Urban Sports as a meeting place
Design research
Urban Sports areas can offer much more than just space for sports and exercise. If designed well, these areas can grow into meeting places for the entire neighbourhood or city district. In addition to the presence of an active community, a well-designed and integral space is essential.
The results of the design research will be shared with a wide audience (online report, social media, presentations, video, symposium).
What is Urban Sports?
Urban Sports includes all forms of sports and exercise in which spectacle, daring and demonstrating skills play an important role, with the urban environment as a backdrop and stage. For example, sports such as BMX, skateboarding, free running/parkour, boulder, panna, freestyle football, 3×3 basketball, breakdance, crossfit and slacklining. Other activities such as dancing, music and games thrive in the atmosphere of Urban Sports. What all these sports have in common is that they stand for freedom, for doing things together, for pushing your own boundaries, for easily organising things yourself and giving things your own twist. This is not only about the sports themselves, but also about the culture surrounding them and the ‘community’ to which you belong. A community where there is also increasingly more room for girls and woman.
Research Project
This project focuses on the following question: how should Urban Sports be planned in an urban environment and what does the associated design assignment look like? What are the possibilities for doing this? Does this involve specific places, or places that have multiple uses and value? What details are important in this regard? What materialisation is appropriate? The starting point within the research is not to see Urban Sports as an isolated environment, as has been the case for so long in the past (despite its origins), but rather how it can be integrated into the neighbourhood and city in a good and attractive way.
Urban Sports can activate places, elicit interaction, create connections in the city and let people act with each other. In this sense, Urban Sports can be a design tool to tackle challenges in the city.
An important question is also which type of Urban Sports goes well with the environment and with each other. Is there any form of symbiosis and exchange between the different urban sports? And how is the shared use of this space possible, for example for playing, music and dancing? And is there also a relationship with recreation or the daily walk/detour?
This project wants to broaden. Experiment to look differently at just the sports function of a skate park, a calisthenics cluster or parkour training area. This includes the question to what extent the design offers space for crossovers (use and space) and at the same time offers a good sports area, incorporated into the urban space of the neighbourhood. And also by looking at the inclusivity of users, by giving disabled people a place in the whole.
Two parts
Project / Research design / Approach The central question of the research is how Urban Sports can be designed as meeting places in neighbourhoods and districts. Which also allows it to be applied as a broader design tool and program component in the city. The research consists of two parts: 1) drawing up a design toolbox based on inspiring examples of Urban Sports; and 2) investigating Urban Sports as meeting places in five different cases (in The Netherlands).
The research project started in January 2025 and will run till the first part of 2026. It has financial funding of the involved municipalities, the Fund for Creative Industries, and VSG (Association of Dutch Municipalities on Sport).
The core team is formed by Daniel Casas-Valle and Guido Schuurman.