A Review of “Sport, Leisure and Culture in the Postmodern City (original) (raw)
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Of the 400 Australian athletes at the 2012 London Olympics, 64% came from a Surf Life Saving Australia (SLSA) background. This included runners, swimmers and the gold medal winning Men’s K4 Kayaking team. We know that innovation and elite level success in Australian sport has been dependent in part on the serendipitous development of ‘sporting ecologies’ such as the one that produced this success, SLSA working in partnership with organisations such as the Australian Canoeing High performance Unit and the Australian Canoeing National Elite Development Program which works to identify Canoeing and Kayaking talent through programs such The Next Wave pathway for young paddlers emerging out of the competitive SLSA networks. Of the 400 Australian athletes at the 2012 London Olympics, 64% came from a Surf Life Saving Australia (SLSA) background. This included runners, swimmers and the gold medal winning Men’s K4 Kayaking team. We know that innovation and elite level success in Australian sport has been dependent in part on the serendipitous development of ‘sporting ecologies’ such as the one that produced this success, SLSA working in partnership with organisations such as the Australian Canoeing High performance Unit and the Australian Canoeing National Elite Development Program which works to identify Canoeing and Kayaking talent through programs such The Next Wave pathway for young paddlers emerging out of the competitive SLSA networks. These ecologies are networks of athletes, civic organisations, expertise and information exchange that operate at multiple scales, from the suburban neighbourhood, to regional and nation wide elite and professional organisations. They function by cultivating talent in very young children at a grass roots neighbourhood level on the one hand in local life saving clubs up and down the coast. These organisations then identify amateur athletes with potential and carry them through to elite level competition across what in time becomes a diversified field of sport, linking different, often unrelated sports, competitions and sporting organizations with great medal winning success. The real contribution of the sporting ecology has been its taking of underperforming talent in one sporting arena, Surf Life Saving for example, and accelerating athletic performance into another field: Olympic level swimming, running, kayaking and canoeing for example, and through this success providing the next wave of young athletes back at the local club with the role models and ambition to aspire for success beyond the local neighbourhood competition. What has been less discussed however is the wider projective role, relationship and potential that these ecologies might have in city building itself. Since the early decades of the 20th century, leisure and sporting infrastructure has been central to our patterns of spatial reasoning about the city at the scale of neighbourhood. The Neighbourhood Unit has been a powerful instrument in urbanism’s city building arsenal operating at this scale of ‘community.’ At the core of this is a series of civic institutions like Surf Life Saving. The Neighbourhood Unit is a diagram that appears in the late 1920’s and is concerned with negotiating the relationship between a cluster of problems regarding work environments, housing, transport in the city and sporting and leisure infrastructure. Central to its function is a worrying about what size the scale of stable ‘community’ is. Around the developed world the Neighbourhood Unit remains even today, the model for ‘stability’ and ‘collectivity’ against which we measure our speculations and interventions into the city at the scale of ‘community’.
Sport and Tourism Between Modernity and Postmodernity
Polish Journal of Sport and Tourism, 2016
The text presents and analyses manifestations of modernity and postmodernity in the field of competitive and recreational sport, physical education, leisure, and tourism. The paper builds upon an extensive literature survey and presents the concept and key features of postmodern societies and the modernity-postmodernity debate in sports with reference to postmodern tendencies in tourism. We have attempted to determine the proportions of tradition, modernity, and postmodernity in contemporary sport and tourism, keeping in mind that, similarly to contemporary societies as a whole, sport is undoubtedly a mixture of traditional, modern, and Fordist elements with postmodern and post-Fordist features. We present and discuss the prevailing belief that the key elements of leisure sport are mostly postmodern and focused on the notion of individualisation and freedom expressed especially in alternative sports, while commercialised mainstream sport follows the regular mass-media show-business ...
Palpable Cities: leisure in the contemporary urban geographies – a theoritecal discussion
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Right to the city Urban geography Human geography Neoliberal capitalism This paper argues the role of cities as scenarios where the economic, social, political, cultural, leisure, educational and also geographical inequality it is increasingly evident. It is intended to reflect about the close relationship of humans with the territory. In addition, we seek to discuss the importance of leisure as a builder of identity (individual and social), of belonging and a key factor in appropriations (through the leisure experiences, the routes and places that each individual has in their city) of the territory by its inhabitants.
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This research is interested in the history of three tourist towns along the coast of Manche Deauville, Dieppe, and Le Touquet-Paris-Plage, which are amongst the stations closest to the capital and the historic cradle of sport, England. The thesis states that sport is an indispensable part of the 'Habiter' bathing from the Second Empire to the Second World War. The latter participates in an essential way in the appropriation of the seaside. Urban development, the construction of equipment, the dynamism of practices and the evolution of sports shows are analyzed using the scientific literature and various archival documents to illustrate the importance of sport in the definition of the Habiter des villégiateurs. RÉSUMÉ Cette recherche s'intéresse à l'histoire de trois villes touristiques alignées sur la côte de la Manche Deauville, Dieppe et le Touquet-Paris-Plage et qui sont parmi les stations les plus proches de la capitale et du berceau historique du sport l'Angleterre. La thèse formule que le sport constitue un élément indispensable de l'« Habiter » balnéaire du Second Empire à la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Celui-ci participe de façon essentielle à l'appropriation du bord de mer. Les aménagements urbains, la construction des équipements, le dynamisme des pratiques et l'évolution des spectacles sportifs analysés à partir de la littérature scientifique et de divers documents d'archives montrent l'importance du sport dans la définition de l'Habiter des villégiateurs.
Sport as a driver for local development and sustainable tourism
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The paper analyses the relationship between sport and tourism. Starting from the literature on sport tourism and tourism sport, we examine the impact of a sporting event in terms of tourist flow in relation to the provision of sporting facilities in the Italian regions. The sport tourism is an original product, taking into account both relations between tourism and sport, but also a real osmosis of sport activities with the touristic ones. Mega events, like the Olympics, or local events, as city marathons, exert an increasingly significant role in positioning the resort in the tourist market, improving image, local amenities and infrastructure in general. Sports tourism could be a driving force for local development, community cohesiveness, economics benefits, social incentives, positioning the localities in the touristic market, improving their image.
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This article reviews how sport has been engaged in urban geography and related fields. Across the social sciences, there has been an explosion of research on " sporting mega‐events, " such as the Olympics and FIFA World Cup. While much of this scholarship has examined the effects of these events for cities and city residents , I emphasize a longer and deeper history of research on sports and the city. I trace three lines of inquiry to illuminate the broader state of the field: (1) sport, (post)colonialism, and modernity; (2) sports, identity, and belonging in the city; and (3) sport, neoliberalism, and urban transformation. Not limited to the work of geographers, this review considers important overlaps between sports geography, urban geography, and a number of other disciplines. I suggest that sports studies has just as much to offer urban geography as the other way around, and in closing, I point to some key directions that might deepen urban geographers' contribution to the interdisciplinary research on sport, as well as critical approaches to urbanism.