Sports and Environmental Justice

This article examines a contemporary and unfolding conflict in downtown Brooklyn in New York City where the siting of a professional sport stadium intersects with the politics of race, class, and the built environment. The Atlantic Yards project is a 4. 2-billion project to bring housing, retail, open space, and most significantly (for the developers in their public relations campaign), a professional basketball franchise, the Brooklyn Nets. The author uses an analytic frame drawing from environmental justice studies through which to analyze the cultural and representational politics of the controversy. In doing so, this case complicates and further illuminates environmental justice and the sports and siting literature in the context of the geography of neoliberalism.