SPORTSPACE is an initiative of Shift architecture urbanism, in collaboration with NOC*NSF and is made possible by the Dutch fund for Creative Industries. The platform is one of the results of Studio Sport, a research-by-design project by Shift that deals with sport’s potential to generate urban quality.
In the last decades, sport has been discovered as a tool to pursue a variety of external objectives, from social to economical. Strikingly enough, this so called instrumentalization of sports has largely been overlooked in spatial planning and urbanism. Sports is subject of rest planning, is pushed away by other urban functions, and often ends up on isolated locations in the fringes of the city. Sport accommodations are often seen as a nuisance, too large and difficult to combine with other urban programs. The potential of sports to add meaningful new places of(inter)action to the city and its public domain remains therefore largely unexplored.
Also within the world of sports there is a lack of knowhow about the spatial possibilities of sport. Projects are usually approached from the point of view of one sport and are based on old regulations for sport accommodations. The emergence of different types of sports and the rising demand for intensely used and multifunctional accommodations asks for a whole new spatial approach of the accommodation policy. Besides this, there should be a better response to the increasing trend of individual and so called unbound sports. Apart from accommodations for sport clubs and top sports there is a rising need for the integration of sports- and activity structures in the direct living environment, as part of the public domain.
SPORTSPACE connects the world of space with the world of sports, and provides tools for the integration of sports in the contemporary city and its public domain.
