How Denmark’s GAME Houses Turn Street Sport Into Public Value

Skateboarders, parkour practitioners, breakdancers and graffiti artists have long occupied an awkward position in public sport provision. Their activities thrive on informality, spontaneity and urban culture, yet the facilities that dominate municipal budgets were designed around organized clubs with fixed schedules and formal membership. A new study from the University of Southern Denmark, published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, examines what happens when a welfare state deliberately builds space for these marginalized communities—and what its findings reveal about the fragile mechanics of turning public money into public value.

The research focuses on the GAME House concept, developed by the Danish NGO GAME, which was founded in 2002 to promote sport, physical activity and social inclusion through street sports and urban culture. GAME opened its first purpose-built street sport facility in a former tram depot in central Copenhagen in 2010. Between 2016 and 2018, three more GAME Houses opened in the regional cities of Esbjerg, Viborg and Aalborg, each housed in a transformed industrial building and run under long-term agreements between GAME Denmark and the local municipality. These hybrid indoor-outdoor facilities host skateboarding, parkour, street basketball, bouldering, dance, graffiti art and music production, and they stay open almost year-round, including on traditional closing days such as Christmas and Easter.

Signe Højbjerre Larsen and Evald Bundgaard Iversen, the study’s authors, analyzed documents, construction plans and operational agreements for the three facilities, and interviewed twelve user groups with formal collaborations, the three facility managers, and consultants and directors from the municipal Culture and Leisure Departments. Their analytical framework comes from Mark Moore’s theory of public value, in particular his strategic triangle, which holds that publicly funded organizations sustain themselves by balancing three elements: operational capacity, legitimacy and support, and clearly articulated public value. Because street sport facilities cannot easily be measured in economic terms, their worth emerges instead as social, cultural and democratic outcomes that must be understood in context.

The interviews revealed that dedicated facilities mattered to street sport communities in three distinct ways. First, the groups had simply lacked any other spaces meeting their practical and cultural needs. The parkour association in Viborg, for example, had spent six years being shuffled between temporary venues, including an unheated hall with uncleaned toilets, before GAME House opened. In Aalborg, the street workout community had relied on weather-dependent outdoor equipment or costly commercial gyms. In Esbjerg, a street roller hockey team described how the facility spared them from dragging goals off the road every time a car passed. Users across all three houses consistently praised the smooth asphalt surface, and many emphasized the cultural atmosphere: the breakdancers in Aalborg explained that the free-spirited street culture of their dance simply did not fit formal studios, while the openable gate panels with large windows let users feel outdoors even inside.

Second, the facilities strengthened local activity-based communities. The skateboarding representative in Esbjerg described how a permanent venue stabilized local interest in a sport whose popularity fluctuates, and how a skate school project with public school classes turned a whole generation into regulars who come because they are skaters, not because it is trendy. In Viborg, the parkour association reported that visibility through the house grew its groups from roughly seven to thirteen participants to around twenty, as children and adults now know that parkour in Viborg happens at GAME House.

Third, and perhaps most strikingly, the facilities publicly recognized street sports and street cultures as legitimate forms of participation. In Esbjerg, a city the skateboarding representative described as dominated by football, handball and ice hockey, the house helped skaters shed a lingering image as troublemakers. The graffiti and street art community experienced an even sharper shift: GAME House gave them a legal wall along a public walkway, where curious passersby stop to ask questions and discover that the people behind the paintings are, in the representative’s words, ordinary people who want to express themselves creatively. The representative noted a preventive effect as well, since artists who once painted illegally in tunnels now have legitimate space to practice their craft.

Yet the study also documents significant tensions. Operational capacity proved uneven: each house runs on just two full-time employees—a daily manager and a project coordinator—supplemented by young junior coordinators and volunteers known as Playmakers. While Viborg and Aalborg recruited substantial volunteer numbers, Esbjerg struggled, which the manager attributed to youth outmigration and limited recruitment capacity. Moreover, the planned model in which affiliated user groups would provide instructors for open training sessions in exchange for facility access often failed in practice. Some groups were too small or loosely organized, others preferred open formats that welcomed everyone regardless of affiliation, and some facilities had been built without a real local user base to sustain organized activities, forcing the houses to hire paid instructors or partner with groups based elsewhere.

The formal governance model fared even worse. The concept envisioned a user council in each house, with representatives from every user association, elected local users and GAME appointees, meeting at least quarterly to ensure democratic influence. In practice, no user council was ever established in any of the three houses. Managers found that many groups focused narrowly on their own discipline and that individual, informal dialogue was more meaningful. In 2018, GAME Esbjerg successfully applied to revise the operational agreement, replacing the closed council model with open workshops accessible to all users. As one facility manager put it, local adaptation is essential: Denmark may be small geographically, but culturally it is big, and no one-size-fits-all concept works.

Legitimacy, by contrast, flowed strongly from both directions. User groups supported the houses because the facilities met their needs, a success the authors link to extensive user involvement during the design phase—though with instructive exceptions. Skateboarders and parkour practitioners in Esbjerg felt their local expertise was overlooked in favor of external consultants, and budget cuts meant many ideas from the workshops never materialized. The parkour setup was criticized for reflecting Copenhagen-style practice rather than local norms, illustrating what researchers call the glocalization of lifestyle sports: street sports may be global, but they are practiced in locally specific ways that facility design must respect. From the municipal side, support was equally strong. Aalborg increased its annual operating subsidy by 250,000 Danish kroner just one year after opening, and extended the extra funding in 2023. Municipalities deliberately positioned GAME House not as a rival to traditional clubs but as an inspiration, holding meetings of the local voluntary sports council at the facility to signal that organized sport stood behind the initiative. External funding from major Danish foundations totaled roughly 1.9 to 2.6 million euros, with municipal co-financing between 0.7 and 1.8 million euros.

The authors conclude that public value in street sport facilities is not a stable, measurable output but a relational, negotiated and context-dependent achievement, emerging from the interaction of spatial design, cultural atmosphere and ongoing organizational adaptation. They also flag a caution for international transferability: GAME’s national reputation, accumulated expertise and organizational infrastructure were central to securing political and financial support, and contexts lacking a comparable central actor may struggle to replicate the model. Finally, the study raises the deeper paradox of institutionalization. Street sport is historically tied to informality and resistance, and practitioners themselves strongly desired stable indoor facilities and recognition—yet converting self-organized practices into publicly governed spaces risks diluting the very autonomy and subcultural distinctiveness that make them meaningful. The GAME Houses suggest that the balance can be struck, but only through continuous negotiation between institutional support and community independence, with flexible managers who listen, adapt and treat local communities as experts in their own practices.

Subject of Research: Public value creation through purpose-built street sport facilities in Danish municipalities

Article Title: Making space for street sport: an exploration of public value creation through the GAME House concept in Danish municipalities

Article References: Larsen, S. H., & Iversen, E. B. (2026). Making space for street sport: an exploration of public value creation through the GAME House concept in Danish municipalities. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 8, Article 1867534. https://doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2026.1867534

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fspor.2026.1867534

Keywords: street sports, public value, GAME House, sport facilities, Denmark, sport policy, social inclusion, informal sport, governance, urban culture, skateboarding, parkour