Policing the New Urban Sporting Frontier

In 2016, Rogers Place, a publicly financed $613.7-million arenathe anchor of a broader entertainment districtopened in downtown Edmonton, Alberta, an area of spatially concentrated racialized poverty. The prospect of the displacement of the city centre’s homeless community, which is disproportionately made up of urban Indigenous people, and other consequences of gentrification were, however, given scant consideration by the Edmonton Oilers and the City of Edmonton in their corporate-civic project of reclaiming “The New Urban Frontier” (Smith, 1996) for capital accumulation. This presentation explores the impacts of these developments on pre-existing community members against the historical backdrop of settler colonialism in Edmonton. Between 2016-2018, as part of an urban ethnography, we hung out around Rogers Place prior to, during, and after over 50 Edmonton Oilers home games. We observed the near-constant monitoring and regular removal of homeless community members around Rogers Place by private security and police through a range of punitive and therapeutic measures. Both tactics result in three interrelated outcomes: the continuation of racial profiling; the displacement of homeless community members; and, finally, the sanitization of public space to ensure that the night-time economy of professional sport and the conspicuous consumption practices of largely white Oilers fans remain undisrupted.