The study, published in Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, examines how provision in urban Sweden is shaped by competing institutional priorities rather than attempting to establish a nationwide facility deficit. It combines documents from national umbrella organisations and public authorities with interviews of representatives from the Swedish Sports Confederation, the Swedish Association of Local Authorities and Regions, the Swedish Research Council for Sport Science and the Swedish Association of Local Authority Leisure and Cultural Services. Two additional interviews with government and national planning representatives provided methodological context but were excluded from the results. The five interviews in the results were conducted remotely in March and April 2026, lasted 65 to 88 minutes and were analysed inductively before being interpreted through path dependency and new institutional theory.

Organised sport supplied the dominant narrative. Surveys cited in the documents repeatedly showed that non-profit clubs experienced restricted access to time and space, and an RF representative said facility provision ranked among the leading priorities identified by Stockholm sport federations. Yet the same representative resisted treating “shortage” as a complete explanation, instead distinguishing demand, expectations, supply and the degree to which those elements aligned. Knowledge-producing and municipal informants similarly said there was no agreed definition of shortage, for whom it occurred or which facilities it concerned. Needs differed across sports, age groups and local settings, making the familiar political label both widely accepted and analytically imprecise.

Urban land pressure adds another layer. Densification increases competition for space at the same time as sport participation becomes more diverse. Traditional Swedish facilities were commonly standardised around federation requirements, competitive activity and club users, whereas growing numbers of people participate informally, at different times and in activities not accommodated by conventional halls or pitches. This creates what the study calls structural mismatch: a facility may exist and even be nearby, yet its size, equipment, opening times, ownership, booking system or location may prevent effective use. Ownership structures, sport-specific requirements and increased training frequency can therefore restrict access even where the physical stock appears larger than expected.

Booked time cannot be treated as a direct measure of use. A Swedish project using cameras and artificial intelligence to register activity in sport halls found heavy weekday-evening and weekend-morning occupancy but substantial unused time during daytime, late evenings and school or vacation holidays. The present study did not calculate utilisation across Sweden, but it used this evidence to distinguish nominal capacity from actual use. Government-commissioned mapping of school sport halls similarly found many halls unavailable for booking despite a perceived shortage; the mapping concluded that opening them might add little practical capacity because some were small, poorly equipped or unsuitable for organised sport. One research informant also noted that children’s teams may require full-sized pitches even when a smaller adaptable space would support the activity.

Quantification remains important but incomplete. Municipalities increasingly request numerical benchmarks, including estimates of how many sport halls are needed, while geographical mapping and visualisation tools can reveal spatial differences among sports and municipalities. However, the informants warned that available data often record perceptions or bookings rather than robust measures of activity and that comparable datasets remain limited. Numbers also fail to capture qualitative experiences such as usability, inclusion, social value, safety and belonging. The study’s institutional interpretation therefore places numerical indicators alongside contextual knowledge and professional judgement rather than treating them as substitutes for it. It also warns that a focus on readily measurable quantities can obscure the social and organisational dimensions of access.

Path dependence helps explain why familiar solutions persist. Many Swedish facilities and planning assumptions date from the post-war period, when local public support and voluntary sport organisations helped build a public system centred on organised competition. Later investment in ageing facilities creates what one practitioner described as accumulated maintenance debt, a burden that can crowd out experimentation, while standardised buildings and federation standards narrow the options considered politically and professionally legitimate. Specialisation may improve conditions for elite or rule-bound sports but reduce flexibility, increase costs and disadvantage smaller clubs or emerging activities. Repeated investment in familiar halls, fields and regulated standards can therefore reproduce institutional inertia even as participation changes.

Responsibility is both central and fragmented. Municipalities generally plan, finance, build and operate facilities, but internal divisions between urban planning and leisure services can complicate coordination and delay consideration of sport in planning processes. National agencies, the RF, municipal networks, researchers, clubs and other actors add expertise and advocacy, with mandates that can shift over time. The 2026 and 2027 initiatives described in the study included support from the National Board of Housing, Building and Planning for municipalities and clubs and SEK 240 million allocated through the RF for co-financing local construction and renovation. These measures indicate growing national attention, but the research did not evaluate their effects and was not designed to test whether additional funding raises participation. The transfer of a national sport-facility knowledge platform to Boverket also reflected changing institutional mandates, including a stronger focus on traditional facilities for organised sport.

The study has important limits. It offers a national-level account built from a small, purposive set of influential informants, most of whom were based in or around Stockholm, rather than a representative survey of municipalities, clubs or users. The authors also note that the material constitutes the first phase of a two-year project, with later work intended to examine grassroots clubs’ experiences and adaptability. The findings therefore illuminate how influential national actors frame, interpret and negotiate facility challenges, but they do not establish how uniformly those interpretations apply across Sweden or whether all local actors share them. The study’s broader conclusion is that shortage is multidimensional and context-dependent: it can reflect structural mismatches, changing participation patterns, institutional constraints and competing priorities. That finding challenges a policy frame in which construction numbers alone are treated as a sufficient measure of either adequacy or success.

Subject of Research: Governance and perceived shortages of urban sport facilities in Sweden

Article Title: Sport facilities in urban contexts: a multi-perspective discussion

Article References: Book, K. (2026). Sport facilities in urban contexts: a multi-perspective discussion. Frontiers in Sports and Active Living, 8, Article 1882349. https://doi.org/10.3389/fspor.2026.1882349

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/fspor.2026.1882349

Keywords: urban sport facilities, Sweden, facility shortages, urban planning, sport governance, path dependency, institutional theory, organised sport, facility utilisation, public infrastructure, Sport, facilities

The research, led by Remilekun Olaide Olaiya of Tai Solarin Federal University of Education and Olayinka Akinsumbo Ajala of Obafemi Awolowo University, challenges the way scientists and planners usually think about urban growth. Most land-change studies treat each conversion as an independent event: a forest becomes a suburb, a farm becomes a road. But the Ibadan evidence points to something more structured, a path-dependent process in which the state of the land today shapes what it becomes tomorrow. In this framing, bare land is not a dead end or a stable category. It is a waiting room.

To uncover that sequence, the team assembled a remarkable satellite record. Using cloud-free dry-season imagery from four different Landsat sensors, Landsat 7 in 2005, Landsat 5 in 2010, Landsat 8 in 2015 and Landsat 9 in 2025, all at 30-metre resolution, they classified the landscape into four categories: built-up area, bare land, vegetation and water. The images were carefully pre-processed, converted to top-of-atmosphere reflectance and atmospherically corrected with the Dark Object Subtraction method, so that differences between sensors and years could not masquerade as genuine change. Ground-truthing combined a 2025 field survey of 180 points recorded with handheld GNSS receivers and historical high-resolution Google Earth imagery for the earlier epochs.

The numbers are striking. In 2005, vegetation covered 688 square kilometres, more than two-thirds of the corridor, while built-up land occupied just 87.3 square kilometres, or 8.39 percent. By 2015, the picture had flipped dramatically: bare land had surged to 484 square kilometres, becoming the dominant class, while vegetation had lost nearly half its extent. Built-up land had more than doubled to 199.5 square kilometres. Then, between 2015 and 2025, the pattern reversed again. Bare land shrank by 215.9 square kilometres as built-up land climbed to 373 square kilometres, 35.83 percent of the corridor. Land that had been cleared in the first decade was being paved over in the second.

The sequencing becomes unmistakable when the transition matrices are visualised as Sankey flow diagrams, where the width of each link is proportional to the area converted. The single largest flow was vegetation to bare land, 333.5 square kilometres, followed by bare land to built-up land at 173.5 square kilometres. Direct vegetation-to-built-up conversion, the pathway most studies implicitly assume, accounted for only 112.2 square kilometres. Meanwhile, built-up land showed complete persistence: every square kilometre urban in 2005 was still urban in 2025. Cities, once established, do not give land back.

The spatial pattern reinforced the temporal one. Kernel density hotspot analysis, which converts newly built-up pixels into a continuous surface of growth intensity, showed that between 2005 and 2015 the hottest expansion zones were confined to Lagelu and southern Egbeda, while most of Akinyele remained quiet. In the following decade, very-high-intensity hotspots spread across Lagelu and Egbeda and pushed into Akinyele, reflecting infilling and densification of previously cleared ground. The result is a pronounced south-to-north urbanisation gradient, with growth radiating from the existing core along major transport corridors, a pattern familiar from other rapidly expanding African metropolitan fringes.

The ecological cost is measured not only in lost hectares but in shattered habitat structure. Using morphological spatial pattern analysis, the researchers found that the number of core vegetation patches, large intact habitat areas, collapsed from 82 to 21 over the study period. Total core area fell from 482.8 to 132.6 square kilometres, mean patch size dropped from 6.42 to 1.58 square kilometres, and the Landscape Shape Index, a measure of edge complexity, nearly doubled from 14.62 to 27.34. Patch density more than doubled. In plain terms, what remains of the corridor’s vegetation is increasingly chopped into small, isolated, edge-exposed fragments, a condition that ecologists consider a more sensitive indicator of stress than raw area loss alone.

What happens next depends on whether recent history repeats itself, and the team built a model to test exactly that. They coupled a first-order Markov chain, which estimates the probability of each land class converting into every other class, with a cellular automata component that allocates change spatially using a 5-by-5 contiguity filter, so that new growth clusters next to existing development. Consolidated built-up cells were treated as absorbing states, physically barred from reverting. Before projecting forward, the model was hindcast: calibrated on 2005 to 2015 data and asked to simulate 2025, then compared cell by cell against the independently classified 2025 map. It scored a standard Kappa of 0.89 and a Figure of Merit of 0.36, figures consistent with the best-performing land-change models in the literature.

Run forward to 2050, the validated model delivers a sobering scenario. Built-up land is projected to reach approximately 580 square kilometres, up from 373 in 2025, while vegetation declines to 198.3 square kilometres, less than a third of its 2005 extent. Bare land continues its role as the conveyor belt, progressively converted to urban uses as the vegetation reservoir shrinks. The Vegetation-to-Bare-Land-to-Built-up sequence persists through the projection rather than giving way to direct conversion, echoing findings from Greater Cairo and other rapidly urbanising Global South landscapes, and aligning with United Nations projections that Africa will experience the fastest urban growth on Earth through mid-century.

The policy implications may be the study’s most valuable contribution. Because land clearing reliably precedes construction, the bare-land stage represents a critical and identifiable intervention window. During the vegetation stage, the authors argue, planners should prioritise conservation zoning, urban growth boundaries and enforcement of statutory plans. Once land is cleared, development control, land banking and time-bound permits can regulate speculation before concrete sets. After build-out, the focus shifts to infill, densification and transit-oriented development. The authors caution that their projection is a conditional continuation scenario, not a deterministic forecast, and that the model does not capture future policy shifts, economic shocks or the fine-scale informal development that 30-metre pixels cannot resolve. But the core message stands: peri-urban transformation is not a roll of the dice. It is a sequence with recognisable stages, and the moment to steer it is while the ground is still bare.

Subject of Research: Path-dependent peri-urban land transformation and simulated urban expansion to 2050 in the Ibadan corridor, Nigeria

Article Title: Path dependent peri urban land transformation and urban expansion in Ibadan Nigeria

Article References: Olaiya, R. O., & Ajala, O. A. (2026). Path dependent peri urban land transformation and urban expansion in Ibadan Nigeria. Discover Geoscience, 4(1), Article 381. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44288-026-00749-2

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44288-026-00749-2

Keywords: peri-urban transformation, urban expansion, Ibadan, Nigeria, Landsat, land-use change, CA-Markov model, Sankey diagram, landscape fragmentation, remote sensing, path dependency, Sub-Saharan Africa