Street sports are sports held in urban environments.

Other key characteristics attributable

include their non-commercial and non-professional nature.[citation needed] Street sports are an
expression of the spontaneous, improvisational and creative origins of sport adapted by human
ingenuity to the urban environment. In historical terms their origins are traceable to the very
earliest evidence of sports in Greek and Roman civilisation.[1]However their rise to prominence
can be dated to the Industrial Revolution and the great shift towards urban living that took place
during this era.[citation needed]
Today their prevalence and diversity are only matched by the diversity and hybridization of
culture in our contemporary world. Although ‘street sports’ as a specific branch of sports have not
been given the same degree of attention extended to the more conventional branches of sport, it
is nevertheless both possible to delineate their scope and valid to speak in terms of their concept.
[citation needed]
 Street sports are a hybrid form of sport and reflect the adaptation of conventional sports
to the cityscape.[2]
According to contemporary research[3] surrounding the notion of the city it is suggested that the
best way to understand its existence is through the prism of an ecology of the city. Viewing the
city in this way as a living, bustling and thriving organism helps to cast light on the nature of the
city, which is urban and to begin to home in on particular salient features of urban life. It is only
with the advent of this relatively modern perspective on the urban that it has become possible to
speak in terms of street sports.[citation needed] Today, with this view established, a variety of sub-
disciplines within the phenomena have evolved, with each successive development representing
a further refinement of the concepts expression. For example, whereas earlier it may have been
natural to discuss skateboarding or stickball in isolation as cultural phenomena occurring in the
urban environment, with the introduction of the broader concept of street sports it has become
possible to explore a range of urban phenomena in the broader context of the urban. The result
has been a greater scope and complexity to our understanding and appreciation of how urban life
manifests itself culturally.
According to the UN World Urbanisation Prospects Report of 2008 the question of urbanisation is
amongst the most urgent, pertinent and overarching of today.[4] Urbanisation, in the words of the
report, is predicted to accelerate in the forthcoming decades transforming at unprecedented rates
the majority of the world’s population into ‘city dwellers’.