NEIGHBOURHOOD SPORTS AS A TOOL OF URBAN REGENERATION - A WARSAW CASE STUDY

There are many connections between sport and urban regeneration. They can be observed while organizing top-down projects, such as sporting mega-events. But sport and urban renewal can also be linked within bottom-up sport initiatives, ones that relate mostly to physical recreation or sport for all. The main goals of physical activity is caring for health, improving fitness, practicing hobbies, and achieving social integration. Enabling the achievement of these goals citizens leads directly to the enhancement of the quality of urban life by rendering an urban lifestyle increasingly satisfactory. An example of action aimed at the integration of the local communities through sport is the project undertaken in Warsaw by the Our Sports Field Initiative (Inicjatywa Nasze Boisko). The central component of the project is the use of public sports fields for neighbourhood meetings in the form of playing three team sports: volleyball, basketball, and football (soccer). The goal of the meetings is the integration of neighbours, but also the social inclusion of people generally excluded from sports activities, such as elderly women, less physically fit youth, and new inhabitants. The attractive factors to participate in the games are: the elimination of rivalry, no charges, no skill requirements, and regular meetings. The success of the first pilot version has encouraged the organizers to expand the action, and in a second phase (April-October 2016) sports meetings have been planned on 24 sports fields in ten Warsaw districts. This article, by presenting of the project and its results, deals with the issue of urban renewal through neighbourhood sport. An analysis of the results of the implemented stage of the project makes it possible to formulate a number of conclusions. The most important of these include: the use of the public sports field involved has increased significantly, from 3% to 22%; the project involved a total of over 250 people; new connections and friendships have been established; a greater concern for the quality of common urban space has been observed; the idea has spread to many districts and public sports fields; and a Forum of Neighbourhood Sports Leaders has been formed. In the context of the forthcoming second implementation of the project, the conclusion is that public recreation and sport spaces and facilities should create a coherent urban system connected with green areas. This will make it possible to integrate local communities and neighbourhoods to a greater extent, and to enable safe and comfortable pedestrian and bicycle traffic between sports facilities. The results and conclusions of the first version of the project show that the idea of neighbourhood sport fits in perfectly with the process of urban regeneration. Therefore, neighbourhood sport can be considered one of the tools of the revitalisation process.