Urban Sports as a Place to Meet!
Urban Sports is on the rise. Doing it together, pushing personal limits and low-threshold participation make sports such as skating, parkour and streetball bring the public space to life. New communities, once hidden away under viaducts on the edges of the city, are increasingly discovering that the entire city is their playing field. Urban Sports is thus becoming visible to everyone. Centre stage on the city square, in the neighbourhood park or as part of open, vibrant sports parks. Once a niche, now for everyone.
We believe that Urban Sports can make an important contribution to a more inclusive and better public space. It is one of the few places where people from different communities, classes and ages still come into contact with one another without prejudice.
Urban Sports spaces can offer much more than simply room for sport and movement. If well designed, they can grow into meeting places for a neighbourhood or city district. This requires not only an active, sporting community; the space itself must also work: designed integrally and with care. In this project we investigated how Urban Sports function as meeting places: how they work, how they are spatially organised and how they can be designed as an open stage for sport and daily life.
Research outline: The central question of this research project is how Urban Sports in neighbourhoods and districts can be designed as a place to meet, and how it can be applied as a broader design tool and programme component in the city. Especially in high dense urban environments. The research consists of two interconnected parts that were carried out simultaneously and continuously informed one another: a design research into three concrete Dutch locations (Eindhoven, Hoorn, The Hague) and an international study into successful Urban Sports projects abroad (several cities, including Barcelona and Copenhagen).
Infrastructure for encounter: Urban Sports places offer more room than only for sport and movement. They are an infrastructure for encounter. Sport is the draw, encounter is the real value, but this does not simply happen: it requires deliberate choices in design, programming and management. Those choices begin with a clear vision of what the space should be and for whom. Four interconnected conditions are decisive in this regard namely: social interaction, multiple use, open space, and integrated with its surroundings.
Project: Urban Sports Research + Public space design | Team: Daniel Casas-Valle, Urban Dynamics and Guido Schuurman, atelier OUI | Location: Eindhoven, Hoorn and The Hague; Urban Sports projects in several European cities | Year: 2025 – on-going
Funded by the Fund NL, VSG and the municipalities of Hoorn, The Hague and Eindhoven. This research builds on earlier research by both authors at the intersection of (Urban) Sport(s), urban design and the layout of public space, including street design and planning.
The research is published in a compact newspaper format:
