A few Weeks in Dirt City: Sport-Related Gentrification, Mobilizing Resistance, and the Art of Failure in Edmonton, Alberta

Abstract

There is no shortage of sociological research that explores the successes and failures of various sport-related social movements. However, a more capacious approach to understanding the significance of sport-related social movements, their imaginative actions and collective labor, and their impacts on social change, is one that shifts its focus away from binary categories of “success” and “failure”. In this paper, we explore the formation of the short-lived Edmonton Community Benefits Coalition, which emerged in 2016 to oppose the lack of a legally binding Community Benefits Agreement associated with a new publicly financed National Hockey League arena in Edmonton’s gentrifying city center, an area of spatially concentrated racialized poverty. Drawing from our ethnographic research, we examine how coalition members engaged in the collective labor of building solidarity, including the collaborative development of political strategies, while recognizing that the odds of successfully penetrating neoliberal capital and municipal governance were virtually impossible. Finally, given that the coalition ultimately “failed” to secure more significant institutional impacts, we offer an analysis of how this failure engendered several effects, including the cultivation of new relationships and political strategies in the ongoing struggle against gentrification and its related displacements in Edmonton, Alberta.