Building and Re-building a City through Sport: Hamilton, Ontario and the British Empire and Commonwealth Games, 1930–2003

Hamilton Spectator sports editor Melville Marks ‘Bobby’ Robinson was a proud British imperialist who wanted to create a new large sporting event to showcase the Empire's athletes when he helped create the British Empire Games. But when he sought financial support from Hamilton, Ontario's city council for the 1930 hosting of those Games, he used symbols that were less about the Empire and more about what was important to that city's local government officials, urban boosters, and citizens; he promised that the event would pay for itself, that it would promote the city abroad, and that it would leave Hamilton with sports facilities that would be ‘the envy of Canada’. Seventy years later another person from the Hamilton Spectator, its publisher Jagoda Pike, evoked Robinson's story when she led Hamilton's bid to once again host those games, now called the Commonwealth Games. That bid relied on themes similar to those used in the past – civic pride, unity, sport infrastructure legacy and economic development. Using urban regime theory as a conceptual framework, we argue that despite the difference in generations, the City of Hamilton has continued to use the Commonwealth Games for the same purpose – city building – and called upon high profile citizens from similar spheres of influence to further the bid.