This week the Olympics begin in Paris with athletes proceeding by nation down the Seine in floating barges. Olympic games always happen in or near a large city, but this feels like one of the first truly urban games. In London, Rio, and Tokyo, outside of the helicopter shots it was possible to lose sight of the fact you were in a city at all, and apologies to Stratford but the majority of the London facilities were built far outside of the iconic sections of the city anyway. Paris is actually trying to integrate its historic core into the games itself. Judo and wrestling will happen on the Champ De Mars at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. I’ve never been excited to watch fencing but people sword-fighting under the glass and steel roof of the Grand Palais sounds pretty cool to me. The boldest (and riskiest) decision has been to stage swimming events in the Seine River itself after an expensive cleanup effort. The whole thing makes you wonder why we’ve never done this before. Can you imagine tennis in the Forbidden City? Volleyball in Central Park? Cycling over Tower Bridge?
Sports and cities have been on my mind a lot recently. The New York Knicks experienced their first playoff run in a generation. People dressed in blue and orange waved to similarly dressed strangers on the street and pressed their faces against the windows of packed bars to see the TVs. We rolled from the NBA into two international soccer competitions in Germany and the USA. Berlin transformed Unter Den Linden into a miles-long fan boulevard, while Miami failed miserably at crowd control outside Hard Rock Stadium. Between these events and the impending Olympics, it’s been a fun time to parse the pros, cons, and differing strategies for using cities as the backdrop for sports. These massive events are also a good reminder that the human urge to play is a city-shaping force, and sports occupy a particularly impactful position. Robert Moses plowed expressways through dense urban areas partially to connect the city to huge public parks and beaches. Moses was a champion of the “recreation area.” A keen swimmer, he held a vigorous view of what recreation meant. His parks weren’t places to laze in nature, they were hardscapes of tennis courts, playgrounds, and baseball diamonds. His signature creation, Jones Beach, still has rows of sunbaked basketball courts, outdoor shuffleboard, clay tennis courts (recently converted to Pickleball), mini golf, and softball diamonds. Half a decade after Moses, Dan Doctoroff failed to attract the Olympics to the West Side of Manhattan as Deputy Mayor — However, the engineering studies, zoning changes, and brainstorming he pushed for were foundational to the Highline and the developers of Hudson Yards.
Even in their non-professional form, sports are a massive disruption. A tennis court can serve at most four people at once and requires almost 3,000 square feet of open space. Any sport that uses grass requires space, mowing, and watering (There is a strong argument a golf course is one of the worst things you can build in a city). The impacts are scaled up exponentially when you start talking about professional sports. Transit, waste, power, and police presence must meet the surge in activity on game day. Stadiums are often subsidized directly or indirectly by taxpayer dollars and then sit empty most of the year when the season is over or the team is on the road. Sports are noisy, people yell, get drunk, make trash, and form vast crowds. An image that will remain seared in my mind forever is millions of people walking across the highways of Buenos Aries after Argentina won the 2022 World Cup to reach celebrations in the city’s center.
All this disruption costs a lot of money but also creates tremendous value. Sports are often pitched as an urban economic boon - especially when stadium development is involved. Stadiums create jobs, fans patronize vendors and restaurants, and tourists flock to signature events and teams. Often these impacts are grossly overstated. Studies have shown that most people have finite leisure budgets. When a stadium promises to create “xxx millions of dollars in revenue” some of that value will be net-new but a lot of it will be at the expense of other activities. You may skip dinner and a movie to go see the Mets play. You’re not magically making more money appear you’re just shifting it into the pocket of a professional sports team. Stadium jobs are generally poorly paid and often seasonal, and construction jobs will disappear on completion. Many costly stadiums built for one-off events like World Cups or Olympics struggle to find purpose after the games, or end up completely abandoned. The organizers of the London Olympics were the first to include detailed plans for the post-game life of its facilities — such as converting the aquatics centre into a public pool and the Olympic Stadium into the permanent home for West Ham United — while the organizers of the 2026 World Cup in the US are actually boasting that no new venues will be constructed at all for the tournament - instead relying on improvements to existing, well-used stadiums.
Skepticism of stadium projects is healthy, but like so many things that make city life great, it’s impossible to talk about the impact of sports in cities in solely economic or physical terms. I didn’t grow up in a sports-loving family. No one ever forced me into Little League or soccer, I discovered sports primarily as a fan and viewer. Sports, even just watching it, is joining something. It’s a free, low-stakes emotional investment…although if you’re like me and primarily a fan of the Knicks you may ask yourself if the investment is worth it. Sports is a shared language. Strangers of all backgrounds talk about it and it fills spaces with a palpable energy. A Knicks game is probably the only time me, Ben Stiller, and Spike Lee will share a room. I put the pirouetting footwork of a good point guard driving into the lane on par with any dancer moving across the stage at Lincoln Center as a form of high-culture entertainment.
The spectacle is both the action itself and the action around the action, and this is probably more true when sports happen in public spaces, not professional arenas. I’ve become an occasional viewer of NYC’s summer streetball leagues at public basketball courts with evocative nicknames like “The Hole,” and “The Cage.” An entire ecosystem of neighborhood characters emerges around these courts. There are the flamboyant announcers with names like Mr. Talk Spicy, commentating on the action and pumping up the crowd over portable PA systems. Smoke wafts over the court from grills and food carts pulled right up to the baselines. Kids climb the chainlink fences to get a view of a neighborhood player, because seeing someone dunking a basketball live at the playground is about as impressive as watching LeBron James do it for the Lakers a million miles away on TV… to me anyway. Many of NYC’s streetball teams are formally organized, pooling money for jerseys, and sometimes even gaining sponsorship. The political scientist Robert Putnam researched how loose organizations like these build bonding social capital - trust, association, and coordination between similar people. The connections formed by organizing a basketball team gives it’s participants a network to use potentially in other aspects of life. These groups can then work to create bridging capital, where dissimilar groups engage in the same activities. A basketball or pickup soccer team may form among friends but participate in a city-wide league full of strangers. The signature example of Putnam’s research isn’t political clubs or fraternal organizations - it’s bowling leagues, and he argues that the erosion of civic participation and trust in the US is partially a result of a decline in low-stakes, semi-formal groups like neighborhood sports teams.
Below the streetball league at the most casual level of sports - the spontaneous pickup game- is a wonderous display of group dynamics in public space. Players show up and form teams on the spot. They figure out each other’s strengths and weaknesses on the fly. The system generally just works, and as someone who is fascinated by social dynamics in public space, I’m amazed how the unwritten rules of sports are so good at getting people to buy in. It isn’t all smooth sailing, any competitive activity will sometimes inspire fights and there’s sometimes conflict forms over limited spaces. Sports, and pickup sports especially, are still male-dominated. But I think in their ideal form, sports brings the same sort of cohesion and sense of community to neighborhoods that churches and Elks- Lodges used too. Most people want to belong to something. When I sit in the nosebleeds at Madison Square Garden or hang on the fence at The Cage I’m participating in one of the central pleasures of city living - the fun of being a part of something bigger than yourself.
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Great article. A couple things to add.
The funding of stadiums is obviously political, but I also think a lot about the politics of the location of stadiums. Where are the located? How do people arrive to the stadium? Who is it convenient for? Citi Field and Yankee Stadium are both a bit out of the way in the outer boroughs, but they are ultimately accessible by public transit from a variety of locations. Yankee stadium in particular has multiple subway lines and Metro North access. Even better, I think it's incredibly cool when a stadium is right smack in the middle of an urban area like MSG. On the other hand, there are a handful of teams doing the opposite. The Braves moved out of Atlanta totally to Cobb County. The Bears are exploring moving out of Chicago and into the suburbs. That sucks, in my opinion.
And pickup games are so fun to watch and see the community they create. One time I was biking past St John's Rec Center in Crown Heights and saw a game between two teams that were mixtures of Orthodox Jewish and Black men, and all I could think was "Damn, Brooklyn rocks."
The night Germany and Hungary were playing in the Euro Cup, my spouse and I went to a tiny little jazz club in Berlin. It was packed … perhaps the only 40 people in the city not watching the match—so that episode of sports-in-a-city made for a different kind of bonding. Thanks for another great post!