the need to balance two contradictory imperatives: in this case the desire for independent (evidence-based) investigations, while also meeting the expectations for economic development/cooperation through a public-private partnership. The city’s choice to outsource investigations to a ‘pro-stadium’ organization (whose membership was self-appointed) undeniably created consequences in terms of public responsiveness. Ultimately, Sam and Scherer argue, this had the effect of replacing the institutionalized planning practice of ‘prepare, reveal and defend’ with a newer mantra of ‘delay, market and sell’.

The elephant in the room in such cases is the power to control the nature of debates. In the essay by Sam and Scherer, the Dunedin stadium debates serve as the backdrop against which we see proponents mobilize their interests through the use of internet technologies. Their case outlines stadium proponents’ efforts to carve out ‘clean’ and uncluttered spaces for their rationales and justifications using new media technologies such as YouTube. These highly orchestrated public relations or ‘astroturfing’ strategies are testament to the importance of bypassing traditional media in order to disseminate unfiltered messages that support the cause. While this case illustrates the counter-measures of opponents, the deliberately insulated platforms are significant from the standpoint that public legitimacy is often already enjoyed by the proponents who are ‘first movers’ in cyberspace as elsewhere. Indeed the issues raised here touch upon much broader questions around the capacity for citizens to engage in local, politically charged debates. Sam and Scherer thus ask whether the sheer volume of fluctuating material and the often-mystifying use of economic multipliers, amongst other issues, will paradoxically predispose citizens to uncritically accept what is easily available and, in turn, further decertify traditional media.

David Roberts’ essay focuses on one of the major global sporting events, the FIFA World Cup (soccer). Written based on research undertaken prior to the staging of this event in South Africa in June/July 2010, Roberts’ essay is particularly concerned with the policing measures put in place in the city of Durban for the ostensible purpose of providing a safe environment for tourists for the duration of the World Cup. Roberts contends that the World Cup is being used by Durban (and other host cities) as an opportunity to overcome a growing reputation for lawlessness and disorder in urban South Africa. The plan for the longer-term is for Durban to be imaged as a safe tourist location beyond 2010. The World Cup is thus being used by civic planners to showcase this desired future. However, Roberts contends that the logistical demands required for the policing and associated control measures during the World Cup period will not be sustainable beyond the specific event. This is not to argue that such measures, which in some ways are draconian, should be ongoing but to highlight how a sports mega-event can be politically manipulated and managed to assuage the fears of global tourists about the dangers of urban crime in an otherwise attractive destination city in a key developing nation.

While much of the work spanning sport, cities and culture examines immovable objects, infrastructure and such, there is much less focus on so-called ‘tangible movable sport heritage’ such as sport museums and halls of fame.⁹ Geoffrey Kohe’s work presents a case study of a national sport hall of fame (New Zealand’s) that offers an opportunity to view the way in which civic spaces devoted to sport can elicit collective memories and identities. His investigation confirms that sport halls of fame are often explicitly intended to instil a sense of nostalgia, reverence and religiosity for sporting figures and heroes. Whilst appreciative of audiences’ needs for ‘sensuousness’ to connect with artefacts, Kohe points out that halls of fame tend to prioritize form over content, introducing a tension between the academic portrayals of history and the more nostalgic depictions of sporting moments. In this light, Kohe advocates for stronger connections between sport historian academics and the sport halls so that these sites can help citizens to better know sport’s connections with national culture.

Along similar lines, Sarah Gee and Steven J. Jackson’s work reminds us that the sport-city nexus is where a range of cultural identities are given shape. Their paper focuses on a ‘local’ brewery and brand of beer – Speight’s – along with their wider cultural articulations with what the authors call the ‘holy trinity’ of sport, masculinity and alcohol. Through their examination of places and ad promotions, we are alerted to a particularly localized representation of hegemonic masculinity, one that is produced, represented and consumed through the creation of a mediated ‘Speight’s Space’. Gee and Jackson point out that the sense of nostalgia used to stimulate memories, perform histories and symbolize identities effectively defines the inhabitants of this ‘holy trinity’ space and the city itself. These are important considerations, for while sport’s indivisible link with alcohol may be a civic concern in terms of public health and safety, it also has some bearing on what it means to be a diehard fan and by extension, a loyal (masculine) citizen. Thus, as the authors conclude, when civic elites argue for a new sport stadium or franchise amidst fears that their city might become a backwater, perhaps they are also signalling deep-seated anxieties about the potential loss of a spatial ‘holy trinity’.

Working from a sport-management perspective, Patrizia Zagnoli and Elena Radicchi present an essay considering the role of a ‘football fan community’ as a key stakeholder within the overall operational environment of a large professional soccer club, the Florence-based AFC Fiorentina. Their paper presents quite a different approach to that from crit...