Mphil in Architecture and Urban Design Projective Cities, 2022/24 Architectrual Association School of Architecture
Programme:
Student Name: Submission Title:
Course Tutor:
Projective Cities, Taught Mphil in Architecture and Urban Design
Yuanbo Jia Dissertation
Platon Issaias Hamed Khosravi
MPhil in architecture and Urban Design Projective Cities, 2022/2024
Architectural Association School of Architecture
Declaration: "I certify that this piece of work is entirely my own and that any quotation or paraphrase from the published or unpublished work of others is duly acknowledged."
Yuanbo Jia
April 2024
Acknowledgements
This dissertation would not have been possible without the support of many individuals throughout this 18-month journey. Firstly, I would like to express my gratitude to Platon Issaias, Hamed Khosravi, and Anna Font Vacas for their patient guidance and support. Additionally, I want to thank Doreen Bernath for her inspiring conversations. I am also grateful to Roozbeh Elia-Azar, Cristina Gamboa, and Daryan Knoblauch for their insightful ideas and suggestions from different perspectives. My thanks also go to my classmates from the 2022-24 cohort, whose interactions have been a source of inspiration and motivation. I extend my appreciation to my teacher and friend, Wang Ying, who has been incredibly supportive from afar in China. I am also thankful for the AA bursary. Lastly, I want to express my deepest gratitude to my partner, Zhijun Lei, whose support and encouragement have been invaluable not only in academics but also in my personal wellbeing.
Abstract
Football as a sport with the largest number of spectators: the 1950 World Cup Final at the Maracanã Stadium had the largest officially recorded crowd of 199,854, at a time when the population of Rio de Janeiro was around three million, and with around 7% of the city's population gathered in the same building, the stadium not only serves as a container for the sport and requires the most complex design in terms of capacity, circulation, gaze and safety, but also plays an important role at the urban scale. Furthermore, although there is still debate over which stadium in history was the first to host only football matches, the subjects of that debate are invariably located in the UK. As the birthplace of modern football, the UK has the longest history of the sport and of football stadiums, and this means that football stadiums in the UK have undergone more transformations in terms of space and the role of the city.
Due to the huge volume of the modern stadium typology, its functional, circulation and structural complexity, architects and researchers have tended to focus on its form, structure and technology, while the publicness that the stadium as an element of the city and an infrastructure is supposed to provide to the citizens has often been neglected, and this is one of the reasons why the modern football stadium has become an extremely territorialised space. This study aims to discuss issues related to the publicness of football stadiums in the UK from different aspects and scales, and attempts to make them more inclusive and collective. This thesis uses a case study approach to examine the most essential spatial diagrams of football stadiums and the loss and compensation of their publicness by selecting a number of football stadiums or other sports grounds. In addition, the paper selects and examines cases within the stadium-led regeneration that is occurring widely in the UK today, understanding its co-operative framework and combining it with a discussion of the publicness of football stadiums in an attempt to propose a new shift in the typology of football stadiums.
Fig0.1 Maracanã, World Cup Final, 1950
source: FIFA
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV Conclusion Bibliography
Pre-modern
Modern
Postmodern
Informality: The redefined boundary
Define the "Informality"
Informal spectatorship
Wrigley Rooftop: A bottom-up deterritorialization
Design I: Riverbank stand Design II: Car park stand
Neighbourhood: Stadium as a social value
Overview of stadium context
Economic value
Sociologic
Wembley Park: Temporality and
FIFA Fan Festival: Fan zone and
Design III: Mirrored square
Regeneration: A chance for stadium typology
Overview of regeneration
Stadium-led regeneration
Co-operative
Stadium and residential
Design IV: Inhabitable stadium
source:
Fig0.2 Going to the Match, 1953
Bolton Art Gallery
As the birthplace of modern football, the sport has become a cultural and, in a way, a tag for the UK. As a container for the sport, on match days football stadiums often experience an influx of tens of thousands of people coming in, staying in, and pouring out over several hours, making football stadiums in the UK play an important role in collective living. However, the other side of the coin is that the huge success of football as a business in the UK has made football stadiums more of a profit-making instrument than anything else, and the exclusivity of the space and operation of football stadiums is not only a trend that can be observed in the history of stadium architecture, but one that is likely to continue to intensify. This exclusivity and privatisation creates a contradiction with the public and collective connotations of football stadiums, and this contradiction, caused by economic factors, is not only at the operational level, but also reflects on spatial and urban scales, and makes the evolution of football stadium architecture a challenge.
When football stadium architecture is discussed, there tends to be a stereotype of it being a specialised building type because in contemporary football stadium design projects, space, circulation, capacity and sightlines are all shaped by a series of already developed design specifications, and architects tend to be more than willing to work on form. A number of architects have become famous for the distinctive appearance of the football stadiums they design. However, football stadiums should be collective, and if they are not seen as part of the city and viewed socially, then becoming exclusive and fragmented becomes inevitable. In fact, it is the truth that the architects' over-emphasis on the stadium itself and their neglect of its social effects have led to an increasing number of football stadiums that, despite their impressive appearance, many of them actually do not interact well with the urban area in which they are situated as a kind of architecture in the city, which, together with the exclusivity caused by the commercialisation of football, has made these stadiums, from the urbanism perspective, an isolation in the city. This isolation implies not only economic and class segregation for fans attending the matches, but also the isolation of football as a sport, a sport with strong community connotations, which can also be seen as a socially resourced sport, from society. This makes the game of football seem like it is trapped in a cage, the publicness is reduced and football is no longer for the public.
Thus, this thesis starts from the history of the architectural evolution of football stadiums and considers them as part of the urban environment in which they are located, investigating the different aspects of football stadiums socio-economically and discussing how to restore the publicness of the stadiums as well as reshape their role in the city to be more inclusive and collective, by proposing a series of design tests. The research part of this thesis adopts a case study approach and redraws a series of cases at different scales to discuss the history, opportunities and social value of football stadiums in terms of architectural scale, neighbourhood scale and urban policy. In current academic research on the topic of football stadiums, some of it focuses on the structural and technical aspects of the construction, and some of it focuses on its contribution to economics and policy. However, there is not much literature that analyses and interprets the publicness and social value of football stadiums through the lens of architecture and urbanism, combined with historical and sociological research, so this thesis is well placed to fill the gap in the relevant field.
The research in this thesis is divided into four chapters based on scale and the different aspects of the stadium's publicness: History, Informality, Neighbourhood, and Regeneration, and a design intervention is proposed at the end of each chapter. It is important to note that this thesis recognises the significance of a range of football stadium design regulations, as it is the existence of these regulations that allows for the safety of football stadiums, which in reality will always have the highest priority. However, it is precisely because of these regulations that contemporary football stadiums are largely identical in terms of their spatial and social effects, apart from their form. Because the design proposal in this thesis serves as a test of an idea to innovatively explore the potential of the football stadium in relation to the urban space in which it is situated, and to reshape the stadium's urban role to be more inclusive, considerations of regulations may impose a constraint on the design idea, and as such, the regulations for the design of the football stadium are excluded from this thesis, and the economics and feasibility of its construction are also excluded for the same reason. There are therefore limitations to the design proposals in this paper in terms of the relevance to reality, e.g. in relation to safety, efficiency and profitability.
In Chapter I , this research traces the history of modern football stadiums in the UK and compares them with those of different periods and countries, investigates the trends in function, space and typology since the birth of the modern football stadium and identifies the problems in the publicness of today's football stadiums in the UK. The research is focussed on sections and therefore, based on the conclusions of the research, this thesis will propose a new section of the stand that could lead to the restoration of the publicness of the stadium.
In Chapter II , this research will use the informality of football matches as an entry point to suggest the prevalence of informal spectatorship behaviours. It also discusses what kind of spatial forms are shaped by informal spectatorship behaviours in relation to a number of case studies that attempt to resolve the conflict between formality and informality. Based on the conclusions of the research, this thesis formalises informality and proposes an alternative renovation strategy that is different from the direct expansion of stadiums.
In Chapter III, the research focuses on the neighbourhood scale and the social value of the stadium, in this chapter the stadium is seen to have a positive impact at the neighbourhood scale and this opens up a discussion: what neighbourhood or urban form is helpful in promoting its interactions with the stadium and helps to allow the stadium's atmosphere to penetrate? Through the case study, this research will propose a neighbourhood-scale intervention to make the stadium as a core of the area and activate its neighbourhood.
In Chapter IV , this research takes the topic of regeneration and examines stadium-led regeneration in terms of its co-operative framework and the reasons why it has become a trend, as well as the publicness embodied in this framework. Through case studies, the reasons and inevitability of the residentialisation of stadium-led regeneration will be discussed and pointed out, and the residentialisation will be seen as a typological opportunity to propose a new vision of a new architectural typology that combines housing and stadiums.
Research questions
Typological questions
-What spatial typologies has football as a spectacle shaped with spectatorship? What spatial and typological shifts have taken place in the evolution of football stadiums in the UK?
-With football stadiums facing a trend towards renovation, what new typologies can be formed between stadiums and their neighbourhoods, especially with residential?
Disciplinary questions
-What are the socio-economic factors that have driven the evolution of football stadiums in the UK?
-What is informality in football and its significance?
-What is the social value that football and stadiums can provide at the neighbourhood scale?
-What does the stadium-led regeneration mean for society? What is the role of the stadium in it?
Urban questions
-How does informality redefine the boundaries of stadiums in the neighbourhoods in which they are located?
-How do stadiums act as urban infrastructure and interact with neighbourhoods?
Research problems
The current British football stadium has become a perfect example of a highly territorialised space. Over the last hundred years or so, football grounds in the UK have undergone a transformation from open, multi-functional spaces with lots of spatial interaction between players, fans and the public to closed, mono-functional, segmented spaces. Whether for economic or safety reasons, this shift has seen football grounds become more and more of a pure landmark and monument, the loss of publicness has made them less and less of an infrastructure, the main group of fans has shifted from the working class to the middle class, and football grounds are becoming extremely exclusionary and purely profit-oriented facility.
Aims
In the context of many old stadiums in the UK that are, or will be, facing renovation, this research aims to propose a series of multiscale renovation strategies that will allow football stadiums to interact with their neighbourhoods in a greater number of ways and to a greater extent, which will recover or re-activate the publicness of the stadiums, in order to change the roles and functions of the stadiums in the city in the present time. This is to prevent further exclusivity of football stadiums and allow the game of football as a public resource to be shared by a wider range of citizens in a variety of ways.
CHAPTER I
HISTORY THE EVOLVING SECTION
The widely discussed sport of football today generally refers to modern football, which was born at the end of the 19th century. From the time of the Renaissance to the revitalisation of sport before the birth of modern football, there were already sports that resembled modern football, which were rough and tumble and lacked refined and unified rules, with the idea of having fun being a core feature of the sport. As is the case with this sport, the grounds that host it are similarly characterised by a lack of spatial rules and geographic constraints; games can take place in public places, fields and squares (Fig1.1, Fig1.2), with very few places set aside specifically for the public's sport.1 In that kind of game, "there was a tendency to "not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators"2, and not only were the boundaries of the field extremely intangible, but the physical interactions between spectators and players were frequent.
In the mid-19th century, football gradually became stylised by Britain's elite educational institutions, the public schools, according to their facilities and traditions, with many different versions of the game divided into two distinct types, football and rugby, and the founding of the Football Association in 1863 formally represented the birth of modern football. Industrialisation and urbanisation, as well as the restrictions on workers' hours imposed by the Factory
1 John Bale, ‘The Spatial Development of the Modern Stadium’, International Review for the Sociology of Sport 28, no. 2–3 (1 June 1993): 123, https://doi. org/10.1177/101269029302800204.
2 Mikhail Bakhtin, Krystyna Pomorska, and Michael Holquist, Rabelais and His World , trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).
Fig1.1 Football, Kingston upon Thames, 1846
source: National Football Museum
Fig1.2 Football 1875 engraving
source: Alamy Stock Photo
The first international football match, Scotland v England, 1872
source: National Geographic
3 William J. Baker, ‘The Making of a Working-Class Football Culture in Victorian England’, Journal of Social History 13, no. 2 (1979): 242.
4 Bale, ‘The Spatial Development of the Modern Stadium’, 124.
5 Ibid., 124.
6 Simon Inglis, The Football Grounds of Great Britain, 2nd edition (London: HarperCollins Willow, 1987), 12.
Acts, created a strong link between the working class and football: workers needed a new distraction, and the railways made it possible to provide cheap playing fields in remote areas and to hold inter-city football matches.3 At the same time, opposition to street football reached a peak across Britain, and within cities the territorialisation of football spaces began in the early nineteenth century, with football matches gradually being played in a number of grounds used to host other sports, such as athletics, over the following decades. The spaces in which matches were held began to become enclosed compared to those in the streets or squares, and it was argued that football was worth paying for by those who wanted to watch the game, and that watching football matches went from being entertainment to an act of consumption,4 but due to the working class origins of the sport, attending football matches was still affordable for working class people at the time.
In 1872, Kennington Oval, a cricket ground, hosted the world's first international football match (Fig1.3) as well as successive FA Cup finals in later years. Initially, the boundary between players and spectators remained relatively blurred, and as there were no touchlines, spectators often entered the field, with players mixing in with spectators who intruded on the field, hiding and fighting with them. 5 This imprecise division of space ended with the introduction of touchlines into the rules in 1882. In the early days the ground was divided by ropes or fences, but clubs soon began to improve the conditions by providing better viewing conditions, such as renting pavilions from cricket clubs for those who wanted extra comfortable space and for the business crowd.6 (Fig1.4) As football was not yet a highly specialised and commercialised sport, the number of spectators was much smaller than those attending matches played by today's internationally renowned clubs, so there was no need to design the stands, a core architectural element of today's stadium design, with the spectators spread out almost horizontally or at a very slight incline. Unlike many of today's football stadiums, which have a single continuous stand, the stepped open space for standing spectators was called a terrace, and the roofed and seated spectator space for fans who were willing to pay more for the comfort of watching the game was called a grandstand. These spaces for spectators were in some ways part of the rules of the game in the earliest days of football, distinguishing between on-field and off-field. (Fig1.5)
Fig1.3
Fig1.4 The Kennington Oval, 1891
source: Alamy Stock Photo
Fig1.5 The Kennington Oval, 1896
source: Alamy Stock Photo
Modern
Although there is debate as to which of the world's stadiums was the earliest to host just football matches, the arguments are all based in the UK: Preston North End FC claim that Deepdale Stadium, which they opened in 1875, was the first modern football stadium in history, while some scholars argue that Everton's Goodison Park Stadium 7 or Manchester United's Old Trafford Stadium, 8 respectively, were the first modern football stadiums in history. But when discussing the architecture and design of modern football stadiums in question, there is little debate that Archibald Leitch is the name that everyone mentions. (Fig1.6) He designed a total of 51 stadiums over a period of 40 years for Aston Villa, Rangers, Chelsea, Everton, Liverpool, Fulham and almost all of the English clubs that are world famous today.
His first project was the design of the Ibrox Stadium for Rangers in the city of his birth. Before designing stadiums he had built his reputation in Scotland through his work designing and building factories and warehouses, and it was these cost-conscious design projects that attracted the attention of football clubs, who wanted to spend less money by employing Leitch to enable them to accommodate more fans. However, overly radical savings led to one of the most significant disasters in the history of modern football. 25 people died and 517 were injured in the Ibrox disaster of 1902,9 (Fig1.7, Fig1.8) the inability of the terraces, which were constructed from wooden panels as well as wooden framed structures, to support the overflow of fans was the cause of this disaster.
7 Nichola Crilly et al., ‘El Desarrollo Espacial Del Estadio Moderno de Fútbol: El Ejemplo Inglés’, Apunts: Educación Física y Deportes , no. 59 (2000): 62–66.
8 Simon Inglis, Engineering Archie: Archibald Leitch - Football Ground Designer (London: Historic England, 2005), 37.
9 David
Is
A Global History of Football (London: Penguin, 2007).
After this disaster, Leitch improved his designs for the structure of the terraces, and in his subsequent designs for football stadiums, reinforced concrete and steel replaced the wooden panels, and the wooden structure for support underneath was discarded, the alternative being to use massive, easily available materials to heap out a slope, and then lay strong concrete terraces on top of that, for example, Fulham used the street sweeping and local collieries to provide ash and cinders as fill underneath the terraces, Chelsea used soil dug up from the Piccadilly Line, which was under construction at the time, to support their terraces, (Fig1.9) and there were a number of other clubs who would invite the neighbourhood to come to the building site to dump their rubbish before building the terraces.10 In summary, at the time, and generally speaking, three of the four sides of the pitch were surrounded by terraces with solid infill underneath them with no space to spare, and on the other side Leitch designed stands with roofs and seating for fans who were willing to pay extra for a more comfortable and all-weather match viewing experience. (Fig1.10)
Due to coming from the same designer, many football stadiums share similar sections and spatial diagrams. (Fig1.11, Fig1.12, Fig1.13, Fig1.14) In terms of the design of the stands, Leitch made extensive use of steel as a structure, and the benefit of the stands over terraces that were supported by solid material was that space was created underneath them, and although football stadiums at the time were nowhere near as highly commercialised as today's football stadiums, the space underneath the stands could be used for circulation as well as rooms for essential facilities such as ticket hall and dressing rooms.
Fig1.9 Stamford Bridge Stadium, 1920s
source: Daily Mail
10 Inglis, The Football Grounds of Great Britain, 12.
source:
Fig1.10 Ibrox Stadium, 1920
The Sunday Post, 22nd Aug 1920
source: Author
Fig1.11 Section of the stand in Craven Cottage Stadium, London, 1905
source: Author
Fig1.12 Section of the stand in Stamford Bridge Stadium, London, 1905
source: Author
Fig1.13 Section of the stand in White Hart Lane Stadium, London, 1909
source: Author
Fig1.14 Section of the stand in Ayresome Park Stadium, London, 1903
11 Juan Luis Paramio, Babatunde Buraimo, and Carlos Campos, ‘From Modern to Postmodern: The Development of Football Stadia in Europe’, Sport in Society 11, no. 5 (September 2008): 520, https://doi. org/10.1080/17430430802196520.
12 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford; Cambridge, Mass.: Blackwell, 1991).
With the specialisation of modern football and its popularity in Europe, the reputation of football as well as spectator attendance has grown rapidly, but despite this, many clubs are still struggling to operate due to the effects of the war and financial crisis, with some clubs' football stadiums even being destroyed during the war, such as Manchester United's Old Trafford and Arsenal's Highbury in the Second World War. In addition, the main source of income for clubs was still tickets, and although clubs would sell programmes on match days as well as provide some basic food and drink, the contribution to income was quite limited. Therefore, at the time, generating more income was a major concern for many clubs.11 It wasn't until the mid-20th century, with the war fully over and the football league back on track, that the number of people attending football matches rose once again, and more rapidly. Faced with the highest attendance levels in history at the time, English clubs generally chose to expand their existing stadiums rather than build new ones. (Fig1.15) Clubs' income would increase as a result of the
expansion but not enough to generate a significant financial return, so television rights, licensed merchandise, and rising ticket prices became new sources of income for the clubs. In terms of architecture, executive suites with enriched hospitality services have been found to have great economic potential and as a result are rapidly appearing in football stadium expansion or new build projects throughout Europe. In English football stadium expansions, terraces began to be partially removed and replaced with higher stands with greater capacity. The stands, compared to the terraces, on the one hand provide a more comfortable allweather viewing experience to earn higher ticket prices, and on the other hand allow the otherwise solidly filled space underneath the terraces to be better utilised to generate more value, which is in line with Henri Lefebvre's view that one of the key features of capitalist development is the commodification of space, as mentioned in his book The production of space. 12
Fig1.15 Riverside stand in Craven Cottage Stadium, 1972 source: Fulham FC
In Spain, although modern football and football stadiums came later than in the UK, clubs in Spain have experienced a similar development, but the major difference between them and British clubs is that only a portion of the money spent on the construction of a stadium in Spain comes from the team's operating income, with the rest coming from donations from club members, public subscriptions and bank loans. In Italy, although some of the football stadiums built in the early 1900s were still privately owned and invested in by the clubs, they were soon acquired by the local authorities and have remained in public ownership ever since. The San Siro stadium in Milan, for example, was built in 1926 at the expense of AC Milan's president, Piero Pirelli, but was acquired by the city of Milan in 1935, when the first expansion of the stadium began. To the present day, the majority of football stadiums in Italy are still publicly owned. Germany and France have experienced a similar situation in the modern period, with a large number of football stadiums being built or renewed for major tournaments such as the Olympics, World Cup and the Euros, and rented by local clubs for long periods of time after the tournament, with local authorities taking ownership of the stadiums. Either a multichannel approach to funding, as in Spain, or an operational model that relies on public and government investment, as in Italy, Germany and France, has led to the construction of football stadiums in these countries being more financially viable than in the UK. Furthermore, due to the generally earlier construction of football stadiums in the UK as well as the working class nature of the sport itself, and the fact that many of these stadiums are known for their longevity in a particular location,13 these stadiums blend seamlessly into the urban fabric and become an intrinsic part of the local neighbourhoods, which makes the UK's football stadiums generally smaller in terms of capacity and size than those of the more famous stadiums in Europe. (Fig1.16, Fig1.17, Fig1.18, Fig1.19)
13 Stephanie Charleston, ‘The English Football Ground as a Representation of Home’, Journal of Environmental Psychology 29, no. 1 (1 March 2009): 145, https://doi.org/10.1016/ j.jenvp.2008.06.002.
source: Author
Fig1.16 Section of the stand in Craven Cottage Stadium, London, 1972
source: Author
Fig1.17 Section of the stand in Camp Nou Stadium, Barcelona, 1957
source: Author
Fig1.18 Section of the stand in San Siro Stadium, Milan, 1955
source: Author
Fig1.19 Section of the stand in Parc des Princes Stadium, Paris, 1972
Postmodern
During the 1970s and 1980s there were a number of disasters in British football, 14 the causes of which were related to the design of the circulation, crowd management and the rise of football hooliganism at the time.15 On 2 January 1971, 66 spectators were crushed to death on a staircase outside the Ibrox Stadium after a match. (Fig 1.20) Damage to the staircase handrail caused by the overcrowded crowd was the main cause of this disaster. Subsequently, Lord John Thomas Wheatley produced a similar but not legally binding guide to stadium design codes in the same year, Guide to Safety at Sports Grounds, also known as the Green Guide, which provided guidance to help assess the capacity and safety of stadiums. On 15 April 1989, 95 people were crushed to death outside the Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield and hundreds more were seriously injured (Fig1.21), with the disaster being equally attributed to the number of people exceeding the designed capacity as well as the lack of designed circulation.16 Following this disaster, Lord Justice Peter Murray Taylor published a famous inquiry into the disaster in the same year, known as the Taylor report, which outlined general recommendations for football stadium safety, most notably, it stipulated that football stadiums must provide every spectator entering the stadium with a defined seat and the removal of all terracing for fans to stand and watch the game, these regulations have led to a significant reduction in the capacity of football stadiums in the UK, with some teams refurbishing their stadiums at great expense to meet the new regulations, and others being forced to choose to build new stadiums.
14 Martin Johnes and Gavin Mellor, Soccer and Disaster: International Perspectives, ed. Paul Darby, 1st edition (Routledge, 2005).
15 Paramio, Buraimo, and Campos, ‘From Modern to Postmodern: The Development of Football Stadia in Europe’, 526.
16 Peter Taylor, Final Report on the Hillsborough Stadium Disaster (London: HMSO, 1990).
Fig1.20 The aftermath at Ibrox, 1971 source: The Guardian
Fig1.21 Hillsborough disaster, 1989 source: BBC
P.Thompson, J. Tolloczko, N. Clarke argue that the Hillsborough disaster and the Taylor Report marked a turning point in the development of English football stadiums17, and John Bale argues that it represents the beginning of the postmodern stadium.18 This thesis argues that the series of disasters and the legal or building codes enacted in their aftermath did play an important role, and that the evolution of the stage of football stadium design from modern to postmodern can be seen as a paradigm shift because, although these codes were aimed at architecture and management, the dramatically reduced capacity forced the clubs and the designers of the stadiums to find ways of obtaining the corresponding compensation for their income from elsewhere. Commercialisation has therefore become a prominent feature of the post-modern stadium, and has increased in both sporting and non-sporting areas. 19 In the current stadium, not only are there commercialised features such as executive suites for matches, but there may also be meeting rooms available for hire, exclusive lounges, fine dining restaurants, museums and stadium tours on non-match days to generate additional income from the stadium. (Fig1.22, Fig1.23, Fig1.24, Fig1.25) The football stadium is no longer purely a place of spectacle and spectatorship, but also a multifunctional place of consumption. Camiel Van Winkel et al. in their book The Stadium: Architecture of Mass Sport suggest that in the postmodern football stadium, commercialisation becomes an aim in itself rather than an outcome.20
17 P. Thompson, J. Tolloczko, and N. Clarke, Stadia Arenas and Grandstands: Design, Construction and Operation (CRC Press, 2002), 52.
18 Bale, ‘The Spatial Development of the Modern Stadium’, 130.
19 Camiel Van Winkel, Pauline Terreehorst, and Marieke Van Rooy, The Stadium: Architecture of Mass Sport, ed. Matthjis Bouw and Michelle Provoost, 1st edition (Rotterdam: NAI Publishers, 2000).
20 Ibid., 12.
source: Author
Fig1.22 Section of the stand in Craven Cottage Stadium, London, 2019
source: Author
Fig1.23 Section of the stand in Allianz Arena, Munich, 2005
source: Author
Fig1.24 Section of the stand in Feyenoord Stadium (OMA's proposal), Rotterdam, 2016
source: Author
Fig1.25 Section of the stand in Metropolitano Stadium, Madrid, 2017
The transformation
This thesis argues that the evolution of the modern football stadium since its inception to the present day has been mainly sectional. The spatial interrelationship between the three, Pitch, Stands as well as spectators, has hardly changed at all, as it is determined by the behaviour of how spectators view the spectacle, the spectacle needs a space for it to take place, the spectators form a ring around the spectacle in order to view it from all sides, those who in the outer ring also need visual accessibility so they need to view it from a higher place than the spectators in the inner ring, the large number of spectators makes it impossible for a football stadium to be distributed vertically like the space of a theatre, so a fixed diagram of spatial relations is created: spectators stand on the inner wall of the bowl to view the spectacle at the bottom of the bowl. The evolution of the football stadium has focused almost entirely on the design of the stands. On the one hand, the space for fans to watch the game has changed from the solid terraces that were filled in the beginning, to later being replaced by stands with usable space underneath. On the other hand, the stands themselves became taller as the demand for capacity increased, resulting in more space below. In addition, and the most obvious change, the size of the stadium was increasing and the space was becoming more and more multifunctional. More and more space is being used as hospitality, which is used to earn extra income for the club. (Fig1.26)
Thus, the conclusions on the evolution of the football stadium serve as the most basic observation of its space and architecture, providing the motivation and the initiation of the next three chapters of this thesis, as well as the design of this chapter. Firstly, the football stadium will inevitably occupy public territory in the process of expansion and will make it exclusive to the stadium, and this privatisation of urban public space may affect the public benefit; secondly, the utilisation and commodification of space in football stadiums can be seen as a formalisation, and when tickets become one of the main targets of commodification, it can contribute to a class shift in the main group of fans, which has the potential to exacerbate class tensions as well as the neglect of disadvantaged groups; thirdly, while financialization can lead to a number of disadvantages, as well as being an important source of funding for football stadiums to become larger, the ability of taller, iconic stadiums to distinguish themselves in the urban form, as compared to earlier stadiums that blended seamlessly into the urban form, isn't entirely a bad thing, as it may be helpful in shaping the identity of the place as well as in attracting investment and infrastructure development and thus activating neighbourhoods; finally, the stadium in the new era is no longer purely a place for
sport, but its social and economic significance gives the stadium a great deal of influence in the development of urban policies and strategies, which can be seen as another form of return of the football stadium to the public, and to reshape the role of the football stadium in the urban and the society.
The history of the evolution of the football stadium is at the same time the history of the territorialisation of the space in which modern football is played. As capitalism developed, its characteristics dictated that many aspects of society were undergoing an inevitable territorialisation, with both public and multi-purpose land becoming enclosed, monofunctional and segmented. The same is true of football stadiums, from the initial definition of the space in which the game is played, to the clear definition of each space in the stadium, to the precise spatial limitations placed on each individual within the stadium today. Football was chaotic at the beginning of its existence, but the greatest benefit of this chaotic state was that all people could participate in the sport equally, freely and to the greatest extent possible, and this description is almost a utopian fantasy for the sport today. In the process of the development of football and football stadiums, the publicness of football as a sport has gradually been lost, and commercialisation has replaced the publicness and become the most distinctive feature of the sport. In addition, it has been argued that territorialisation as a means of social control may lead to an increase in social tension, and therefore, finding a way to de-territorialise football and give football stadiums a penetrable boundary may be a potential direction of development, with regard to the boundaries of football stadiums, which will also be discussed in the next chapter of this thesis.
UK, 1905
UK, 1905
UK, 1972
Italy, 1955
UK, 2019 Germany, 2005
Fig1.26 Comparison across the sections
source: Author
UK, 1909 UK, 1903
Spain, 1957
France, 1972
Spain, 2017
Netherland, 2016
DESIGN I RIVERBANK STAND
Fig1.27 Rendering of the Riverbank Stand
source: Author
In this chapter, the design aims to challenge the trend in the evolution of football stadium stands, specifically the economic demand for them to become higher in order to accommodate more spectators, the increased commercialisation of the space underneath them in order to generate additional income, and the high degree of privatisation and negative impacts on the publicness of the stadium that has resulted from this commercialisation. The design is located at the Craven Cottage Stadium, the design plan to remove the stands that need to be extended, opens up the riverbank to the public as a free platform, make the stadium more inclusive and restore the publicness of the stadium.
Fig1.28 Aerial view of the site, Craven Cottage Stadium (before 2019)
source: Alamy Stock Photo
Fig1.29 Axonometric of the Riverbank Stand source: Author
source: Author
This plan shows the condition of the space underneath the stands. There are a number of restaurants, shops, cafes and other leisure spaces that can serve the fans who come to watch football or the citizens who walk along the riverbank
Fig1.30 Ground floor plan of the Riverbank Stand
In response to the conclusion of this chapter, the design maintains the spatial relationship between the stands and the pitch, the players and the fans, but it challenges the tendency of the sectional transformation, and instead of making the stands taller and incorporating expensive functions such as exclusive lounges and executive suites, the stands are part of the riverside landscape and become accessible to everyone.
Fig1.31 Section of the Riverbank Stand
source: Author
source: Author
Fig1.32 Rendering of the Riverbank Stand
CHAPTER II
INFORMALITY THE REDEFINED BOUNDARY
Define the “Informality”
In the Merriam-Webster dictionary, the word formal is defined as "following or according with established form, custom, or rule" and "done in due or lawful form", Keith Hart and Chris Hann, in the book Economic Anthropology, suggest that the "form" in the word formality refers to "the rule", emphasising a concept that is universal in social life.1 Based on this context, this thesis attempts to define formal and informal in football. In football stadium architecture, where clear boundaries serve as a tool for the formalisation of space, the clarity of each space it defines and the use to which those spaces are assigned can be seen as a formality, then attempts to blur or break down the physical boundaries of the spaces and to use them in a way that isn't expected can be seen as an informality; in the operation of a football stadium, the club has ownership of the team, so the operation where the players of the team and the matches in which the team participates generate profits that accrue to the team can be seen as a formality, whereas the operation where the profits do not accrue to the team can be seen as an informality. In addition, because in/formality is strongly associated with regulations and rules, which are characterised by certainty and clarity, this thesis also argues that in/formality has implications about determinism, and that this can also be understood in conjunction with the notion of territorialisation of space, which was discussed in the first chapter of the thesis, as the notion of territory involves the measurement and control of land as well as the precise definition of boundaries,2 and that there is therefore a potential link between formality and territoriality, and between informality and de-territorialisation.
Informal spectatorship
Informal spectatorship, as defined above, is an act of watching a match outside of a defined area, and since the inception of modern football and specialised football stadiums, stands and terraces have been spaces designated exclusively for fans to watch matches, and therefore any spectating that takes place outside of stands or terraces can be considered as informal spectatorship. The act of going to watch the game through informal ways was widespread in the early days of modern football, the history of modern football is described in the first chapter of this thesis, in the early days of the sport the involvement of fans in the sport went far beyond watching, due to the lack of a physical barrier between the space
1 Keith Hart and Chris Hann, Economic Anthropology: History, Ethnography, Critique, 1st edition (Cambridge: Polity, 2011), 114.
2 Stuart Elden, The Birth of Territory (Chicago; London: The University of Chicago Press, 2013), 323–24.
3 Martin Johnes, ‘“Heads in the Sand”: Football, Politics and Crowd Disasters in Twentieth - Century Britain’, Soccer & Society 5, no. 2 (January 2004): 135, https://doi.org/10.1080/14660970420 00235173.
that fans were expected to occupy and the space that players were expected to occupy, (Fig2.1) fans breaking onto the pitch and taking direct part in the game was something that could happen, and for some fans today it may be one of their lifelong dreams, and football, at that time, could perhaps truly be called a sport for the public.
Soon after the birth of modern football it became a very attractive sport and started to become popular in other countries, clubs believed that football could have a great economic value and therefore clubs started to build walls outside their stadiums in order to make money from tickets. Although there is almost no research on wall climbing in modern football, a 1914 incident at the Hillsborough Stadium, where the collapse of the wall injured 80 people, is described in a journal article on the introduction to the history of football by Martin Johnes,3 so it would seem that wall climbing appeared almost as early as the appearance of the wall. In the decades that followed, climbing over the wall was commonplace at football stadiums in the UK, (Fig2.2), either because people did not want to pay or could not afford to pay for tickets, or because they were unable to get tickets as they were selling out fast due to popular matches. Overall, the strict control of the boundary between the stands and the pitch and the construction of a wall outside the stadium is an important method of territorialisation of the football stadium, the boundary changes from penetrable to solid, making the stadium a money-making tool, the public participation in the game represented by the fans is weakened, and the publicness of the stadium is therefore weakened, and the act of going over the wall can be seen as an informal compensation for the publicness of the stadium. In addition to going over the wall, at
Fig2.1 FA Cup Final, 1901
source: Leicester City FC
Fig2.2 Football fans climbing over a fence at Upton Park football ground, 1946
source: Getty Images
popular matches, fans eager to be there in person faced with already full stadiums would go to dangerous places to support their teams, these could be above unfinished canopies, (Fig2.3) on floodlight towers, (Fig2.4, Fig2.5, Fig2.6) as well as outside the stadium on top of the roofs of the buildings that can be seen inside the stadium, (Fig2.7) which exemplifies the inclusive nature of the football stadium, it is worth noting that in some of the photographs we can see the police, and this implies that these informal viewing behaviours are somewhat tacitly tolerated, and that the fans are using these unique and dangerous methods so that at this point in time, football and the football stadium can still be considered to be for the public.
Fig2.3 A huge crowd watches the match between Cardiff City and Chelsea source: Getty Images
source:
Fig2.4 The Den, London, 1957
Daily Mail
source:
Fig2.5 Ninian Park, Cardiff, 1961
Wales Online
Fig2.6 Ibrox Park, Glasgow, 1969 source:The Northern Echo
4 R. Todd Jewell, Rob Simmons, and Stefan Szymanski, ‘Bad for Business? The Effects of Hooliganism on English Professional Football Clubs’, Journal of Sports Economics 15, no. 5 (1 October 2014): 3, https://doi. org/10.1177/1527002514535169.
5 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison , trans. Alan Sheridan, Second Vintage Books edition., Penguin Social Sciences (London: Penguin, 1995), 195–228.
In the 1960s and 1970s, hooliganism emerged and became popular as a subculture in the UK, and although it had little to do with how the game was watched, it led in part to the introduction of CCTV to most stadiums in the UK in the mid-1980s. The Hillsborough disaster of 1989 and the publication of the Taylor Report in the same year led to a major renovation of football stadiums across the UK, the launch of the Premier League in 1992 led to a significant increase in club income and ticket sales, and clubs invested in more powerful CCTV systems to help identify and control disorder at stadiums,4 with the above mentioned behaviour of going over the wall and watching matches from inappropriate positions being rightly banned and largely eliminated.
By this point, the football stadium has come to embody some of the characteristics of Foucault's discussion of the concept of the Panopticon, introduced by Jeremy Bentham in 1971. Firstly, there is a strict division of space within the football stadium, where each participant is confined to a specific area of activity and activities beyond that are strictly prohibited; secondly, the observer (e.g. a surveillance camera) can watch every corner in all directions without the person being watched being able to observe the observer, and this system of surveillance virtually eliminates informal spectator behaviour; moreover, Foucault's concepts are not only concerned with specific spaces (e.g. prisons), but apply to all forms of power and control in society. 5 (Fig2.8) Therefore, the football stadium after the Taylor Report is in a way a kind of "prison" (stadiums have been used as prisons in some countries during the period of turmoil), with perfectly defined boundaries,
Fig2.7 Rooftop outside Upton Park, London, 1972 source: Getty Images
Fig2.8 Panopticon source: N. Harou-Romain
impenetrable on the outside and strictly regulated on the inside, this spatial relationship and power structure has made football stadiums extremely exclusive and private, and although this may have been beneficial to the development and operation of the sport, football stadiums have become more like monumental urban isolations, where the publicness of the stadium has once again been greatly reduced.
Although the development of football stadiums is an continuous process of territorialisation, and every innovation in football stadiums is a suppression of informality, this does not mean that territorialisation is a solution to informality, and that more advanced stadiums will only elevate the level of difficulty of informal spectatorship, rather than eliminating the need for it, as demonstrated in this set of photographs, (Fig2.9, Fig2.10) when faced with a near-perfect football stadium boundary, fans chose to lie on the ground for ninety minutes and support their team through the gap under the gate. This thesis argues that, to resolve the conflict between the formal and the informal, territorialising instruments such as walls and closed-circuit televisions can have some effect in suppressing informality, but do not help to resolve the conflict at its root, as Foucault points out that territory is first and foremost "juridico-political" and emphasises that the notion of territory has implications of power,6 and that territorialisation is therefore a representation of formality, and that therefore to resolve the conflict at its root, it is necessary to de-territorialise and to formalise informality, rather than to use formal devices to suppress informal behaviours.
6
Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977 (New York: Random House USA Inc, 1980), 68.
Fig2.10 Fans watching the game through the gap source: Unknown
Fig2.9 Fans watching the game through the gap source: Unknown
Michel Foucault,
Wrigley Rooftop: A bottom-up deterritorialization
There are two case studies in this chapter, the first one is located in Chicago, USA, a baseball stadium called Wrigley Field. Although this paper focuses on football stadiums in the UK, there are not many examples of football stadiums in the UK that have been outstanding in dealing with the conflict between formality and informality, and based on the discussion of the spatial relationship between pitches, stands and spectators at the end of Chapter 1 of this thesis, baseball stadiums can be considered to have a similar spatial diagram to football stadiums, and therefore the study of baseball stadiums is likely to provide insight into the study of football stadiums.
In 1914, Wigley Field was built and hosted its first Major League Baseball game.Since the stadium's opening, fans have informally gathered in nearby buildings to watch the games.Each section of the stadium's stands is not the same height, so that behind some of the lower stands, residents of flats across the street can watch the games inside the stadium from their windows. (Fig2.11)
The low stands made it popular to watch the game from outside the stadium, not only inside the building, but more people would gather on the rooftops to watch the game. (Fig2.12, Fig2.13) These rooftops can be seen as informal, as prior to 1980 the owners of these properties did not even charge tickets for fans watching from the rooftops, and this undoubtedly reflects the publicness of the stadium. After 1980, property owners recognised the huge economic potential of rooftops and gradually began to set up
Fig2.11 Wrigley Field, Chicago, 1914 source: Chicago Tribune
Fig2.12 Rooftop spectating, 1979 source: Chicago Tribune
Fig2.13 Rooftop spectating, 1958
source: Chicago Tribune
7 Charles Shifley and Patrick Shiftley, ‘Who Owns the View? Chicago Cubs v. Rooftop Owners, or Chicago National League Ball Club, Inc. v. Box on Waveland, L.L.C.’, Northwestern Journal of Technology and Intellectual Property 1 (2003): 71.
rooftop spectator stands and partially renovate their properties to provide dining areas such as bars and barbecues, (Fig2.14) with the income going entirely to the owners, and it is estimated that one of them, the Ivy League Baseball Club, was earning up to $1.38 million per year at the turn of the century.7 It wasn't until 2004 that the team wanted to raise the stands, which was opposed by the property owners because they felt that the increased height would obstruct the view from the roof, while the club felt that it would not be able to generate any income from these privately operated rooftop stands, and this conflict between the formal and the informal reached a peak, with the team taking the property owners to court in a dispute that ultimately ended with the rooftop owners agreeing to give the team 17% of their income in exchange for the team's recognition of the situation.
Today, these rooftop stands thrive, (Fig2.15) they have separate management and ticketing systems and operate independently of team control, which makes them still informal in character, but they are recognised by the team and the team shares a portion of their income, which gives the rooftop stands a formal character at the same time, and thus these rooftop stands can be seen as being partially formalised.
Fig2.15 Wrigley Rooftops source: Getty Images
source: Author
Fig2.14 Renovation diagram of Wrigley Rooftop
This section (Fig2.16) shows the spatial relationship between the stadium and the rooftop stands, the physical boundaries of the stadium still exist, but when a game is taking place, it is obvious that the spectators on the rooftop stands should also be counted as part of the game, so the boundaries of the stadium are no longer physically walled and fenced off during a game, but rather they are redefined by a kind of informal behaviour, wherever the fans who are watching the game outside the stadium are located, the boundaries are defined. The boundaries of the stadium are therefore broken down and widened, and become intangible and blurred, which is characteristic of de-territorialisation, a method of de-territorialisation that can be seen as effectively resolving the conflict between the formal and the informal, making the game less exclusive and increasing the publicness of the stadium.
Fig2.16 Section of Wrigley Field source: Author
source: Author
Fig2.17 Axonometric view of Wrigley field
This axonometric view (Fig2.17) shows the spatial condition of the stadium and its surrounding buildings. It can be seen that two of the sides of the stadium are wrapped by streets with rooftop stands on the opposite side of the street, which means that these two streets will be extremely busy on match days, which can generate noise and congestion, and have a certain negative impact on some of the residents and on the traffic in the area, but it is the fans and their occupation of the streets that make the whole neighbourhood full of match atmosphere on match days, and also because of the match temporality that makes the neighbourhood dynamic. Paul Peterson, in the book Chicago's Wrigley Field, commented on the atmosphere "...from the rooftops to the bleachers and back down to the streets where odd and obsessive characters turn a day and night at Wrigley Field into a truly unique experience."8 The atmosphere as an extension and continuation of the game affects the whole area, and if we look at the atmosphere as a special part of the game, then the boundaries of the stadium are once again widened and redefined and blurred.
8 Paul Michael Peterson, Chicago’s Wrigley Field (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2005), 72.
Braga Municipal Stadium: Formalize the informality
Another case study in this chapter is the Municipal Stadium in Braga, Portugal, (Fig2.18) designed by Eduardo Souto De Moura as one of the stadiums for Euro 2004. It was chosen for similar reasons to the first case study, and also because it demonstrates a certain level of innovation in tackling the conflict between the formal and the informal. In this project, the architect made good use of the terrain, which is basically surrounded on three sides by an abandoned quarry. The architect, according to the context, retained only two stands along the long side of the pitch, and intentionally retained the viewing platform at the top of the hill facing the short side of the pitch. (Fig2.19)
Fig2.18 Braga Municipal Stadium source: Wikimedia Commons
Fig2.19 Site plan of Braga Municipal Stadium
source: Author
Viewing spot
Giuseppe Cocco and Barbara Szaniecki commented on the atypical spatial organisation of the stadium, describing the building as embodying "democratic nature". The term democratic here can be interpreted as two different concepts, one being that the removal of the short-side stands allows for fans in the stadium to be located in the best position to watch the game, which reflects a sense of equality; the other is that the open short side allows those who do not have the necessary resources to gain access to the game, they can get a good view without spending a penny, (Fig2.20, Fig2.21) and this can be seen as a counter to the political process of socioeconomic inequality.9
9 Giuseppe Cocco and Barbara Szaniecki, Creative Capitalism, Multitudinous Creativity: Radicalities and Alterities (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2015), 30.
Fig2.20 Hilltop view of Braga Municipal Stadium source: Unknown
Fig2.21 Section of Braga Municipal Stadium
source: Author
10 Robert Sack, Human Territoriality: Its Theory and History , Illustrated edition (Cambridge Cambridgeshire; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 3.
This study attempts to understand the project in terms of boundaries, territories and formal-informal dichotomies. Firstly, the boundaries of the stadium are not closed and defined by physical architectural elements like most stadiums in the world, and the open short sides make the project a good case for topdown de-territorialisation. But the process of building a stadium from scratch is indeed the process of defining territory, and it has been argued by Robert Sack in his book Human Territoriality that the effect of territorialisation depends on who is in control and for what purpose.10 The investors behind the construction of the football stadium in Portugal and the people who benefited from the operation of the stadium may be in a completely different situation to that of the football stadium in the UK, and because the stadium was constructed with public funds and for the purposes of national sport, the stadium does not demonstrate significant commercialisation. The already existing viewing platform has a double identity due to the architect's design, on the one hand it is an urban natural space, on the other hand it is part of the stadium, this characteristic means public accessibility and gives the place a unique temporality and atmosphere, which is positive for enhancing the publicness of the stadium as well as activating the public space of the city. The topic of temporality and atmosphere, as well as the social effects of the stadium at the neighbourhood scale, will be discussed in more detail in Chapter 3 of this thesis.
Secondly, the spatial condition presented by the stadium was intentionally designed to be this way, rather than being shaped by any external factors, so there is no doubt that the stadium is formal. However, the act of standing on the hillside to watch the game is clearly categorised as informal in the context of this thesis, and as there are spaces on the hillside designed for watching the game, there is a mixture of formality and informality in this project, which can be seen as a formalised informality. In addition to this, in the case of Wrigley Rooftop mentioned above, the existence of the property owner's act of sharing the proceeds with the team in exchange for the team's official recognition led to a shift from pure informality to formalised informality, which continues to operate in a hybrid condition, challenging the traditional formal-informal dichotomy and defining a new mode of relationship between the public and capital or power institutions, the formalised informal allows the informal to exist in a more sustainable way, which provides insights into how not only the stadium, but other urban infrastructures can better serve the public.
DESIGN II
CAR PARK STAND
Fig2.22 Rendering of the Car park Stand
source: Author
The design in this chapter aims to look for possibilities in the surroundings of the stadium, and tries to create some informal viewing spaces, in order to break the physical boundary and provide more opportunities for the informal spectatorship. The design is located at The Den stadium, close to Bermondsey. This design makes use of the gaps between segmented stands and proposes a parking building so that drivers can watch the game while sitting in their cars. But having a car isn't mandatory, and as a free platform, pedestrians can likewise go up and watch the game via the ramp.
Fig2.23 Aerial view of the site, the Den Stadium source: Alamy Stock Photo
Axonometric of the Car park Stand source: Author
Fig2.24
Plan of the Car park Stand
source: Author 0 5 10m
This plan shows the scale of the project. It is a small car park, four in total, distributed around the corners of the stadium, providing a total of 100 parking spaces. At the same time, as the project is designed for informality in football and as a response to the conclusion of the research, the design maintains the intact condition of the stadium in a form of addition rather than replacement.
Fig2.25
source: Author
This section shows the spatial relationship between the parking building and the pitch. Each parking space has been provided with a 10% slope to ensure that drivers can see the game from their cars.
Fig2.26 Section of the Car park Stand
source: Author
Fig2.27 Rendering of the Car park Stand
CHAPTER III
NEIGHBOURHOOD STADIUM
AS A SOCIAL VALUE
Overview of stadium context
In general, the relationship between a stadium and its context can be divided into three categories, the first being stadium in an urban context, in which case the stadium will often have a direct link with residential areas; the second category is stadium in the landscape, where the stadium is often located away from the city centre and contributes to the local landscape, such as in the case of the Braga Municipal Stadium mentioned in Chapter 2, which is embedded in an abandoned quarry; the third category is stadium in a sports park, most of the projects under this category are built for the Olympic Games, because mega-events of the size of the Olympic Games require a lot of space, and in order to accommodate different kinds of sports, multiple arenas of different sizes and functions will be built.1 All three categories are widespread in the European context, with representative cases in each. (Fig3.1)
However, in the UK, these three categories do not occur equally. In the case of London's Premier League stadiums, for example, there are seven teams in London playing in the Premier League this season, and with the exception of West Ham United's home stadium at the Olympic Park, the home stadiums of the remaining six clubs are all located in urban contexts, and are particularly surrounded by residential neighbourhoods (Fig3.2), similar to the situation in cities renowned for their football, such as Manchester and Liverpool. Thus, in the UK, the first category dominates, and the relationship between the stadium and the neighbourhood becomes a critical and discussable issue.
1 Martin Wimmer, Stadium Buildings: Construction and Design Manual (Berlin: DOM Publishers, 2016), 71.
Fig3.1 Three categories of stadium context
source: Google Earth
Barcelona
Bordeaux
Munich
Munich
Landscape
Sports park
London
Madrid
Fig3.2 Stadium context in London
source: Google Earth
Arsenal
Chelsea Fulham
Crystal Palace
Tottenham Hotspur
Brentford
2 Jon Ladd and Liz Davis, BURA Guide to Best Practice in Sport and Regeneration (London: British Urban Regeneration Association, 2003), 7–12.
3 Margarita Bowen, ‘Outdoor Recreation around Large Cities’, in Suburban Growth – Geographical Processes At The Edge Of The Western City, by James Johnson (London, New York: Wiley–Blackwell, 1974), 225–48.
Economic value
Unlike the previous chapter, this chapter attempts to move away from the traditional perspective of football and football stadiums, i.e. no longer focusing specifically on how people in different roles participate in the sport and how the space of the building evolves, but rather viewing it as a conceptualised object and expanding the scale and scope of the discussion to include neighbourhoods and sociology, investigating the social value that football and football stadiums can provide and the more macro-level impacts that they can have.
Firstly, in England in particular, as one of the most successful football leagues in the world, commercialisation has become the most obvious tag for English football, with the economic value of the stadium becoming one of the most frequently mentioned of its many values. However, although there is a direct link between the commercialisation of stadiums and their economic value, their commercialisation has more generally had a positive effect on the development of the teams themselves and the expansion of the clubs. In other words, although stadiums can do things like provide more local employment, increase business activity and tax revenues, increase community provision, and develop new landmarks,2 this research argues that the most direct economic value of stadiums to their neighbourhoods is primarily in the effect they have on house prices in their proximity.
In the past, some conventional opinions have suggested that the existence of a football stadium could have a negative impact on property prices in its surroundings. Margarita Bowen, for example, in a 1970s study on the impact of venues for different sports on the property market, pointed out that a £5,000 house located within 10 miles of central London would see an average price drop of around 2.5% due to its proximity to a stadium, while the drop in house price grows to 12% when the price of the house is £20,000.3(Fig3.3)
This thesis argues that the reasons for this phenomenon need to be seen in the context of the era in which this research was made. On the one hand, the study was made before the Taylor Report, when football stadiums lacked strict management and systems, misbehaviour was common, football hooligans were widespread, and so football stadiums were often associated with dirty and danger, which undoubtedly had a negative impact on house prices in some way. This conventional view has had a lasting impact on the property market around stadiums in the UK, with John Bale referring to the metaphor "the stadium as slum" in his 1995 book, and suggesting that the reduction in property values is just one of the many negative impacts of stadiums.4
On the other hand, the well-known Premier League was created in 1992, however, it was not the first time in the history of England that a football league appeared, but it was a milestone in commercialisation. Larissa Davies mentioned in a journal article in 2006 that in the early 1990s, sport was hardly considered an economic development tool.5 Therefore, prior to the establishment of the Premier League, football stadiums did not have the ability to have the branding effect that today's stadiums have thus attracting amenities around them as well as urban infrastructure, which could positively impact on neighbouring property prices.
The situation has changed in this century, with Larissa E. Davies investigating the impact of stadiums on the property market in two journal articles in 2005 and 2006, using football stadiums in the cities of Manchester and Cardiff as case studies. In her quantitative analysis, she mentions that in Cardiff, the stadium has boosted the value of homes in its neighbourhood by around 3%, and in Manchester this is 13%. She also mentioned the impact of the stadium on the value of industrial, office, retail, and leisure uses, and in general, the stadium contributes to the value of each of these functions to different extents.6 (Fig3.4)
4 John Bale, The Stadium and the City, ed. Olof Moen (Keele: Keele University Press, 2019), 13.
5 Larissa E. Davies, ‘Sporting a New Role? Stadia and the Real Estate Market’, Managing Leisure 11, no. 4 (1 October 2006): 231, https://doi. org/10.1080/13606710600893726.
6 Ibid., 237–40.
7 Larissa E. Davies, ‘Not in My Back Yard! Sports Stadia Location and the Property Market’, Area 37 (1 September 2005): 268, https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1475-4762.2005.00630.
x.
8 Gabriel Ahlfeldt and Georgios Kavetsos, ‘Form or Function? The Effect of New Sports Stadia on Property Prices in London’, Journal of the Royal Statistical Society: Series A (Statistics in Society) 177 (7 January 2014): 187, https://doi.org/10.1111/rssa.12006.
9 John Crompton, ‘Public Subsidies to Professional Team Sport Facilities in the USA’, in Sport in the City: The Role of Sport in Economic and Social Regeneration (London: Routledge, 2001), 15–34.
She opposed the traditional stereotypes of stadiums and suggested that stadiums can indirectly contribute to property values by creating pride, confidence and promoting the image of an area. In her interviews with local residents, the positive impact of the stadium on the environment as well as the image of the area and the shift in their own attitudes towards the stadium were commonly mentioned. 7 In addition, Gabriel Ahlfeld and Georgios Kavetso quantified the impact of Wembley Stadium and Emirates Stadium on the property market in a journal article published jointly in 2014. They reached similar conclusions: property near Wembley can rise by up to 15%, and pointed out that the iconic element of Wembley Stadium, the 130m high arch, contributes to 'stadium effects'; the Emirates Stadium, because it is a relocation project, has a 1.7% increase in price for a 10% reduction in the distance from the stadium to the neighbouring properties.8
Sociologic value
In the previous discussion of the economic value of stadiums, a number of studies have pointed to the positive impact that stadiums have on the pride, confidence and image of their neighbouring communities. Similar arguments have been made by a wide range of scholars within the field of sociology, such as John Crompton, who in a 2001 article identifies three major non-economic impacts of sports facilities: increased community popularity, psychic income, and enhanced community image. 9 This thesis acknowledges the positive aspects of these mentions, but this thesis also argues that, essentially, the establishment of neighbourhoodscale pride and confidence is dependent on the establishment of a collective identity, and that the shaping of a collective identity is the most central sociological value of the game of football, and of the architecture of football stadiums.
Although many sociological studies see identity shaping as a positive effect of football (stadium), the narrative tends to appear simply as an effect in the conclusions and there is a lack of discussion about the reasons why football or football stadiums specifically shape identity. Furthermore, this thesis argues that there is a general problem of notional confusion in existing relevant research: is it the game of football, football fans, football matches, football clubs or football stadiums that are the key players in shaping identity? Or are they all? Even if this is the case, it should be discussed clearly and separately, rather than referring to several
completely different concepts as “football”. In this thesis, the contributors to shaping collective identity are divided into two categories, one being the football match and the other being the football stadium.
James Coleman, in a 1961 journal article, argued that most parts of the world have few crises, such as wars, community rallies or natural disasters, which are conducive to generating a communal spirit and common goal.10 Football matches often carry metaphors for war in match narration as well as in people's everyday conversations, and Aliyu Yusuf discusses such metaphors in a 2016 journal article, making connections between roles in war and roles in football matches, for example, "Soldiers" and "Football players", "Battle ground" and "Playing field", "Attacking the opponents" and "Attacking the rivals' goal", etc. are similar.11 When tens of thousands of fans gather in the same construction, playing the same role, doing the same thing, the concept of "you" or "me" disappears and is replaced by "us" and "them". Thus the game of football can be seen in some ways as a civic ritual and there are many cathedralised analogies to the stadium in the existing literature. This commonality of the game provides an artificial, safe common goal for a society without crisis, and the working-class origins and traditions of English football have led to many stadiums being rooted in the communities in which they are situated, with a large degree of overlap between those watching the game in the stadiums and those living off the stadiums, which has led to the common goal created by the game of football becoming at the same time a common goal on a neighbourhood scale. On the other hand, John Jackson noted in a 1986 journal article that most of us establish the sense of place not by its forms, but by the way it tells time, by the sequence of daily, weekly, yearly events.12 Since a football match is an event that occurs intermittently, regularly, its temporality helps to shape the same sense of place among the residents near the stadium that is part of the collective identity.
The second part of this section seeks to explore the contribution of the football stadium itself to the shaping of collective identity and to see the stadium as a landmark and monument. This statement appears to contradict the position of this thesis, which begins by noting the current tendency for stadiums to become purely landmarks and sees the monumentality of stadiums as a negative, isolation from the urban context. In fact, however, the previous argument focuses on a critique of the isolation caused by landmarks, or rather, a critique of "purely", whereas monumentality itself can be considered neutral, and even, in this chapter, as having a positive impact. In The architecture of the city, Aldo Rossi noted that "Monument, signs of the collective will as expressed through the principles of architecture, offer themselves as primary elements,
10 James Coleman, ‘Athletics in High School’, The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 338, no. 1 (1 November 1961): 42, https://doi. org/10.1177/000271626133800105.
11 Yakubu Yusuf, ‘Conceptual Metaphor in the Language of Football Commentary: A Cognitive Semantic Study’, Ganga Journal of Language and Literary Studies 5, no. 4 (2016): 8.
12 John Jackson, ‘A Sense of Place, A Sense of Time’, Oz 8 (1986): 9, https:// doi.org/10.4148/2378-5853.1111.
13 Aldo Rossi, The Architecture of the City , Revised ed. edition (Cambridge, Mass,: MIT Press, 1984), 22.
fixed points in the urban dynamic.”13 Thus, the monumentality of the stadium as a huge volume of presence has a positive impact on the shaping of identity.
Archibald Leitch's significance to football stadiums in the UK, and indeed worldwide, is almost a matter of consensus, and as the creator of the football stadium architectural typology, his designs have had a deep influence on the form of football stadiums in the UK. His radical control of construction costs became, on the one hand, his most attractive feature to clubs and, on the other hand, resulted in the first generation of football stadiums in British history being all function-led, with little in the way of aesthetics or uniqueness in their design, which led to some of his works looking almost identical. (Fig3.5, Fig3.6, Fig3.7)
source: Unknown
Fig3.5 Archibald Leitch's design of St. James Park Stadium
source: Unknown
Fig3.6 Archibald Leitch's design of White Hart Lane Stadium
source: Unknown
Fig3.7 Archibald Leitch's design of Goodison Park Stadium
This feature of his design coupled with the popularity of post-war modernism led later stadium designers to maintain the stadium as a functional construction in renovation or extension projects in the UK in the mid-to-late twentieth century, and the new stadiums remained so similar in form that it was difficult for those uninterested in football to quickly differentiate or recognise each stadium. (Fig3.8, Fig3.9, Fig3.10)
Fig3.8 Anfield Stadium source: Getty Images
Fig3.9 White Hart Lane Stadium source: Getty Images
Due to the development of material science and structural technology, the commercialisation of football and the Hillsborough disaster as a trigger, the form and aesthetics of football stadiums began to be taken seriously from the end of the last century onwards. In contemporary times, discussions about and designs for form tend to have the highest priority in football stadium practice projects, and many of the new football stadiums built in this century are formally impressive. For example, the iconic arches of London's Wembley Stadium, designed by Foster + Partners and Populous (Fig3.11), the inflatable façade of Munich's Allianz Arena, designed by Herzog & de Meuron (Fig3.12), and the thin, dense columns of the new stadium in Bordeaux (Fig3.13).
Fig3.13 Matmut Atlantique Stadium source: Herzog & de Meuron
These distinctive forms and the character of the innovative architectural elements make these stadiums quickly and easily recognisable to almost everyone, thus contributing to the global reputation of these stadiums, which are beginning to become landmarks on their neighbourhood scale and even on a city scale. These newest stadiums are not as uniform as the old ones, and fans or residents can easily recognise the great differences between the stadiums, and the stadiums are no longer a generic and abstract object in the awareness of fans and residents, but a specific and unique image. Road signs may serve as evidence of this in a way that the image of a football is a common way of representing football stadiums in British road signs (Fig3.14, Fig3.15), but the uniqueness of the form of Wembley Stadium makes it possible for its road signs to represent the football stadium with a simplified image of a stadium. (Fig3.16) Alessandra Zamparini et al. argue in a 2023 journal article discussing iconic architecture that "Their aesthetics and materiality can serve as powerful collective meaning generators, informing perceptions of visitors and locals about the unique elements of a city’s character, but also contribute to the emergence of new and divergent interpretations.” 14 This thesis argues that today's football stadiums are increasingly becoming a landmark, and that the connotations of uniqueness of a landmark can have a positive impact on shaping collective identity at the neighbourhood scale.
14 Alessandra Zamparini, Gastone Gualtieri, and Francesco Lurati, ‘Iconic Buildings in the Making of City Identity: The Role of Aspirational Identity Artefacts’, Urban Studies 60, no. 12 (1 September 2023): 2474–95, https:// doi.org/10.1177/00420980221144157.
Fig3.14 A road sign in Liverpool source: BBC
Fig3.15 A road sign in Portsmouth source: Alamy Stock Photo
Fig3.16 A road sign at Wembley source: Unknown
15 The Planning Service, ‘Wembley Masterplan: Supplementary Planning Document’, agenda (London: Brent Council, June 2009), 30.
Wembley Park: Temporality and atmosphere
The case study in this chapter is Wembley Stadium and its neighbourhood in London. The present-day Wembley Stadium, completed in 2007 and designed by Foster + Partners and Populous, is surrounded by a large-scale residential community that has been built in recent years, with retail and office space. According to the official website of Quintain Living, the stadium's investor and developer of the area, and the planning application advertised by Brent Council, the first phase of the Wembley Park development in 2004 would provide 3,727 new rental flats, 28,500m2 of leisure and entertainment facilities, 47,000m2 of retail, restaurants and bars, 63,000m 2 of offices and 52,000m 2 of hotels. 15 By 2020, Wembley Park already has a stable of 10 developments and is expected to reach 12 by 2025, with the ability to provide 6,044 rental flats, making it the largest Built To Rent development in the UK. Wembley Park is also close to a railway station and tube station, making the area well connected to central London and providing easy access for anyone living or working in the area. (Fig3.17)
This research argues that the mixed-use development illustrated in this plan plays an important role in the enhancement of the social value of the stadium, as it challenges the traditional " stadiumresidential" dichotomy of the UK stadium neighbourhood. Offices, hotels, and retail spaces have allowed the stadium's influence to go beyond this area, and the movement of commuters and tourists has allowed the stadium's influence to spread throughout the city, which is one of the key factors in Wembley Stadium's development from a regional landmark to a city landmark. Additionally, this mixed development provides an alternative layer of temporality to the one of the football match, because different roles of the crowd have different conditions of occupancy of the space during the day, which makes this area dynamic even when it is a non-match day. The movement of different groups of people at different times of the day offers the possibility of intertwining between them and this plays a key role in enhancing the vitality of the area.
Fig3.17 Land use of Wembley Park source: Author
Secondly, the roads in this area can be categorised according to temporality. The two roads directly connecting the stadium to the transport hub are set up to be pedestrian-only at all time, they carry the majority of the crowd on match days and are the main routes for residents as well as commuters travelling on non-match days. A large number of restaurants, bars, retailers and supermarkets are located on both sides of the road, making these two roads the places that residents rely on for their daily lives. Apart from these two pedestrian-only roads, the roads within the area are essentially time-varying roads. They are open to vehicles and pedestrians on non-match days to maximise accessibility for the convenience of residents, and on match days, when there is traffic control within the area, these roads become pedestrian-only to carry the crowds created by fans travelling by other transportation modes, and the roads within the residential areas become open to residents only. (Fig3.18)
This research argues that the temporality of the road illustrated in this plan can be seen as an extension of the temporality of the match, or rather, an extension from social temporality to spatial temporality, which physicalises the temporality of the match and makes it easier to perceive. Fans gather in a designated space and time, and as an important element of a football match, and an important contributor to the atmosphere of the game, their presence makes the atmosphere of the match no longer confined to the field, but spread outside of it. This planning of the roads on the one hand allows the atmosphere to reach its maximum concentration in the designated places for people to perceive it, and on the other hand also minimises the possible negative effects of the atmosphere.
Pedestrian only
Temporarily pedestrian only
Vehicle and pedestrian
source: Author
Fig3.18 Road condition of Wembley Park
Thirdly, the temporality of football matches also extends to temporary retailing. A series of moveable, temporary retail installations will be located near the stadium and on the pedestrian walkways on match days. The installations consisted of vans designed for retail sales, trolleys for the sale of official publications and brochures, simple shelters, containers converted into souvenir shops or catering, and portable toilets for easy transport. (Fig3.19) These installations will only be present on match days, and due to their portability, vans or trolleys can be left as soon as the fans have been evacuated, shelters can be quickly dismantled by the stallholders and stored in a nearby building, and containers and removable toilets are lifted onto lorries and transported for storage elsewhere a couple of days after the match. (Fig3.20)
source: Author
Fig3.19 Installations on match day
16 Paul Ashmore, ‘Of Other Atmospheres: Football Spectatorship beyond the Terrace Chant’, Soccer & Society 18, no. 1 (2 January 2017): 43, https://doi.org/10.1080/14660970.201 4.980743.
This research argues that portable retail installations in the neighbourhood of the stadium play a determinant role in the formation of the off-stadium atmosphere. They only appear on dates when there are matches and sell goods that are strongly related to football matches, so they share a resemblance to the game and are in a way representative and symbolic of the game. Their existence makes the football match perceptible outside the stadium as well and becomes the source of the atmosphere. Paul Ashmore noted in a 2014 journal article that in pre- and postmatch spaces such as, for example, pubs, cafes, public transport, etc., international supporters of different teams at different levels may meet and interact and therefore generate atmosphere. 16 And in the case of Wembley Park, these installations play the same role; their existence creates a change in the density of the crowd, with people more densely populated closer to them, which opens up the possibility of potential communication.
source: Author
Fig3.20 Installations' distribution of Wembley Park
Trolly
Van
Portable toilet Shelter Container
Finally, this area is in a dynamic, activated condition with the above mentioned mixed development, road classification, and the multi-scale intervention of portable installations. (Fig3.21) Mixed Development makes the composition of the population in this area diverse, which is a prerequisite for the intertwining of different populations. The main road that connects the stadium to the traffic on the one hand provides distribution for the fans and on the other hand serves as a place that the residents rely on daily, it provides space for the intertwining of different groups of people. In addition, portable retail installations, as a special part of football matches, in a way break down the physical boundaries of the stadium, taking the atmosphere from the field to the outside and penetrating into its neighbourhood. These interventions together make the football stadium the heart of the area and transform football from a sport into a culture that affects the neighbourhood, restoring the publicness of the stadium, which is undoubtedly what football should be.
source: Author
Fig3.21 Mixed condition of Wembley Park
17 Mike Weed, ‘Sport Fans and Travel –Is “Being There” Always Important?’, Journal of Sport & Tourism 15, no. 2 (1 May 2010): 103, https://doi.org/10.108 0/14775085.2010.504427.
18 Mike Weed, ‘The Story of an Ethnography: The Experience of Watching the 2002 World Cup in the Pub’, Soccer & Society 7, no. 1 (1 January 2006): 93, https://doi. org/10.1080/14660970500355603.
19 Weed, ‘Sport Fans and Travel – Is “Being There” Always Important?’, 104.
FIFA Fan Festival: Fan zone and broadcast
Prior to 2006, at football tournaments such as Euro 2000, fans without tickets were warned to stay away from the stadium as they would be seen by the organisers of the tournament as people who might be involved in football hooliganism as well as other illegal acts.17 Things began to turn around at that point, with FIFA noting that they had noticed some excitement at the 2002 FIFA World Cup Korea/Japan, with fans gathering to watch the broadcast of the match openly away from the stadium. Not only does this behaviour demonstrate that gatherings of fans may not be as aggressive and destructive as one might assume, but it also goes a long way to spreading the culture and atmosphere of football, making major tournaments start to become a kind of festival. FIFA mentioned "These impromptu gatherings made it clear there was a desire to celebrate the FIFA World Cup™ as a huge cultural event, something to be cherished and experienced with friends and family – in short, it was about more than just the football.” During the 2002 World Cup, the 2003 Rugby World Cup and Euro 2004, the majority of front-page news stories focused on where people watched the matches collectively,18 and this informal act of congregation has become an important part of major sporting events as a bottomup way of resolving the tension between the huge attraction of large sporting events and the limited seating capacity which is destined to not be able to accommodate all of the crowds that are attracted to them. The act was finally officially recognised and formalised for the first time at the 2006 World Cup in Germany, where it was named “FIFA Fan Fest” and has been a regular event at every subsequent World Cup. At the 2006 FIFA World Cup, the hosts actively welcomed ticketless fans, gathering in designated areas and featuring a large screen broadcasting the matches live. These areas can be located next to the stadium (Fig3.22), city landmarks or squares (Fig3.23), or even on the riverbank. (Fig3.24) It worked so well that on 24 June 2006, the Fan Fest in Cologne hosted thousands of German fans, many of whom were willing to spend two hours in the city where the match was being held even though they did not have tickets because they wanted to "be there".19
Fig3.22 Fan Fest in Munich Olympic Park source: FIFA
Fig3.23 Fan Fest at the Brandenburg Gate source: FIFA
Fig3.24 Fan Fest on the riverbank in Frankfurt source: FIFA
20 Jessica Richards, ‘“Which Player Do You Fancy Then?” Locating the Female Ethnographer in the Field of the Sociology of Sport’, Soccer & Society 16, no. 2–3 (4 May 2015): 396, https://doi. org/10.1080/14660970.2014.961379.
21 Jessica Richards and Keith D. Parry, ‘Beers and Blurred Boundaries: The Spatial and Gendered Organisation of Pre-Match Venues for English Football Fans’, International Review for the Sociology of Sport 55, no. 6 (1 September 2020): 10, https://doi. org/10.1177/1012690219835487.
22 James Woods and Jan Andre Lee Ludvigsen, ‘The Changing Faces of Fandom? Exploring Emerging “Online” and “Offline” Fandom Spaces in the English Premier League’, Sport in Society 25, no. 11 (2 November 2022): 2239, https://doi.org/10.1080/174304 37.2021.1904902.
23 Weed, ‘Sport Fans and Travel – Is “Being There” Always Important?’, 104.
Here, the case of the UK needs to be mentioned, or rather, the difference between the fan zone created by leagues that take place every week, unlike major sporting events that take place once every few years. The league is undoubtedly weaker than the cup in terms of influence and attraction, due to the fact that the cup is organised less frequently and is less tolerant of error than the league. In addition, in the Premier League, fans of clubs are much more localised compared to the World Cup, with far fewer fans travelling across cities, hence the Premier League's fan zone is "usually located directly outside stadiums on match day ".20 In terms of functionality, the Premier League's fan zone can also be viewed as essentially a consumer zone. In Jessica Richards and Keith Parry's description of Everton's fan zone in a 2020 journal article, that area is a car park on non-match days, and on match days becomes a place where fans can engage in entertainment and buy souvenirs and fast food.21 In contrast to the World Cup, the Premier League's fan zone doesn't offer a big screen, and most fans will probably eventually get into the stadium to watch the matches, and they're usually ticket holders.22 Therefore, in the current Premier League, the fan zone is more of a pre-match destination, providing fans with pre-match entertainment and catering, and its duties end after the opening whistle. In this way, it would appear that the pedestrian walkway at Wembley Park in the previous case study can also be seen as a type of fan zone (despite the fact that Wembley Stadium is the home of the England national team rather than any league team), and therefore the positive impact and value of this British fan zone to the neighbourhood as well as to society does not need to be argued for again here. But it is worth criticising that, as mentioned earlier, "they are usually ticket holders", which this research sees as a ignorance of those who do not have tickets, and that Premier League tickets are no longer cheap, and are hard to obtain for popular matches. Although it would be unrealistic to set up big screens and run them all year round for these few fans due to cost considerations, fan zones in the UK have had little positive effect on making football more inclusive and giving more people the chance to enjoy it than major sporting events.
On the other hand, the previously mentioned big screens in the fan zone, along with television, webcasts and other means, can be seen as a visually based, remote reproduction of the events taking place in the stadium in the form of videos. This way of presenting is dominant at the moment and is also, based on the technology of the moment, the best way to do it. It does play a determinant role in the globalisation of football, and indeed, if someone's need is purely to just watch a game, then a mobile phone or TV can easily fulfil that need, but the reality is that fans act in the opposite way. On 25 June 2006, two to three thousand England fans watched the England v Ecuador match in Stuttgart at the Fan Fest in Cologne.23 John Bale
argues that in the modern world, visuals are strongly favoured, but in the stadium, sounds, smells, touch and memories may all be recalled,24 this study agrees with him and argues that it is this multi-sensory experience that makes in-person viewing difficult to replace by mobile phones or television, and that Fan Fest, and even the bar, is providing an experience of other layers of the senses besides the visual as an alternative to not being able to be in the stadium. And this explains why fans are still willing to pay higher prices to watch matches live even with the current internet availability, why pubs near stadiums are always crowded on match days, and why the behaviour of fans watching matches collectively can be a widespread phenomenon.
24 Patricia Anne Vertinsky and John. Bale, Site of Sport : Space, Place, Experience, Sport in the Global Society (London: Routledge, 2004), 3.
DESIGN III
MIRRORED SQUARE
Fig3.25 Rendering of the Mirrored Square
source: Author
The design of this chapter aims to challenge the contemporary and common urban role of the football stadium, no longer seeing it as an isolated, exclusive urban element, but through a discussion of the social value of the stadium and its atmosphere, discovering its positive impact on the scale of the neighbourhood and seeing it as an activator that enhances the vibrancy of the area. The design is located at Loftus Road Stadium, near White City. The current situation of the site is adjacent to the stadium, basically residential, with a low level of hybridity, and is not fully activated by the stadium.
Fig3.26 Aerial view of the site, Loftus Road Stadium
source: Alamy Stock Photo
source: Author
This design proposed a critical conception of the fan plaza. In this project, although the fan plaza is seen as positive, the ordinary way of broadcasting via the big screen is seen as lacking in innovation as it is not fundamentally different from the TV. Therefore, this design proposes a way to optically reflect what is happening at the stadium into the fan plaza by using a highly reflective metal as the new canopy. In this optical diagram, people standing in the light blue zone can see part of the pitch through the mirror, and people in the deep blue zone are able to see the whole pitch.
Fig3.27 Optical diagram
source: Author
This rendering illustrates a whole-pitch view of the fan plaza. In this way, it can provide a new and unique experience for the nonticketed fans to get closer to the game, and can also attract more people to involve and share the match atmosphere.
Fig3.28 Rendering of reflection
source: Author
The design seeks to place a small scale mixed zone, including groceries, leisure, hotels, and small offices close to the stadium, as well as a pedestrian-only road, which will allow the football stadium to penetrate the atmosphere outwards and activate an area when a match is being played.
Fig3.29 Axonometric of the Mirrored Square
source: Author
Fig3.30 Section of the neighbourhood
source: Author
Fig3.31 Rendering of the Mirrored Square
CHAPTER IV
REGENERATION A
CHANCE FOR STADIUM TYPOLOGY
Overview of regeneration
The term regeneration is commonly used in discussions under the disciplines of architecture and urban planning to refer to an urban-scale process of improving the physical, economic and social conditions of an area. It usually includes renovation of old buildings, redevelopment of derelict areas, and improvement of public spaces. Although regeneration is becoming more and more important to architects and urban planners today, it is not a very recent topic. The UK's Housing Act, enacted in 1969 to address the physical decline of cities through the creation of General Improvement Areas, is considered one of the first regeneration policies. 1 The policies targeting inner city areas began mainly through the introduction of the Urban Programme and Community Development Projects in 1968, which were intended to respond by providing grants to local authorities facing extreme social need, urban deprivation and ethnic tensions, and which were initially funded and managed by the Home Office. Thus, John McCarthy argues that at the time, those urban issues were seen as matters of law and order.2
As time passed, in the late 1970s, urban regeneration policy gradually shifted from caring about and addressing social issues to focusing more on economic and environmental objectives. 3 The white paper “Policy for the Inner Cities”, issued by the Department of the Environment in 1977, marked a turning point by emphasising co-operation between government departments and the private and voluntary sectors. At the same time, Urban Development Corporations were introduced and took over the powers of local authorities in several city centre areas to promote property development-led regeneration. During this period, the tendency for regeneration projects to focus more on physical and economic rather than social aspects became more apparent.4
After 1997, the new government introduced a number of innovations, including reforming the Single Regeneration Budget to focus it more on the most deprived areas. In addition, the government has introduced a range of locally co-ordinated, areabased strategies to encourage community and local people's participation in programmes such as Education Action Zones, Health Action Zones and Employment Zones, which are aimed to promote higher educational attainment, better health and employability in areas affected by severe disadvantage.5
Overall, from the 1960s to the present day, urban regeneration policy in the UK has undergone a shift from a focus on social origins to a greater attention to economic and environmental objectives, and from purely governmental funding and management
1 Michael Carley, ‘Urban Partnerships, Governance and the Regeneration of Britain’s Cities’, International Planning Studies 5, no. 3 (1 October 2000): 273, https://doi.org/10.1080/713672858.
2 John McCarthy and Graham Haughton, Partnership, Collaborative Planning and Urban Regeneration (Abingdon, UNITED KINGDOM: Taylor & Francis Group, 2007), 27.
3 Tim Blackman, Urban Policy in Practice , 1st edition (London ; New York: Routledge, 1994), 223.
4 McCarthy and Haughton, Partnership, Collaborative Planning and Urban Regeneration, 30.
5 Ibid., 33-35.
6 Andy Thornley, ‘Urban Regeneration and Sports Stadia’, European Planning Studies 10, no. 7 (1 October 2002): 813, https://doi.org/10.1080/0965431 022000013220.
7 James Bulley, ‘Stadia Development as a Catalyst for Regeneration’, Journal of Retail & Leisure Property 2, no. 4 (1 December 2002): 306, https://doi. org/10.1057/palgrave.rlp.5090152.
to a model of co-operative funding and management between authorities and social organisations. However, this thesis argues that a series of policy innovations by the new government in 1997, which demonstrated advances in increasing community participation and partnership in particular, made the subsequent urban regeneration less of a purely economically driven one, the focus on deprived areas made it conducive to the promotion of social justice and inclusiveness, and its community connotations create a potential link between urban regeneration and the topic of dwelling in the current era.
Stadium-led regeneration
In a 2002 journal article, Andy Thornley talked about stadium building as seemingly a marginal and specialised type of urban project, but in fact growing in importance, for example, whether or not to build the Stadium in Dublin, Ireland, became a major issue in that country's national elections, and discussion about Wembley Stadium in the United Kingdom continued to appear in the national news.6 Stadium-led regeneration is a strategy that uses the construction or refurbishment of stadiums as the primary tool to drive the economic and social regeneration and development of neighbouring areas. In this kind of project, the stadium often acts as a catalyst, with its iconicity and huge volume, bringing in a large number of additional jobs as well as enhancing the sense of belonging and pride of the local residents on top of the regular regeneration projects.
The Hillsborough disaster and the Taylor Report , as already discussed, can be seen as one of the most important turning points in the evolution of football stadiums in the UK and even worldwide. Safety regulations have forced almost all stadiums to make changes in order to continue to be eligible to host football matches, which has objectively created a huge demand for stadium improvements, and in the ten years or so between 1990, when the Taylor Report was delivered, and 2002, at least 12 major clubs have completed their stadium improvements, with a total spend of more than £1.25 billion.7 In addition, the traditional negative image of stadiums in people's minds is being reshaped as a result of the new stadiums' good performance in eliminating football hooliganism and maintaining order and safety, and the huge economic potential of football as an industry is beginning to be realised, which in turn is making the government more willing to try to embrace football.
In a journal article, Andy Thornley refers to the example of the Netherlands, where Rotterdam allocated significant financial resources to the stadium of its football team Feyenoord around 2010, and Amsterdam did the same for Ajax football club. He argued that there was now a widespread attitude among city leaders to actively promote and market their cities in order to be more competitive in different cities.8 Also, in a 2004 UK Sport report, the Sport Industry Research Centre outlined the results of 16 economic impact studies of major sports events carried out since 1997, which recognised and demonstrated the potential for major sports events to have a significant economic impact on host cities. The document recognises and demonstrates the potential for major sports events to have a significant economic impact on host cities.9 (Fig4.1)
1997 World Badminton Glasgow
1997 IAAF Grand Prix 1 Athletics Sheffield 1 0.18m 0.18m
1997 European Junior Swimming Glasgow 4 0.28m 0.06m
1997 Women's British Open Golf Sunningdale 4 2.07m 0.52m
1998 European Short Course Swimming Sheffield 3 0.31m 0.10m
2000 Flora London Marathon
2000 Spar Europa Cup - Athletics
2001 World Amateur Boxing Belfast 8 1.49m 0.19m
2001 World Half Marathon Bristol 1 0.58m 0.58m
2003 World Cup Triathlon Manchester 1 1.67m 1.67m
2003 World Indoor Athletics Birmingham 3 3.16m 1.05m
This is why cities such as Sheffield, Birmingham and Glasgow have made sport as a leading sector for urban regeneration, and have invested heavily in sports infrastructure to ensure that they are qualified and capable of hosting major sports events.10 Overall, this thesis argues that the Taylor Report , through both direct and indirect ways, objectively created a significant demand for renovation and redevelopment of British football stadiums in the new century, which in terms of timing and in terms of goals and ambitions fit perfectly with urban regeneration projects in the broader context. And that’s why there is a wide range of urban regeneration projects combined with the redevelopment of football stadiums today.
8 Thornley, ‘Urban Regeneration and Sports Stadia’, 814.
9 UK Sport, ‘Measuring Success 2: The Economic Impact of Major Sports Events’ (London: UK Sport, 2004).
10 Chris Gratton, Simon Shibli, and Richard Coleman, ‘Sport and Economic Regeneration in Cities’, Urban Studies 42, no. 5–6 (1 May 2005): 990, https:// doi.org/10.1080/00420980500107045.
Fig4.1 Economic impact of major sports events
source: UK Sport
Composition of the investment for Stratford Regeneration
source: Dennis Coates et al., redrawn by the author
Co-operative framework
11 Thornley, ‘Urban Regeneration and Sports Stadia’, 817.
12 Bulley, ‘Stadia Development as a Catalyst for Regeneration’, 308.
13 Ibid.
14 Dennis Coates and Brad Humphreys, ‘Can New Stadiums Revitalise Urban Neighbourhoods?’, Significance 8, no. 2 (1 June 2011): 68, https://doi. org/10.1111/j.1740-9713.2011.00488. x.
Next, this research will introduce the co-operative framework behind stadium-led regeneration, aiming to explore the publicness embodied in the policy and programmatic aspects of regeneration. The roles and purposes of the participants and the stadiums may vary significantly from different projects, e.g. is the stadium being built for major sports events such as the Olympics and the World Cup? Or is it being built for a private club to use as a home for a league? So, the specific modes of co-operation between projects may therefore vary in some ways. But, the co-operation behind regeneration, if understood in one of the simplest and most basic ways, refers to public-private co-operation, and all co-operative regeneration projects can be summarised in this way. The public aspect may include central government, local councils, parastatal organisations and community associations, and the private aspect may include a wide range of private businesses, such as building contractors and sports ticketing agencies. These public authorities often hold control over public finances and land, and after the potential of the stadium as a catalyst for regeneration was realised, the redevelopment of brownfield sites became widely associated with football stadiums in post-industrial Britain as a win-win partnership. Investors of stadiums get access to cheap land and the government can improve the image of brownfield sites with a brand-new stadium. In the decade after the Taylor report was delivered, 12 major new club stadiums were developed, 7 of which were built on brownfield sites such as gasworks, waste treatments and coalfields. 12 In terms of public investment, local authorities have realised that although stadiums can occasionally generate high ticket income, few stakeholders can afford or are willing to pay out of their own pockets for large-scale stadium redevelopment to meet the new design regulations, therefore the authorities intervene in the investment through a wide range of ways to help the relevant stakeholders to realise the new stadiums. 13 For example, in the Stratford regeneration for the London 2012 Olympics, public investment was £6 billion from central government, £1.1 billion from London council tax and £2.2 billion from the National Lottery. 14 (Fig4.2) In addition, in James Bulley's study, he listed more examples of public investment in regeneration projects in other cities.(Fig4.3)
Fig4.2
On the other hand, the private enterprise, in addition to generally playing the role of a major investor, plays a crucial role in the reuse of sports heritage in some regeneration projects. As introduced earlier, the government will organise large-scale sporting events such as the Olympic Games or the World Cup for political and economic reasons, but these events often last for a very short period of time, and if there is a lack of advance management and design, then the stadiums used to host these events may easily remain vacant for a long period of time after the events have ended. For example, many Olympic stadiums, including those in Beijing, Sydney and Athens, have struggled to find long-term use, with many falling into a condition of disrepair,15 (Fig4.4, Fig4.5) which is undoubtedly a huge waste of public resources. At this point the football club as a private investor can play a huge role as it is almost a perfect tenant. On the one hand it allows the stadium to be used at a very high frequency, and on the other hand it has enough income generating capability with football to pay for the rent of the stadium. In this regard, the London Olympic Stadium and the Manchester City Stadium are good examples of stadiums that have been rented on a long-term basis by West Ham United Football Club and Manchester City Football Club as their home stadiums after hosting the Olympic Games and the Commonwealth Games.
15 James Mangan, ‘Prologue: Guarantees of Global Goodwill: PostOlympic Legacies – Too Many Limping White Elephants?’, The International Journal of the History of Sport 25, no. 14 (1 December 2008): 1873–74, https:// doi.org/10.1080/09523360802496148.
Fig4.3
Fig4.4 Abandoned stadium for 2008 Olympic, Beijing
source: FOX Sports
Fig4.5 Abandoned stadium for 2004 Olympic, Athens
source: FOX Sports
In summary, this thesis argues that stadium-led regeneration and its co-operative framework (Fig4.6) embody an inherent publicness. In the context of this chapter, the publicness comes primarily from the regeneration itself, but the stadium plays a crucial role as a catalyst to spread the regeneration widely. The origin of this publicness is twofold, on the one hand, as discussed earlier, from the goal of regeneration to promote social justice and social inclusion, and on the other hand, from the democracy embodied in the process of regeneration. Specifically, in the UK, regeneration projects are usually subject to a series of planning and approval processes, which often include consultation with neighbouring residents, with the aim of gathering feedback from local community members, property owners and other stakeholders. They can view construction plans and voice their support, objections or suggestions for the plans. If there is a large number of objections from neighbouring residents, this may affect the granting of planning permission and the developer may need to adjust the original plans as a result in order to minimise the negative impact on the local community. Therefore, ideally, local residents have the ability to influence and decide what kind of stadium and neighbourhood they want, which is an important form of social engagement.
Regeneration
Fig4.6 Co-operative framework of regeneration
source: Author
Stadium and residential
At the end of this chapter, the residentialisation of the stadium is also included in the scope of this thesis as a phenomenon and discussed briefly. This research argues that in the contemporary stadium-led regeneration, real estate has taken an absolute position in functions other than the stadium. (Fig4.7, Fig4.8, Fig4.9)
Fig4.7 Rendering of stadium-led regeneration at Brentford source: Brentford FC
Fig4.8 Rendering of stadium-led regeneration at Tottenham source: Haringey Council
In 2015, a report by the Greater London Authority's Regeneration Commission referred to the situation of housing in several of London's major stadium-led regenerations: at Wembley, as of the publication of this report, 500 units had been provided, 45 % of which were affordable; at Highbury, where 3,000 new and refurbished units have been provided, with a further 655 directly converted from the Highbury Stadium itself; at Brentford, 910 units are planned; at Tottenham, 222 units are for rent and for sale; and at Stratford, 7,000-8,000 units will be built.16 This thesis argues that this residential-dominated regeneration will continue to occur widely and that the dominance of dwellings will increase further as a result of multiple factors. Firstly, because stadiums have been rooted in communities throughout the history of British football, this has led to a number of stadiums still being surrounded by dense neighbourhoods today, and how to manage the relationship with the community has been a challenge that a number of regeneration projects have had to face; secondly, the history of regeneration policy in the UK shows that community has been a key motivator from the beginning, so if regeneration investment is focussed on the housing sector, particularly affordable housing, this is more conducive to enabling projects to receive policy and financial support; finally, real estate is also highly profitable itself and is less dependent on economic cycles and consumer habits than business and entertainment, which means that real estate has a lower risk for investors.
16 Regeneration Committee, ‘The Regeneration Game: Stadium-Led Regeneration’ (London: Greater London Authority, 18 March 2015), 33.
Fig4.9 Aerial view of stadium-led regeneration at Wembley source: Quintain Living
In conclusion, the overall perspective is that the trio of stadiums, residential and regeneration have come together, driven by multiple factors. In this case, the stadium has often acted as a catalyst, as it has always played the most visible role, and it has the ability to attract investment from a variety of social groups, allowing regeneration to take place on a wide scale. And the inherent publicness embedded in the co-operative and programmatic framework of regeneration, as well as being able to provide a range of social values, more importantly enables local inhabitants to have the rights and potential to shape their future neighbourhoods and dwelling patterns. In the UK, although stadiums and residential have been two related topics from a long time ago, the complicated political and socio-economic correlations and motivations behind both of them have achieved a new level only after the Taylor Report. Stadium and the residential are becoming more and more an entity in terms of urban policy and planning, and this can also be seen as a new opportunity for the architecture of football stadiums and residential, as it can lead to new thinking about the ways in which people participate in football and the ways in which they dwell and thus to the creation of a new typology. Unfortunately, however, this thesis argues that contemporary football stadium-led regeneration does not demonstrate sufficient innovation in this regard. In a large number of regeneration projects where stadiums and housing have always existed together, the relationship between the two is also simply juxtaposed, which in essence does not qualify as a new form of dwelling. If the fact that the regeneration project has been approved means that it has sufficient community support, then there is a need to provide a better way of interacting with the stadium for those residents who wish to live with the stadium. It is also a shift in the role and responsibilities of the architect in a traditional stadium project: from the beginning, designing a solid structure, to designing a profit-making tool, to designing a new way of engaging with football and a way of living.
DESIGN IV
INHABITABLE STADIUM
Fig4.10 Rendering of the Inhabitable Stadium
source: Author
The design of this chapter aims to propose a new pattern of dwelling, that is, dwelling in the stadium. And to question why stands must be traditional stands and not residential, thus challenging the current trend of commercialisation and exclusivity in stadium typologies to become more inclusive and collective.
source: Author
Fig4.11 Axonometric of the Inhabitable Stadium
Fig4.12 Section of the Inhabitable Stadium source: Author
In this design, football becomes the theme of the residence, therefore different sizes of pitches are placed within the community to respond to both professional and non-professional football needs. Private balconies and communal platforms on each floor become viewing areas for the residents, and the corners of the pitches can be used as stands to create the match-day atmosphere.
source: Author
Fig4.13 Rendering of the Inhabitable Stadium
CONCLUSION
This research, by discussing four aspects of football stadiums at different scales, on the one hand, points out the problems of publicness of football stadiums in the UK today: such as exclusivity due to financialization and security concerns, the elimination of informality, the lack of vibrancy of traditional stadium neighbourhoods and the fact that stadium-led regeneration does not provide a better form of living in the local community; and on the other hand, it also acknowledges positive attempts at the restoration of publicness in a number of cases, which, by analysing and extracting their spatial essence, provide insights for the beginning of the design of this thesis.
This thesis corresponds to four design proposals based on four different aspects of the research, and although different strategies were tested on different sites with different scales, the objectives of these proposals are the same. They all oppose the current trend of financialization of football stadiums as well as the mainstream renovation strategy, and explore the spatial potential of the stadiums themselves as well as the sites, and use a series of non-commercial methods to reduce the exclusivity brought about by financialization, so as to allow football and football stadiums to serve more and more citizens as a public resource of the society, and to restore the publicness of the stadiums.
Therefore, this thesis can be seen as challenging the evolution of the current football stadium and the role of the city in a radical way. In terms of typology, this thesis critiques the traditional evolution of football stadiums and proposes a new type of stadium dwelling; In terms of social roles, this thesis firstly argues against the stereotype of the stadium as a marginal project, and secondly, by arguing for the social value of the stadium, it explicitly sees the stadium as a positive urban element and recognises its centrality to neighbourhoods and regeneration; at the urban level, this thesis focuses on the boundaries between the stadium and the neighbourhood in which it is situated and, through case studies, attempts to extract the seldom-seen good examples of ways to break down physical boundaries, test it in design, and explore the possibilities of generalising and replicating this approach.
However, due to the predetermined scope of the research, this thesis also demonstrates clear limitations, such as the realities of safety and profitability, which make the design proposed in this thesis one that is almost impossible to be realised directly. However, this also means that the research as well as the design of this thesis can explore the frontiers of spatial potential in the most free way, and thus the designs proposed in this thesis have radicality, they should not be seen as an architectural project or solution, but rather as an exploration of the direction in which the stadium typology is evolving. Therefore, future research can, on the one hand, continue to follow the direction proposed in this thesis to explore how to make stadiums more inclusive, and on the other hand, it can incorporate reflections on realistic factors, such as safety and economy, or even the operation mode of football clubs, so as to make the design proposals in this thesis more practically valuable.
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