Sport in the City：Cultural Connections

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.

Michael Sam is Senior Lecturer in Sport Policy and Management at the University of Otago, New Zealand.
John Hughson is Professor of Sport and Cultural Studies at the University of Central Lancashire, UK.

1. Introduction: Sport in the City: Cultural and Political Connections Michael P. Sam and John E. Hughson 2. Cultural Policy and the Dynamics of Stadium Development Costas Spirou 3. Sport and Economic Regeneration: A Winning Combination? Larissa E. Davies 4. Fitting a Square Stadium into a Round Hole: A Case of Deliberation and Procrastination Politics Michael P. Sam and Jay Scherer 5. Policing the Cyber Agenda: New Media Technologies and Recycled Claims in a Local Stadium Debate Jay Scherer and Michael P. Sam 6. Durban’s future? Rebranding through the Production/policing of Event-specific Spaces at the 2010 World Cup David Roberts 7. Civic Representations of Sport History: The New Zealand Sports Hall of Fame G.Z. Kohe 8. The Southern Man City as Cultural Place and Speight’s Space: Locating the Masculinity-Sport-Beer ‘Holy Trinity’ in New Zealand Sarah Gee and Steven J. Jackson 9. The Football-fan Community as a Determinant Stakeholder in Value Co-creation Patrizia Zagnoli and Elena Radicchi 10. Get into the ‘Groove’: Travelling Otago’s Super-region John E. Hughson and G.Z. Kohe