24/07/2026
"It’s very easy to be seduced by visions of huge, billion-dollar stadiums, but the most important question is always: what happens after the tournament?”
In the latest instalment in Dezeen’s Future Stadium series, Boogertman + Partners director Bob van Bebber adds an African perspective to a discussion – alongside contributions from ZHA, BIG, SOM, Populous, HOK and others – in which, as the introduction notes, “almost all the architects focused on what lies around a stadium – the red-hot trend of sports mixed-use districts.”
Encouragingly, there was broad agreement that the huge investment stadiums demand should in future serve everyday city life and civic infrastructure, not just isolated events. In African cities, that could mean not only income-generating facilities like retail outlets and arenas, but also “civic services such as clinics, libraries, police, social grants services and transport nodes”.
He also floated an idea we’ve been exploring in concepts like Arena-in-a-Box, and in the stadium we designed for the Seychelles Football Association’s bid to host the 2025 FIFA Beach Soccer World Cup: the stadium as a modular, demountable, relocatable system that could adapt across diverse and evolving contexts.
Read the full feature here: https://www.dezeen.com/2026/07/22/future-stadium-predictions-populous-hok-gmp-hks-big-zha/
