Sport and Green Spaces in European Cities

This Project is organized by a European network of scholars investigating Sport and Green Space in the Modern and Contemporary City from an interdisciplinary and comparative perspective. Historians, ecologists, geographers and sociologist from Finland, Sweden, Germany and Britain, established academics as well as graduate students, co-operate with respect to the following goal:
(1) to organize a pilot project to study the development of sports parks and golf courses in four major cities in four European countries in the 20th century from a historical, social and ecological perspective.
(2) to look at the growth of sport parks and grounds from the First World War, the reasons for that growth, and how it has contributed to urban biodiversity; it will also consider how changing attitudes to sport and recent reductions and alterations in the area and types of sport space in some cities may have had an adverse effect.
(3) to develop an integrated methodological approach for ecologists, historians, geographers and sociologists.
In the longer-term it is planned to widen the project and to test the preliminary findings and methodology against a bigger and more varied sample of urban centres and for this purpose to obtain funding from the research foundations.