The right to the city: outdoor informal sport and urban belonging in multicultural spaces

ABSTRACT

Studies on ‘everyday multiculturalism’ and ‘lived multiculture’ have advanced knowledge on the kinds of inclusive everyday spaces and practices that characterize our culturally complex, mobile and superdiverse cities. This paper expands this agenda by exploring informal sporting and leisure interactions amongst migrant and ethnically diverse urban populations. Embedded in a larger comparative city project that examines how urban environments and wider social structures mediate inclusions and exclusions of urban dwellers, this paper presents a case study of temporary migrant workers in Singapore and their participation in outdoor informal sport. It deploys Lefebvre's notion of ‘Right to the City’ to understand city dwellers’ access to urban resources and their collective ability to democratically inhabit the city. Despite structural constraints imposed on marginalized migrants, the nature of informal sport, the spontaneous coming together to play, creative use of public space and a range of convivial practices, generate a sense of urban belonging.

KEYWORDS:

• Sport
• recreation
• migrant workers
• urban belonging
• diversity
• Singapore

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Part of the old Kallang Airport land is State land gazetted for development. These sites, found all over the island, often sit untouched for years. Conventionally, they are grassed but left as open public space.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kristine Aquino

Kristine Aquino is Lecturer in Global Studies at the University of Technology Sydney, Australia. Her research interests are in race and racism in everyday life, global Filipino migration, and urban diversity in Australian and Asian cities.

Amanda Wise

Amanda Wise is Professor of Sociology at Macquarie University, Australia. Her research interests include comparative work on global cities and diversity; materialities, civilities, and ‘sensibilities' of urban life; multiculturalism and ‘lived diversity'; race and interethnic relations; social cohesion & integration.

Selvaraj Velayutham

Selvaraj Velayutham is Associate Professor of Sociology at Macquarie University, Australia. His research interests are in globalisation, international migration, diaspora and transnationalism, race and ethnic studies, nationalism, multiculturalism and the Sociology of Everyday Life.

Keith D. Parry

Keith D. Parry is Deputy Head of Department of Sport and Event Management at Bournemouth University, UK. His research interests are based on the sociology of sport, with a focus on sports fandom, health and the spectator experience.

Sarah Neal

Sarah Neal is Professor of Sociology at the University of Sheffield, UK. Her research interests are in ethnicity, race and multiculture; community, belonging and in/exclusion; rural and urban spaces; quotidian social life; sociology of policy processes and qualitative methods.