Making the intangible tangible in sport heritage: a conceptual analysis of sport statuary’s spatial fix

ABSTRACT Sport heritage scholarship has grown in recent years, yet remains underexamined within the sport tourism field. In this conceptual analysis, we examine a type of tangible immovable sport heritage (Ramshaw [2020]; Ramshaw & Gammon [2017]) – sport statuary – that has a niche yet robust body of literature through the lens of the ‘spatial fix’ (Harvey [1981]; [2001]; [2006]) in an attempt to explain the value both of sport heritage as a domain worthy of further investigation and the spatial fix as a useful tool for future conceptual and empirical analyses within sport tourism. Three themes were identified from the sport statuary literature through the spatial fix lens: marketing implications of sport statuary, location implications of sport statuary, and sport statuary as an instrument to frame symbolic heritage, the latter of which is the overarching theme. The current paper makes two contributions to the literature. First, it posits the spatial fix to account for both the economic value of sport heritage phenomena and their presence in space, particularly urban space. Second, following guidance that has emerged from the literature of sport tourism’s allied disciplines of management and marketing, this paper also represents an attempt toward a framework to be used in future conceptual scholarship within the field. An important implication is that the spatial fix appears to be inherent to the process of making intangible sport heritage tangible, as demonstrated through the sport statuary literature.