Speaker
Description
In a twenty-first century shaped in large part by impending global ecological catastrophe and the environmental harms caused by human overdevelopment, there is a continuing need to better understand the ways in which sport, recreation, and leisure practices buttress and complicate the creation of sustainable communities and spaces for healthy living. For instance, to what extent can sporting spaces further or inhibit the development of “post-growth” communities, meaning communities that are decoupled from environmentally destructive processes of economic and consumer growth? In their recent book Post-Growth Planning, Savini et al argue that the planning of ecologically balanced built environments requires emancipating those environments “from the imperative for economic growth” and community planning that can “contribute effectively to a system that pursues prosperity within ecological limits in a socially fair way” (2022, p. 16). How can sports positively contribute and further the creation of such post-growth communities as well as alleviate social inequalities?
This presentation uses historical analysis to address the question of sport’s role in the creation of ecologically sustainable, post-growth communities. It draws specially from archival research on the role of sport in the early twentieth-century international garden city movement, an influential movement in modern urban planning that post-growth planning discourse. In studying the work of garden city planners and their inclusion of sport, recreation, and leisure in garden city community designs, the presentation contends that the planning of sustainable communities may require rethinking the growth-oriented dictates of modern sporting spaces.
