In this dissertation, I investigate the role of the Atlanta Braves’ new baseball stadium and surrounding development within the emerging context of team-driven mixed-use urban development. Conceived as a replacement for the 20-year-old Turner Field, Truist Park (originally called and hereafter referred to as SunTrust Park) opened at the start of the 2017 Major League Baseball season north of Atlanta in suburban Cobb County. The stadium cost $622 million in total, with $392 million coming from Cobb County (Tucker, 2015b). In addition to the park itself, the Braves also financed a $400 million development surrounding the park branded as The Battery Atlanta, which includes food, retail, entertainment, hotel, office, and apartment spaces, resulting in a mixed-use construction capable of capturing a wide variety of consumer behavior (Cooper, 2017). Here I examine several interrelated phenomena vital to the political and experiential aspects of the new Braves development. The mixed-use district surrounding the stadium characterizes a new trend for professional teams, evolving from older paradigms of stadiums either set amidst numerous parking lots or constructed within downtown sites independent of the surrounding development. Team-controlled districts represent an extension of the physical experience of sport franchises, and these master-planned team districts produce different kinds of social practices than prior projects. In addition, the SunTrust project also includes a move from the center-city to the suburbs (in opposition to many contemporary stadium trends) as well as reorienting the Braves as a real estate developer. To this end, I conducted an inquiry into the social production of space at The Battery Atlanta using a Lefebvrean framework. Lefebvre (1991) wrote that space could be understood as a social production and conceptualized it as a tripartite arrangement of spatial practices (the built environment and social behavior), representations of space (how planners and the powers-that-be conceive of the space) and representational spaces (how users of the space actually conceive it, often at odds to the “intended” representation). For this, I conducted a content analysis of government and media records (including the online resources from the Cobb County government, Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and other Atlanta newspapers) to determine frames pertaining to the development of The Battery Atlanta and the franchise’s move from downtown, as they represent the articulation of the local elite’s representation of space for The Battery Atlanta. Ethnographic research was also conducted on-site at The Battery Atlanta to examine the spatial practices therein, along with interviews of the users of the space to understand the representational spaces they construct for it. The findings of the study can best be understood through Bryman’s (2004) concept of Disneyization. The study complements the existing literature on the political economy of stadium development which has primarily focused on quantifying potential tangible and intangible economic costs and benefits as well as the governance processes supporting stadium development and subsidization. The Battery makes ample use of the Disneyization aspects of theming, hybrid consumption, merchandising, performative labor, and the use of control and surveillance. While none of these aspects of Disneyization were invented by or are unique to The Battery, the Braves’ development holistically integrates them and intensifies their use in a novel fashion, which has poised the development to become a trendsetter for the next phase of team-controlled neighborhood stadium development. The Lefebvrean physical and imagined spaces of The Battery thus construct a consumer-focused wonderland that successfully operates as a sphere unto itself, excluding undesirable citizens while adopted glocalized versions of a Disneyization systemscape. Examining the social production of space of the project assists in understanding both the natural progression of existing stadium development logics as well as potential future directions for stadium development from a perspective of the political economy of space.
