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Sports Stadiums<br />

Comerica Park, which opened in 2000 as the Detroit Tigers’ new baseball field, is built around the configuration of the playing field.<br />

The new venue is highly acclaimed, but downtown Detroit still suffers from the staggering economy.<br />

Washington, D.C., the $320 million stadium is set<br />

to anchor the new ballpark entertainment district.<br />

Sports stadiums and the accompanying entertainment<br />

infrastructure are part of the attempt to<br />

transform the material and symbolic environment<br />

of downtown cores and place a city within the<br />

circuits of tourist promotion. Frequently, such<br />

investment in sports stadiums are concentrated in<br />

certain safe and sanitized areas of the city that are<br />

divorced from the lived experiences of many residents.<br />

Indeed, some stadiums, such as the new<br />

FedEx Forum in Memphis, home to the National<br />

Basketball Association’s Memphis Grizzlies, are<br />

designed to provide a physical buffer between<br />

consumption-oriented spaces and those populations<br />

deemed antithetical to such space. Anchoring<br />

urban development in core components such as<br />

sports stadiums has been deployed to rebuild the<br />

urban core, yet for many <strong>cities</strong>, they present an<br />

unreal perception of city life and shield both suburbanites<br />

and tourists from continuing urban<br />

765<br />

problems. Questions also persist over the longterm<br />

impact of such investment and the relative<br />

contribution that adding spaces of (sporting) consumption<br />

will have on a region’s stability. This is<br />

especially the case for downtowns who have predicated<br />

their future on spaces of sporting consumption<br />

(such as Memphis). Detroit, for example, has<br />

added two new sports stadiums and a performing<br />

arts complex in recent years, but these have not<br />

been sufficient to offset the detrimental effects of<br />

deteriorating outer neighborhoods, high property<br />

taxes, and poor schools that have resulted in a net<br />

decline in population between 2000 and 2003.<br />

As with Berlin in 1936, sports stadiums continue<br />

to play an important role in the expression of<br />

selected national ideologies. Often used as material<br />

manifestations of particular identity projects, the<br />

construction of sports stadiums in which to host<br />

major sporting events have been used as part of a<br />

symbolic armory in the expression of multiculturalism<br />

(2000 Sydney Olympic Games), development

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