When a region lacks sports facilities, the reflex is to build halls: one here, one there, each with its own car park, reception, changing rooms, boiler and caretaker. Thirty years of that reflex have left Stockholm with 32,300 inhabitants per sports hall against Gothenburg's 12,700. The approach has not failed for lack of effort. It has failed because it is inefficient.
This post makes the case for the opposite approach: concentrate.
What dispersion costs
Every separate hall needs land, and land in a growing capital is the scarcest input of all. Every separate hall repeats the fixed costs: reception, changing rooms, parking, a heating system, maintenance, staff. Every separate hall takes its own planning process and its own years to build. And every family with children in two or three sports makes two or three car trips on a Saturday.
Dispersion also caps ambition. A hall built for one sport in one suburb will never host an international competition, never fund a coaching academy, and never carry a conference centre or a medical floor.
What concentration buys
Put seven racquet sports, fitness, wellness, rehabilitation, education, conferences and a centre court under one roof, and the arithmetic turns around.
One building instead of a dozen separate ones, on a fraction of the land, with one energy system instead of many old ones.
About six tenths of the floor goes to the courts, about a fifth to the centre court, and the rest to the gym, the wellness and medicare floor, conference rooms and the social spaces that make the building a destination. Shared spaces are in use from early morning to late evening instead of standing empty between sessions. The centre court lives every day, with sport on weekdays and events at weekends, rather than waiting for the next concert.
The car-trip argument
Concentration is also an environmental argument. A family with children in different sports drives to one place instead of three. Outside, a sports park with climbing walls, exercise machines, fields and a running track that is frozen for skiing in winter gives everyone who is not on a court something to do. One modern building with its own energy production and heat recovery replaces a scattering of old halls, each heated and lit separately.
The social argument
A hall in one suburb serves one suburb. A regional building, with reserved time for schools, clubs and low-income families and transport links for the whole region, is where people of different backgrounds and incomes actually meet. Concentration is what makes the neutral meeting place possible.
