The new urban sporting territory in Edmonton’s city center was constructed within the framework of continued settler colonialism. The main catalyst for this development was sport-related gentrification: a new, publicly financed ice hockey arena for the National Hockey League’s Edmonton Oilers, and a surrounding sport and entertainment district. This two-year ethnography explores this territory, in particular the changing interactions between preexisting, less affluent city-center residents and police, private security, crisis workers, and hockey fans. It reveals how residents navigate the physical and spatial changes to a downtown that are not only structured by revanchism, but by what Rai Reece calls “carceral redlining,” or the continuation of White supremacy through regulation, surveillance, displacement, and dispossession.

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The new home of the National Hockey League’s (NHL) Edmonton Oilers opened in 2016. This publicly financed, CAD 613.7 million arena was built in downtown Edmonton, Alberta. The arena and its broader entertainment district were designed to ‘revitalize’ Edmonton’s inner city that was already home to the majority of the city’s homeless population. The spatial transformation of Edmonton’s inner city was an example of what geographer Neil Smith referred to as ‘The New Urban Frontier’. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice, this article explores how the local music community reacted to downtown gentrification through songs by punk bands Latcho Drom, Rebuild/Repair and Audio/Rocketry, along with rapper Cadence Weapon. This article assesses a series of reactions ranging from supportive and promotional to critical and resistive. By showing how musicians engaged in the debate over development, this article creates a template for assessing processes of gentrification, through the relationship between professional sport, media and music. It analyses the role of cultural production in the continued process of gentrification, future developments in cities and who belongs in the new urban landscape. In doing so, this article suggests the embodiment of a punk habitus by agents negotiating various fields in Edmonton and beyond.

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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.