Mega-event Cities: Urban Legacies of Global Sports Events

Valerie Viehoff, Gavin Poynter

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317097952
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Politics & International Relations
• Categoría: City Planning & Urban Development

Mega-events represent an important moment in the life of a city, providing a useful lens through which we may analyse their cultural, social, political and economic development. In the wake of the International Olympic Committee's (IOC's) concerns about 'gigantism' and wider public concerns about rising costs, it was imperative in the C21st to demonstrate the long term benefits that arose for the city and nations from hosting premier sporting events. 'London 2012' was the first to integrate the concept of legacy from the moment a bid to host the Olympic and Paralympic Games was being considered. London proposed an ambitious programme of urban renewal for East London. Subsequent host city bids have adopted the 'legacy narrative' and, as this book demonstrates, aligned this to major schemes of urban development and renewal. Bringing together scholars, practitioners and policy makers, this book focuses upon the legacies sought by cities that host major sports events. It analyses how governments, the IOC and others define and measure 'legacy'. It also focuses upon the challenges and opportunities facing future host cities of mega-events, looking at their aspirations and the intended impact upon their domestic and international development. It questions what the global shift in geographical location of mega-events means for sports development and the business of sport, what the attractions are for cities seeking to harness the hosting of a mega-event, and whether there may be longer term consequences for the bidding and hosting major sporting events in the wake of the widespread social unrest that accompanied the preparations in Brazil for hosting the FIFA World Cup (2014) and the summer Olympics (2016) and in Turkey, where there was significant opposition to bid for the 2020 summer Olympiad.

PART I
Urbanism and Legacy in the 21^st Century

Chapter 1
Olympic Legacy

Iain MacRury

Introduction

The IOC has lately produced a dedicated account of ‘legacy’ (IOC 2013). This is, in part, a response to the problem identified by both critics and advocates of ‘legacy’. Highly frequent as the term has become in the Olympic city lexicon, it is hard to define, hard to pin down and hard to evaluate. Some excerpts from the IOC’s Olympic Legacy document provide a useful flavour of their approach. The document begins with an imposing introduction:

The Games are more than just an important sporting event. Aside from the dreams and achievements of young athletes, the Games provide a setting for champions to sow the seeds for future generations. They also enshrine the social responsibility of ensuring that the host cities bequeath a positive legacy. The IOC is firmly committed to guaranteeing that this legacy is as positive as it can possibly be. (Jacques Rogge, IOC President [IOC2013: 2])

The IOC’s account highlights types of legacy in thematic areas, as well as distinguishing between ‘tangible’ and ‘intangible’ legacies:

• Sporting

• Social

• Environmental

• Urban

• Economic.

The IOC does not include, as it might have, specific headings for, for instance, political or cultural legacies, although these areas are sometimes identified as separate areas for action and review. Nor, as might be expected, does the IOC document explicitly mention the Paralympics in its template view of legacy, in part because, although many host cities place various Paralympic-related legacy ambitions in their bids and plans (e.g. Paralympic sports development and disability awareness), at the global level the Paralympics lies outside the IOC’s working definition of its top level responsibilities. The Paralympic legacy is a matter for the IPC (International Paralympic Committee). The account includes a definition distinguishing ‘tangible and intangible’ legacies. Tangible Olympic legacies ‘can include new sporting or transport infrastructure or urban regeneration and beautification which enhance a city’s appeal and improve the living standards of local residents’(IOC 2014: 9).

On the other hand:

Intangible legacies, while not as visible, are no less important. For instance an increased sense of national pride, new and enhanced workforce skills, a “feel good” spirit among the host country’s population or the rediscovery of national culture and heritage and an increased environmental awareness and consciousness. (IOC 2014: 9)

This is a relatively developed discourse which reflects – in suitably high-level and generic-overview style – an intensive decade of thinking, reflection and activity around the concept of ‘legacy’. It is only since 2003¹ that the following lines appeared in the IOC’s Olympic Charter; an undertaking that the role of the IOC includes an expectation that it:

takes measures to promote a positive legacy from the Olympic Games to the host city and the host country, including a reasonable control of the size and cost of the Olympic Games, and encourages the Organizing Committees of the Olympic Games (OCOGs), public authorities in the host country and the persons or organizations belonging to the Olympic Movement to act accordingly. (IOC 2003: 12)

Amongst the measures taken is a knowledge-based one. The Olympic Games Impact Study was instituted to capture data about areas of impact, and, also, legacy, across three broad areas:

• Economic

• Socio-cultural

• Environmental.

As the IOC describes:

By this means the IOC will build up a powerful and accurate knowledge base of the tangible effects and legacy of the Games in turn this will enable the IOC to fulfil two of its principal objectives as enshrined in the Olympic Charter. (2009: 41)

The OGI study offers an important potential influence on how legacy is understood. The IOC provides a useful piece of guidance that is relevant for other aspects of the legacy discussion.

The Olympic Games Impact study is not a projection of the potential impact of the games, as could be conducted i.e. by bid cities. The Olympic Games Impact study is an object of study measuring facts as they occur on the basis of predefined indicators, and analysing them. Impact should not be estimated in advance (there could be an impact/there could be an impact based on suppositions or experience) as only observation over time will show if an impact occurred, or not. (IOC 2009: 40)

This commitment to the long-term and to post-Games review is, in intention at least, a potentially significant element in the OGI since it offers one important set of longitudinal measures ‘before, during and after’ a Games across many ‘legacy’ areas. This stands as a potential counter to the more prolific legacy discourse – a discourse which, from 2003 to 2012 and, in the present, certainly in London, has been frequently mobilising ‘legacy’ as a projective and promissory note. The measurement and longitudinal analysis of legacy is an important component in its proper constitution. Host cities should take this responsibility seriously and as a long-term commitment.

The origins of Olympic ‘legacy’ lie in the IOC’s attempts to reaffirm the value and values of Olympism in a period when its activities were attracting some negative scrutiny. Specifically, ‘legacy’ seeks to operationalize the notion of ‘long-term investment’ by host cities and governments – investment inspired by the Olympic Games and Olympic values. The centrality of ‘legacy’ in the bid process and candidate city’s advocacy as they seek to become selected is a direct response to the IOC’s decade-long project asserting ‘legacy’ as a core aim. Asserting ‘legacy’ was part of longer term strategic effort seeking to better ensure the evidence of, and belief in, the durability of the Olympic Games’ global and city-based achievements and contributions.

‘Legacy’, as concept and practice, emerged as part of an attempt to respond to critique in the 1990s, following a series of scandals linked to ethical matters, commercialisation, ‘gigantism’, political vicissitudes and a history of boycotts (notably Moscow 1980), and in an era where an economic discourse, broadly neo-liberal (on a global scale) was driving vigorous financialisation and a cost-accounting approach into all government and state activity. There was anxiety about white elephant developments and environmentally damaging, low-utility new buildings – left (post-Games) to haunt host cities and standing as a negative contribution with regards to the global reputation of the IOC and of Olympism. The Olympics (at national and international levels) had to work on instituting both rhetoric and practices designed to legitimate the evolving scope and the financial scale of the Olympic mega-event.

But ‘legacy’ has even outstripped these large ends. The IOC’s legacy concept captured the municipal imagination – attracting governments to jump on the rhetorical power of ‘legacy’ as they, themselves, sought to re-frame a set of challenges linked to the need to bind public and private investment, to appear ‘lean’ and to deliver value for money. This included the wish, on the part of some cities, to assert their value above and beyond the nation state (Sassen 1991). ‘Legacy’ is the language of mature, grown up, government. It was, no doubt, appealing to mayors and city leaders to be publicly engaged in enterprise for ‘the long-term’ (see Andranovich, G., M. Burbank et al. 2001).

The further and potent meaning, the currency and value of ‘legacy’, then, can also be found in the character of cities’ desire for it. It is not just a concoction of the IOC. Olympic ‘legacy’ marks out, in the city and for the city, a conception and a conversation. The city is motivated or mobilised, if not exactly driven, by a hunger for and a grasping after different means, a change of character in the administration of investment, accumulation and sociality around the (anticipated) Games. The Olympics becomes an emblematic hope for the city future, occasioning promises and warnings; the Games and the ‘legacy’ become a territory in which to assert political programmes – programmes that might be inhibited within stagnating instituted structures and entrain spatial strategies. The legacy is a future to be colonised – and a site of contest over the definition of the city future.

The seeming enormity of the Olympics, and legacy infrastructure projects in particular, and consequent prominence in debate and in news media, is in part to do with the Games’ planning providing a stage for some of these dramatic anxieties to play out. The global and historic prominence of the Olympics and the size of its media audiences provide another and different scale. Legacy discourse mixes limelight and scrutiny.

Metabolising Legacy: Containing the-Games-in-the-City

The ‘hard’, tangible ‘proto-elements’ of legacy (the village, the stadium, new infrastructure development and so on) alongside ‘human factors’ or intangible legacies (the energy, the emergent information environments, the networks, the promises and the projected initiatives around the mega-event); they arrive, all together resembling a package that is at once attractive and contentious. In prospect and in development the Olympic mega-event (as it were) enters the city well before it is fully planned and made. It is ingested ‘whole’, a complex object in the popular imaginary and in the city-plan. In practical activities and in projections, immediately the Olympic prospect stimulates and disturbs local and city-wide rhythms, places and structures. This complex object can be called ‘the-Games-in-the-city’.

This in contrast to a counterfactual scenario: the everyday city, the ordinary un-Olympicised city, with horizons foreshortened by pragmatics and inertias, out of the limelight, away from historicity, global-network glamour and grand planning, the city seemingly idling, towards the short-term. For instance, such a city may have adopted a fairly informal, disorganised and distributed approach (creative or otherwise) to its present and future growth. It may, on the contrary and even at the same time, as a consequence of embedded structures (institutional and spatial) and in its establishments, have reached a point of actual or anticipated stagnation – and with a hard-to-articulate desire for a step change leading to small scale and frustrated localities sporadically chasing various means towards renewed growth. Arguably some, indeed much, of this was true to an extent of London in 2005, and, in a different way, of Rio and its regions.

On the other hand, consider the now-successful hosts/host-in-waiting, the bid document in hand, and preparing for hosting the Games: this poses (in the languages of necessity and inspiration) just the needed address to incipient disorganisation and stagnation – offering purpose, action and focus. ‘The-Games-in-the-city’ offers solutions to stagnation under the rubrics of the emergent host-Olympic-city-ideal and in related city branding imperatives, just as projects are taken up concretely and immediately in the form of urgent infrastructure development.

In its action, then, the Games and the connected planning (its emergent hard and soft infrastructures) quickly together constitute and become constituted in this relatively more highly organised ‘object’; ‘the-Games-in-the-city’. This object is complex and multiple but conspicuously identifiable. In turn it allows for the identification of a notional trajectory – ‘a direction of travel’ if not a consensus. Major spaces in the city are reformed, and quickly.

The city seems to realise then (or to imagine) that it is, and that it has been (for some time) hungry for such an object, to abate real and anticipated disorganisation/fragmentation, to overcome stagnation/frustration. This is evident in the passionate pursuit of the Games (bidding), and in the evident euphoria (popular and political) customarily entailed to the award of the hosting rights (in Singapore/London 2005 and Copenhagen/Rio 2009 respectively).

Nevertheless, after the Games it can be hard for a city to ‘swallow’ this complex, highly organised (and large) object, and harder still to adequately metabolise the Olympic project – to so quickly ingest and then convert and distribute its energy through the ‘body’ of the city (and not to mention the nation). The Olympic legacy (in all its artefacts) promises much, but it can sometimes not be ‘taken in’, not fully, ever. The fast-paced, force feeding (before and during the Games) of a diet of optimism and action may be difficult – unreal or ‘incredible’. Negative legacies might be anticipated, or might actually accrue. The legacy of disappointment, failure, missed opportunity or ‘waste’ might cast a shadow in the wake of the limelight.

Metabolising ‘Legacy’: Practical Indices of the City in Transition

In this context ‘legacy’ potentially marks a new way for the city to grow and invites new ways to think about a city’s thriving in relation to its futures. This is felt in public discussion and political discourse, but also in private sentiments regarding the apprehension of ‘the- Games-in-the-city’ – hopes for new jobs, fears of changes and of being side-lined. There is a realisation that the Olympic prize comes in a complex form, that it ties opportunity to responsibility – but provides little clue about how to manage the contradictory entailments of ‘legacy’.

This work, this process of metabolising the Games-in-the-city is a helpful metaphor, but it can also be traced in more practical indices, e.g. of emergent connectivity, mobility, morbidity, health, employment and social cohesion or fragmentation echoing some classic approaches in urban sociology and, also, in a manner akin to a number of legacy assessment and evaluation projects, such as the OGI study, the DCMS meta-evaluation (DCMS 2013) or other studies carried out by city-wide or borough-level bodies. The change to the ‘metabolism’ of the city can be registered in the measure of changing rates and quantities in the throughput of investment and people: foreign direct investment, tourists, elite migrant workers (in service industries) and other indices tracking the emergence of and (further) opening out and exposure of the city to the flows (and ebbs) of global finance. The impact of the-Games-in-the-city on networks and on the way development happens is a further index.

Circulating ‘Legacy’: A ‘Foreign’ Term in Established Idioms of Accumulation and Disbursement

The particular language and heightened currency of ‘legacy’ in this context is widely noted (Gratton and Preuss 2008; Mangan 2008). However, ‘legacy’ is an unexpected word to have become so widespread in the contemporary contexts of urban development – especially in an era in which we have concurrently learnt (across contexts) to talk routinely about ‘leveraging’ and ‘securitisation’ and in which financialisation is made vivid across institutions of all kinds. It is unexpected that this era has produced an idiom and an attendant conceptual frame stimulated for a long period by boom and, more lately, by bust and austerity. Since 2003 in particular and under the auspices of the IOC’s concerted action, this ‘old’ word, ‘legacy’ has become ‘new’.

‘Legacy’ indexes different, competing, developmental narratives. Its etymology points us to the movement of (familial) objects through the generations. ‘Legacy’ connotes an atavistic sense of place, property and ‘habitation’ (Casey 1993), yet Olympic legacy is also future-oriented, with a meaning most often integrated with ‘sustainability’ in London’s Olympic planning, while also tied to ‘creative-destructive’ (Berman 1983) visions of transformative change.

‘Legacy’ gains some of its power in the discourse of urban change because it hints at a set of arrangements other than those of exchange and the market – complementing or subverting familiar and powerful discourses of city-space-planning, speculation, development and ‘return on investment’. ‘Legacy’ speaks of a narrative, of a development that is in part irrational and somewhat unpredictable. Legacy is not chosen; nor, then, is it exactly planned (e.g. in relation to ordinary municipal needs and wants – politically set down or otherwise socially registered). However, Olympic ‘legacy’ can be planned for – and should be. It is important to note, however, that planning legacy and planning for legacy are different things.

Legacy is appealing as an idea because many articulations of ‘legacy’ allude to an emergent settlement in the city ...