Helen Morgan Parmett's "Stadium City"

Helen Morgan Parmett is the Edwin W. Lawrence Endowed Professor of Forensics and an associate professor of English at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Down in Treme: Race, Place, and New Orleans on Television.

Morgan Parmett applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Stadium City: Sports and Media Infrastructure in the United States, and shared the following:

Sports stadiums play an oversized role in contemporary city life. This is especially true for residents who live in and around the neighborhoods in which stadiums are built, which are often in politically and economically marginalized parts of the city, where land is cheaper and the political capital of its residents weaker. Page 99 of Stadium City concludes the the chapter on the city of Atlanta’s professional baseball team’s (the Braves) departure from urban Atlanta’s Turner Field for greener pastures, bigger tax incentives, and the whiter fans of Suburban Cobb County. The page concludes my remarks on the efforts of the Turner Field Benefits Coalition, an activist group of neighborhood residents and supporters, which demanded greater community benefits for the neighborhoods surrounding Turner Field in the subsequent developments being planned to replace the stadium and its parking lots. The page begins by noting that since its formation, the group had splintered into various factions, with some of the group making deals with developers and others arguing for more transparency and more investment in the existing structures and cultures of the neighborhood. The page focuses especially on how, even though the group was not entirely successful in garnering benefits nor in preventing gentrification from future development, it did contribute to a discourse that both drew from and shaped future resistance to stadium building in Atlanta and beyond. The page includes an image from the tent city the group installed around Turner Field, where the group called for resistance to the kind of displacement that too often comes from stadium and other sporting-oriented development projects.

Page 99 is a pretty good representation of what readers will find in Stadium City. The book contends with the cultural and spatial implications of stadium building in the U.S. in both contemporary and historical contexts. This page concludes the book’s section on stadium building in Atlanta. Together with the other two sections on stadiums in Seattle and Minneapolis, the book argues that stadiums embody what I call a sportification of place, wherein stadiums work to reshape cities (and their residents) according to the logics and values associated with mediated sporting culture. This page emphasizes agency—neighborhood residents are not just passive actors or problematic populations to be displaced or reshaped by new sporting developments. Stadiums are sites of struggle over who and what the neighborhood is for. But resistance is hard, and it can be especially challenging to build and maintain coalitions to sustain that resistance. Page 99 is a good example of how even though the book contends with how stadiums have historically razed neighborhoods or led to displacement in the name of urban renewal and revitalization, it also emphasizes how residents have not just passively accepted this remaking of their neighborhoods into shiny new versions imagined by developers and urban, corporate elites. They resist and articulate other senses of place that lay claim to alternative ways of valuing, inhabiting, and practicing urban space that contests the sportification of place.

What readers might miss from page 99, however, is the central role that media culture plays in the sportification of place. Stadium City theorizes sports stadiums as urban media infrastructures—they are at once mediatized, mediated, and mediating sites that constitute, direct, and govern urban space and spatiality in complex ways. Page 99 concludes with a gesture to this broader focus on the intertwinement of stadiums, media, and urban space, as it turns attention to how stadiums help to constitute a city’s image and brand. Whether through integrating forms of media that help to govern and control stadium and urban space, construct a city’s image, or to experiment with new forms of surveillance and data collection, stadiums are more than places in which our favorite teams play a game. They are central nodes in our cities that impact our everyday lives and spatial practices, whether we ever attend a game or not.

Learn more about Stadium City at the University of Illinois Press website.

--Marshal Zeringue