The use of Public Funds for Private Benefit: An Examination of the Relationship between Public Stadium Funding and Ticket Prices in the National Football League

During the past decade there has been a proliferation of sports stadia being built in America’s municipal districts. While it used to be common for the public to fully fund stadium construction projects, over the past twenty years factors such as political motives, tax reform and increased public awareness of tax equity have forced sports teams to share increasing amounts of the financial burden (Crompton, Howard, & Var, 2003). As public funding for stadia construction has decreased, franchises have continued to strive for maximized profits. Concurrently, the cost of attending events in sports stadia has increased for consumers in terms of higher ticket prices even though changes in fixed costs should not affect pricing (Leeds & von Allmen, 2004). The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between the use of public funds to build stadia and the profit maximizing goals of National Football League (NFL) franchises. A hypothesis was formulated that stated the impact of the public share of the construction cost would have no effect on relative ticket prices for those that consume the product. The cross-sectional data for a ticket price model, which consisted of seasonal data from every NFL team to play from 1991 through 2003, was investigated. The results showed an increase in public funding by 10% lowers ticket prices by 42 cents. As shown, the bulk of the variation in ticket prices was due to a general increase over time and MSA per capita income.sunk costs; stadium; financing; public finance; football; ticket prices; fixed costs

Mother Futures

Memories From the Year 2030 is a collection of fictional letters, memos and visual artifacts created by a group of futurists, speculative designers, authors and artists. In mid March, 2020, the contributors were invited to respond to the following prompt: How will we remember these times a decade from now? What actions might we take in the coming months that will shape memories for the next ten years or more? What parts of 2020 will have stayed with us? What parts will have faded? How did 2020 change us? What are we proud of? What do we regret? When we construct fictional perspectives from a time different than our own, (a past, a future or even an alternate reality) we create a framework for transcending some of our immediate feelings of anxiety; we can change our emotional capacity to process threats while the causes persist. By crafting, sharing and reading these figments from 2030, authors and readers alike transform their perspectives on the multitude of challenges we’ve faced in 2020

The fate of things to come

In an epoch in which time has speeded up and where we are forever looking to the future, more emphasis has been placed on designers to imagine new and unthought-of of possibilities. This lecture looks at the ways in which the future is made and unmade in the context of design processes

A novel DSM philosophy for building integrated renewable systems

This paper presents an overview of a novel concept in IT network design and power control focused on matching building integrated renewable power generation with local demands. It describes how this is achieved through combination of energy demand reduction and dynamic utilisation of embedded energy storage in a robust, efficient and cost effective manner. A brief overview of the main features of the design is given in terms of its intended benefits as an integrated system. The load components and distribution topology are described for this experimental system within the limits set by the capacity, capabilities and desired function of the network. Power supply to the network is described as including a back-up source to the photovoltaic (PV) source to add functionality and stability with no requirements for undesirable exporting of excess PV generation. The necessary configuration of the renewable array integrating with the network is also highlighted with an example compatible solar module device. A trial of the technology and demand management control in a high profile office building is described. This trial in a live working environment is providing invaluable real world data to compare against modelling and network simulation results

The Illegal Town Plan: Anecdotal Speculation for Coastal Futures

The Illegal Town Plan aims to understand and develop community- based futures for economic and social development. This case study describes and analyses an ongoing practice-based research project that began in 2015. The project, ambitious in its scope, has engaged with communities that have been stripped of power to develop and present new visions of their hometown. Located in Rhyl, North Wales, the design team has developed strategies, ideas, and possibilities with the people who rejected a European future. This project proposes a form of economic, architectural, and design speculation that aims to reimagine regeneration in a post-BREXIT Britain. The case study questions how we, as designers, evolve and develop processes and practices, popularised through the evolution of Critical and Speculative Design (CSD), to think through alternative social, political, and economic futures. The project utilises open, interdisciplinary, and diverse dialogues with the intention of building a heightened notion of engagement and agency. We hope to demonstrate practices that allow speculation to become democratised away from the gallery and into the world. Through conversation with two politicians, the authors were confronted by a growing realisation that there was a deep problem at the heart of regional development. There was a gap, a schism, between the community and those tasked with the future of their economic prosperity. For the last four years, we’ve been trying to support the people of Rhyl to bridge this gap. As a form of participatory speculation, this project aims to build a new language and discourse of speculation in which underrepresented voices become key to the ambitions of a small town and where the outlier is valued for opening alternatives. There have been many criticisms of critical and speculative design approaches in recent years. This project builds on nearly two decades of CSD experience (in both research and education) to imagine the evolution of the approach. Through a process of anecdotalisation, this case study gives four semi-fictional accounts of extraordinary moments that aim to give insight into the unseen process of an experimental design practice

Made in Criticalland: Designing Matters of Concern

Critical and theoretical concepts and theories are now firmly embedded within design education, but to what goal? How will the practice of design develop and change under the ethos of critical inquiry? Indeed, what version of ‘critique’? Taking inspiration from Latour’s essay 'Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern (2004), this paper will outline how we are introducing concepts and methods derived from science and technology studies (STS), principally developments in actor-network theory (ANT), as part of the BA and MA design programmes at Goldsmiths. To begin, we provide a brief reading of Latour’s essay, discussing its relevance for design education. In doing so we aim to propose an alternative version of critical practice: a criticality that is oriented towards a non-reductive empirical realism tracing the complex messy entanglements of societies with all their strange, weird and wonderful hybrid objects. At the core of the paper, then, is the question of how designers might adopt a realist empirical approach towards the research of societies, actors and networks, whilst allowing for creative speculation. To address this question we present two case studies to highlight the benefits and shortfalls of an STS and ANT inspired approach to design. The first describes a series of workshops with which we encourage our students to adopt the concepts and methods of STS and ANT as part of their design practice. In the second case study we present a design brief in which we ask students to seriously address fictional futures through the associative mingling of statistical entities. In doing so we are exploring how design can address the mediation of expectations and temporality: how, for example, designers might act with ‘matters of concern’ to prospect futures. Each of the case studies highlights a problematic found within both ANT and Design: the first issue is one of truncation. How, in accepting an empirical logic of connectivity, designers delimited and edit their networks of observation and influence. The second case study focuses on the issue of temporality, or more specifically 'future orientation', 'potential' or 'prospect'. Here, design can be seen as a means of ‘departure’ in the material-semiotic lives of objects

Putting the Illegal into heritage practice

This article considers the concept of Illegal that is used to challenge the disciplinary constraints of authorised heritage practice. The Illegal provides a conceptual device to consider the ontological reality of the heritage world and the necessary illusion of the heritage profession. Alongside, the critical challenges to the Authorised Heritage Discourse presented by Indigenous Worlds, guerrilla restoration, People Centred Approaches, Experimental Preservation, and creative heritage practice, the tactical activism of Illegal practice is offered as an insurgent tool for transforming heritage worlds. Two recent Illegal projects, the ‘Illegal Town Plan’ and the Illegal Museum of Beyond’s ‘Objects of the Misanthropocene’ exhibition project, present speculative insouciance as a method for putting the Illegal into heritage practice