Globalization, Urbanization and Sporting Spectacle in Pacific Asia: Places, People and Pastness

Within this paper we “hold together” an amalgam of intensive and extensive glocalization and the simultaneous reinscription of the importance of the global growth rationalities to aid understandings of contemporary Pacific Asian sporting spectacles. Through a series of four vignettes, we point to the place of sport within intense transformations within urban conglomerations in Pacific Asia. In so doing, we point to three central, and interrelated, problematics that appear endemic to Pacific Asian mega-events; raising questions over whose histories, whose representations and which peoples matter to, and for, the Pacific Asian sporting spectacle. Conclusions are centered on attuning our scholarly directions toward the structural inequalities embedded within these processes and transformations.