ABSTRACT
This chapter theorizes the coming together of global sporting industries, media culture, contemporary stadium building practices, and new urban regeneration and place-branding efforts as the sportification of place. Appropriating “sportification” from sports sociology and drawing on theories of media branding and urban renewal, the sportification of place demonstrates how sport, as a convergent media industry and socio-cultural practice, is deployed as a way of producing and governing urban space in and through the contemporary stadium, as stadia are put to work as urban media infrastructures to constitute new urban landscapes and spatialities by drawing on affective connections between teams and place. The sportification of place is marked by three distinct but interrelated practices: First, cities draw upon the cultural ontology of sport to produce and govern urban spatiality and citizenship. Contemporary stadia figure the ideal citizen as healthy, performative, competitive, and entrepreneurial, wherein the stadium is imagined as a site for constituting sportified citizenship. Second, these citizenship practices are bound up with the mediatization of the stadium, where the stadium is constituted as a space for producing, enabling, and capturing the participatory culture and interactivity of fans. Third, the sportification of place is a unique form of place-branding that participates in urban regeneration through constituting stadia within particular, place-based affective sensibilities of “authenticity” and the home team. Ultimately, I argue the sportification of place plays out in deeply unequal ways, as stadia governance, mediatization, and branding practices create new systems of inclusion and exclusion in the city.
