Sport Arena – A Key Player in Changing Mentalities in A Community

Abstract

Football represents a universal leisure activity – being spread all over the world and thus becoming the king of sports. This game brings together families, communities, but also strangers eagerly supporting their favourite – local or national – team. Such a sport gives rise to both friendships and rivalries between supporters. Yet, the partially justified association between football and hooliganism led, implicitly, to new problems that reflected upon the architectural object as well. The stadium can, beside resolving the problem that raised from hooliganism, be the very starting point in a process of image changing through the impact it has at a social scale – equally through its representativeness inside a locality and through the role the accommodated spectacle plays. In this paper, we shall present different ways in which the built space of a sport arena can become a helpful instrument in the process of moulding the mentality of the community, ascertaining the fact that the legislative measures having the same scope are not always sufficient or efficient on a long term. Thus, sports arena can become more than just a space dedicated to performing sports competitions. It can become a space which facilitates social and cultural negotiations, it is an urban landmark and symbol that can improve the action of a community (this feature is perhaps most visible when the arena accommodates other events besides sports events like concerts, fairs etc.). Its transformation from a space dedicated solely to football into a space with multiple services can lead to a permanent use and could draw a heterogeneous public (by including services like: museum, cinema, mall, administrative community space etc.). The proposal for designing multi-sportive and multifunctional modern arenas combines several principles together, satisfying multidirectional social needs: the needs of the users (of recreation, relaxation, entertaining and so on), and the needs of the institutions involved (political, economic needs etc.). The variety of services that can be accommodated into such a space can have a great social, economic, cultural impact etc. The modern sports arena must be the result of much more in-depth understanding of the communities (of fans, users, nearby community etc.), of their current practices, needs and desires. The role of the architect, in this context, is not only that of conceiving the architectural object, of making it functional, but also of linking different elements thus making a building which responds to various needs without considering the arena a boundary.