Sport in the City

<P>Sport is seen as an increasingly important aspect of urban and regional planning. Related programmes have moved to the forefront of agendas for cities of the present and future. This has occurred as the barriers between so-called ¿high¿ and ¿popular¿ culture continue to disintegrate. Sport is now a key component within strategies for the cultural regeneration of cities and regions, a tendency with mixed outcomes - at times fostering genuinely democratic arrangements, at others pseudo-democratic arrangements, whereby political, business and cultural elites manipulate a sense of sameness and unity among their fellow citizens to smooth the path for the pursuit of what are actually vested interests. Almost any active enactment of a ¿sports city of culture¿ risks divisiveness. Recognizing controversies, with both potentially positive and negative outcomes, this book examines sport within contexts of urban and regional regeneration, via a number of rather different case studies. Within th