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A Tale of Two Cities

The Social Production of Sterile Sporting Space

Physical Cultural Studies Research Group located in the Sport Commerce and Culture Program, Department of Kinesiology, at the University of Maryland

Through infusing a spatial imagination with social and historical perspectives, the current article excavates and theorizes the contingent relations, structure, and effects that link the sporting spaces of Memphis, their prevailing determinate forces, and social consequences. Memphis is an archetypal exemplar of a city that has recentered itself around a spectacular space of sporting consumption by exploiting the kind of urban culture that helps position the city within the global fray. Yet this veil of appearance conceals the marked gendered, class, racial, and ethnic polarizations that mark the city. To this end, this article critically investigates the physical and imagined transformations in the city that take place according to distinctly capitalist criteria—in particular, the spaces of corporatized sport production and consumption—that can be seen to be destroying the older urban fabric thereby exacerbating structural divisions and creating new lines of inequality.

Key Words: space • cities • sport • sanitized • fractured

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