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This chapter introduces and sets the scene for a discussion on women's sport in a professional era. Initiated in the wake of the second-wave feminist movement in America in the 1950s with the professionalisation of golf and tennis, the move for other women's sports to be professionalised has been slow, sporadic and marred with difficulties. However, since the turn of the twenty-first century, there have been significant changes in the landscape of elite women's sport. Alongside an overview of the developments in elite level women's sport, we conceptualise the terms ‘professionalisation’, ‘professional’ and ‘professionalism’. Furthermore, the chapter identifies the scope of the book, drawing upon the importance to consider women's sport as distinct from men's sport and identifying issues that are specific to female athletes, such as maternity and the gender pay gap. We also recognise the diverse and multiple nature of women's identities, highlighting the intersectionality of female athletes in professional sport (specifically around race/ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and national identity).

The chapter details the development of one of the most lucrative professional sports for women in the world, while drawing attention to institutionalised issues of racism and sexism in the sport. We discuss the history of women in professional golf, from the roots of the Ladies Professional Golf Association (LPGA), through the modern-day game where women now play for large sums of money each week. We then shed light on the development of a global tour which started with the likes of Annika Sorenstam, Lorena Ochoa, and Se Ri Pak dominating a once Americentric tour, and how the LPGA struggled to embrace this cultural shift via the Five Points of Celebrity marketing plan and the contentious English-speaking rule. The discussion then moves to focal point of the chapter: the US media's reaction to long-time American professional golf coach and former radio broadcaster Hank Haney's disparaging comments before and at the conclusion of the 2019 Women's US Open. Twenty-five articles were collected from US golf and sport media outlets and coded resulting in four themes: (1) a downplaying of the remarks, (2) ambivalence to the women's game, (3) a privileging of men, and (4) a global tour. The chapter concludes with remarks that highlight the media's struggle to find the appropriate framing and language to cover the incident and how an intersectional approach reveals that oppression of women on the LPGA Tour exists beyond gender.

Purpose – This chapter will examine the role of Central Park in setting in motion certain practices related to park development as well as revolutionizing park financing in the mid-nineteenth century and again in modern times. It will examine the shift from public financing of parks to the development of public–private partnerships to design, build, fund, and administer urban parks.

Design/methodology/approach – The author takes an historical approach to put contemporary park debates vis-à-vis funding and administration in context. Archival materials are used to examine park financing models all over the country.

Findings – Central Park still continues to revolutionize urban park financing. Cities are cutting back on funding for public parks; as a result, there is a greater reliance on private financing options. Not all parks are in a position to rely heavily on private financing, and this raises questions about access to open space in cities.

Originality/value – The chapter raises questions about equity in the shift toward the private financing of urban parks. It extends the environmental justice discourse to examine open space issues. It examines long-term historical trends in helping the reader understand the contemporary state of urban park financing.

World population is expected to increase by some 2.6 billion from 6.9 billion in 2010 to more than 9.5 billion by mid-century. Most of this population increase will occur in the developing nations, and most of this increase will be absorbed in the rapidly expanding metropolitan regions of these countries – the so-called megacities of the twenty-first century (United Nations, 2009). And as urban development accelerates across the globe, most of the population increase will occur in the emerging megacities and other metropolitan areas in Africa, Asia and South America. Because the original areas of settlement in the city centre have long been established, much of the population increase in these metropolitan regions will occur in the suburban areas of cities in the Global South – areas of favelas and shanty towns alongside earlier middle-class and upper-class suburbs, newly planned gated communities and garden suburbs, and indigenous models of suburban growth that will emerge in the next century.

This survey of Las Vegas, Nevada, as a benchmark for the transformations of the Anthropocene, is a provisional exercise in applied social theory. Like multiple processes of desertification that are accelerating in and around Las Vegas, this study is provisional, as it follows Las Vegas as a discrete place whose desertifying qualities are spreading far beyond Nevada, regionally, nationally, globally, and virulently so. Las Vegas, Las Vegas Valley, Mohave Desert, and Colorado River Basin are biopolitical spaces and geophysical places that iteratively replicate the psycho-social contradictions of people in search of sustainable lifestyles in global spaces rocked by ecological catastrophe, and which is open to critical scrutiny. The study more closely examines how systems of organized growth tied to commercial degradation, urban demography, military development, and nuclear devastation drive desertification in this region as well as elsewhere. Like the planet’s other sprawling cities, Las Vegas is an integral component in the globalizing neoliberal omnipolitanization of the Earth’s surface. The neoliberal logic of “winner takes all” also is reflected in the metrometabolic exchanges of these extraordinary urban formations. The rampant overdevelopment of a vast urban simulation, featuring multiple ruinations of its own built and natural landscapes, may give many Las Vegans, and probably most Vegas visitors, their most fundamental sense of place.