SPORT-RELATED GENTRIFICATION: Behind the Spectacle of Settler Colonial Urbanism

Abstract

Urban studies scholars and sociologists of sport have critically examined the production and consumption of world-class sports spectacles that are constitutive elements of urban growth agendas and broader accumulation processes by dispossession. This multi-year community-based research project goes behind the spectacle, exploring the uneven impacts of Rogers Place, a $613.7 million (CAD), publicly financed hockey arena and its associated entertainment district on city-centre communities in Edmonton, Alberta—an area with a sizeable Indigenous urban street community. In doing so, we bring together critical sport and urban geography scholarship and work by Indigenous Studies scholars who have examined how Indigenous peoples in Western Canadian Prairie cities navigate the white possessive logics of settler colonial urbanism and the state-sponsored gentrification of their communities and land. Our analysis challenges common-sense ideas about the community-wide benefits of sport-related gentrification and pervasive beliefs that settler colonialism is an event of the past that occurred entirely outside of cities. We also highlight the aspirations of city-centre residents to continue living in their shared urban homespaces and to collectively envision other futures that are neither based on the violent practices of sport-driven gentrification nor its associated forms of genocidal inclusion.