The location of sports facilities impacts on the possibilities for citizens to join and be active in sports activities; many of the trips that sports activities generate every day use unsustainable modes of transportation. As such, ensuring accessibility to sports and recreation activities presents increasing challenges in relation to both negative climate effects and urban inequalities. This paper studies the location of, and accessibility to, sports facilities, analysing the catchment area of facilities from a socioeconomic perspective in order to advance knowledge on sustainable and equal accessibility. 

A set of methods is tested with the aim of increasing our understanding of the relation between access to sports facilities and municipal goals regarding climate and inequality. The results show that the city of Uppsala in Sweden affords unequal accessibility to sports facilities as a result of their location in the urban context and a result of the design of the street network, of public space. The results provide key insights regarding how urban planning and accessibility relate to the possibilities of practicing a sport and potentially reaching sports locations using sustainable modes of transportation. The analysis further illustrates that the conditions for introducing sustainable travel modes vary in relation to different sports, a finding which calls for the development of analytical analyses and adapted strategies that can take local and specific conditions into account, rather than uniform and normative approaches.