Smart Sport Arenas Make Cities Smarter

Cities are home to more than half of the world’s population, and urbanization is expected to further increase. They face increasing environmental pressures and infrastructure needs—and growing demands from residents to deliver a better quality of life and to do so at a sustainable cost. Smart technologies can enable all urban infrastructures thus helping cities meeting these challenges. This chapter deals with sport arenas - and in particular with stadiums. It presents the most advanced worldwide practices to show how sport arenas can improve sport clubs’ economic performance and fans satisfaction and how they may strongly contribute to create smarter cities. Rebranding stadiums, modernising them to better calibrate their capacity, refurbishing old venues and new stadium projects involve high-level investments, and they require an organisational transformation both for sport clubs and cities. Municipalities and sport clubs can, therefore, be partners in developing technologically advanced and resilient sport arenas and related infrastructures that will be well integrated into the urban design both inside and outside the areas where they are built supporting rather than putting a strain on cities in many ways. A modern stadium must be safe, smart, green, accessible, efficient and innovative: digital solutions let creating a user-friendly urban environment that enhances citizens' wellbeing, welcoming them in a space where emotions and needs can meet.