Stadium City

Sports and Media Infrastructure in the United States

Helen Morgan Parmett

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Paperback

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English

University of Illinois Press
23 September 2025

Urban communities; Sociology: sport & leisure; Media, information & communication industries

Series: Studies in Sports Media

Understanding the recent history and multifaceted impact of sports stadiums

A new sports stadium has an outsized impact on a city’s landscape and image of itself. Each stadium also plays a central role in media institutions, technologies, and culture as a catalyst for urban change and flashy neighborhood anchor, cornerstone of regional identity and purveyor of multimedia experiences.

Helen Morgan Parmett analyzes sports stadiums in Atlanta, Seattle, and Minneapolis to demonstrate the role that media institutions, technologies, and culture play in sports and examine their impact on the urban landscape. These interconnected factors impact struggles over city space, identity, and urban governing. As Morgan Parmett shows, stadiums exist as more than just buildings and sporting places. They are central nodes in the city that connect, disconnect, and distribute resources, people, information, and, ultimately, power. Morgan Parmett demonstrates how the “sportification” of place is influenced by the specific histories, geography, and sporting cultures of a city while explaining their relationship to broader forces at work in media, sport, and urbanism.

Original and incisive, Stadium City offers a beyond-the-playing-field analysis of sports stadiums and their impact on our cities and our lives.

By: Helen Morgan Parmett
Imprint: University of Illinois Press
Country of Publication: United States [Currently unable to ship to USA: see Shipping Info]
Edition: New edition
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm,
Weight: 454g
ISBN: 9780252088834
ISBN 10: 0252088832
Series: Studies in Sports Media
Pages: 304
Publication Date: 23 September 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Helen Morgan Parmett is the Edwin W. Lawrence Endowed Professor of Forensics and an associate professor of English at the University of Vermont. She is the author of Down in Treme: Race, Place, and New Orleans on Television.

Reviews for Stadium City: Sports and Media Infrastructure in the United States

“This engaging book details, via three evocative, meticulously researched US case studies, sport’s role in fostering both pro-social connection and paranoid alienation among urban and media communities.” —David Rowe, author of Sport, Culture and the Media: The Unruly Trinity and Global Media Sport: Flows, Forms and Futures