Mega-Events

Placemaking, Regeneration and City-Regional Development

Graeme Evans

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429882098
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Industria dell'ospitalità e del turismo
• Index: Business

This book brings together different perspectives of mega-event bidding, hosting and legacies. Their impact is considered through an international range of mega-events in terms of land use, political and socio-economic change, and the placemaking processes that accompany these area-based regeneration projects. From city-regions that have not been successful or withdrawn from mega-event selection, to contemporary Olympic, Football World Cup and Expo host cities whose legacy is still unfolding, to event sites whose legacy is now established, the global appeal of the mega-event is apparent from this collection.

The book interrogates the mega-event phenomenon in ten countries, from North and South America, and Australia, to Western and Eastern Europe. Drawing on their historical evolution and antecedents, and following recurrent themes of urban regeneration and resistance, the book highlights the importance of major events and festivals to the creation and marketing of place through branding and regional growth

In considering a range of mega-events critically and in different national and geopolitical contexts, the book will be of interest to policy and decision-makers at local, regional, national and international levels, and will be of particular interest to professionals, scholars and students working in planning, urban studies, sport and leisure studies, and in event and festival management.

1 Introduction

Graeme Evans

The phenomenon of mega-events, once distinguished as ‘special’ or ‘hallmark’ events, has arguably become normalised, reflecting their universal and thus ubiquitous nature – and their longevity. Despite the excessive cost, controversy and corruption associated with their selection, delivery and post-event legacies – cities, regions, as well as nation states continue to vie for the honour of hosting international mega-events.

These event-based urban imaginaries have a long trajectory. Universal Expositions and World Fairs, the forerunner of today’s Expos, date from the 1700s, early examples of globalisation and capitalism through respective Franco-British empires, converging in the exemplar Great Exhibition in 1851 (Greenhalgh, 1988). The Olympics movement was resurrected in 1894 with the first modern Olympics symbolically held in Athens in 1896, although the early twentieth-century Olympics were treated as a sideshow to the fairground, employing them as additional but subsidiary attractions to the already established World’s Fairs. For instance, Paris 1900 treated its Olympics as an indistinguishable component of the ‘Exposition Universelle’ whereas St Louis in 1904 followed the same formula (Gold and Gold, 2010; Evans, 2019). By the 1930s, however, host nations had also started to use the Olympics as a stand-alone opportunity to advertise their country and regimes, notably Berlin’s ‘Third Reich’ 1936 Games. By 1964 Tokyo was promoting its Games as an important medium for conveying Japan’s credentials as a modern country and for signifying its re-emergence onto the international stage after World War II, a modernisation strategy later adopted in Seoul, Beijing and Rio (see Broudehoux Chapter 6), and most recently in Sochi, Russia (see Wolf, Chapter 6). Versions of this international cultural diplomacy and branding exercise can also be seen in the FIFA Football World Cup and other competitions hosted by developing regions such as in the Middle East (e.g. Qatar) and South Africa. Old world cities also return to the bidding table, often revisiting their earlier experiences and sentiments (e.g. London’s post-War Olympics in 1948 and London 2012). Even when associated with cost overruns, corruption and displacement of residents and businesses, as in the case of Tokyo (1964), this city (having lost out to Rio in 2016), sought and won the 2020 Olympics. Tokyo had been awarded the organisation of the 1940 Summer Olympics, but this honour was subsequently passed to Helsinki, because of Japan’s invasion of China, before ultimately being cancelled because of World War II. The late Zaha Hadid – also architect of London 2012’s Aquatic Centre – and original designer for the Tokyo 2020 Olympic stadium oversaw the original budget of £707 million rise to £1.37 billion, which led to her replacement and the appointment of a Japanese design firm working with a revised budget of £843 million.

The history of these special events therefore predates the post-industrial urban renewal and competitive city eras. For example, a year prior to the first revived Olympics, the inauguration of the International Art Exhibition, or Venice Biennale, took place in 1895. Although a biannual art exhibition would not in itself be considered a mega-event as such, as the event has grown in size and importance – cultural, symbolic, economic – it has expansively evolved into a permanent spectacle, with the national pavilions of the Giardini sitting alongside the temporary exhibitions in the Arsenale dockside complex (another regeneration project waiting to happen – Figure 1.1), and now spread across other venues and sites in Venice.

Figure 1.1 Venice Arsenale dock, Architecture Biennale, 2014

Source: author.

Today, over 150 art biennales are now held across the globe. Venice is not unlike the Edinburgh International Festival in this respect, established in 1947, and which has spawned the now much larger Fringe and associated festivals (12 distinct festivals including literature, jazz, etc. – BOP, 2012), and also the annual Milan Design Feira, again with a larger off-site fringe exhibition programme. This international design fair attracts over 160 countries and 2,000 exhibitors – more than International Expos. Public sports, exhibitions and festivals are therefore supplemented by commercial trade shows which in countries like Germany and China which occupy semi-permanent sites, e.g. International Building Exhibitions (IBAs – see Kuhlmann on Hamburg, Chapter 9) and Garden Festivals, often linked to regeneration and re-use of industrial sites. The serial festival represented by the European City of Culture first hosted by Athens in 1984 also draws on the expansive Venice Biennale. Like these notable major festivals these events have widened in scope and scale over time, expanding their footprint and transforming what was once a prosaic one-off event into a cyclical mega-celebration of culture and commerce, and fast track route to regeneration and redevelopment.

What these historical antecedents provide is not only a longitudinal reference and perspective on this contemporary phenomenon but a commentary on urban spectacle, city development (and therefore regimes) and cultural identity, at various scales. Scale has become an important factor in mega-event development since they claim – and seek to reconcile – the local and the global, with the intensive site-based developments associated with Olympic venues, villages, Expo sites and major culture-led regeneration used to project collective visions and host qualities. This is most apparent through the worldwide media dissemination which dominates major sporting events, notably Olympics and World Cups, but also through the self-conscious themes adopted to provide International Expos with the gravitas they otherwise lack (at their most basic, a series of national tourism board theme sheds).

Even Cities/Capitals of Culture have increasingly felt it necessary – particularly during the bidding stage – to emulate these utopian missions coupled with the local and regional economic development and political ambitions of their proponents. This has also seen their political and spatial scope (and ambitions) extend to regional and cross-border events such as Aix-en-Provence combining with Marseille for the 2013 French Capital of Culture (Andres and Gresillon, 2014) and Maastricht’s (unsuccessful) bid for the first Euroegional Festival in 2018, combining with Liege in Belgium and Aachen in Germany (Evans 2012; Lawton, 2014).

Mega-events: cities of renewal

Writing over 25 years ago, Hall located the rationale for hosting what until then had been termed hallmark events, within the fourth era of World’s Fairs running from the early 1960s – namely ‘the city of renewal’ (1992, 29). Today’s mega-events are no exception to this 50-year trajectory, which has hardened in recent years toward major cities hosting and bidding for the ‘greatest show on earth’. National capitals such as Madrid, Paris, Stockholm (Olson et al., Chapter 8) and Tokyo, and cultural capitals Amsterdam, Los Angeles, New York, Rio (Broudehoux, Chapter 6), Sydney, Istanbul and Toronto (Oliver, Chapter 10) have competed for hosting major international events such as Expos and Olympics, despite their escalating cost and now-predictable controversies and dubious legacy effects (Evans, 2010; Grix, 2014). Re-presenting and re-imaging major cities through these mega-events is therefore both a competitive strategy (Ward and Jonas, 2004) and a reflection of the ‘festivalisation of the city’ (Richards and Palmer, 2010). These once-in-a-lifetime events also present a dualistic challenge to their hosts – between the temporal/ephemeral nature of the event and the permanent legacy, and between the ‘host’ audience and the outside world. The latter includes visitors/tourists, global media, commercial sponsors, and institutional ‘brand’ holders who also impose their design controls on the event organisers (Evans, 2019).

Figure 1.2 Mascot, Shanghai Expo 2010

Source: author.

Large-scale festivals and sporting competitions make up the majority of what are considered contemporary hallmark or mega-events. Early studies into the phenomenon tended to view them as simply ‘special’ (i.e. not regular/annual) large-scale events. However, subsequent studies (Hall, 1989) identified short-term staged events also, such as carnivals and festivals. Such events can be of significant economic and social importance, which may not only serve to attract visitors but also assist in the development or maintenance of community or regional identity (Getz, 2012). The term ‘hallmark event’ is not therefore confined to the large-scale events that generally occur within cities and major towns. Community festivals and local celebrations can be described as hallmark events in relation to their regional and local significance. Such an observation highlights the importance of the economic, social and spatial context within which these events take place. However, the term ‘mega-event’ has far more specific application. Mega-events, such as World’s Fairs – or ‘Expos’ (Olds, 1988) and the Olympic Games (Ritchie and Yangzhou, 1987), are events which are expressly targeted at the international market – global media, tourists and investors, as well as local and national participants. They also entail major capital investment in venues, facilities and transport and drive a number of planning imperatives.

More recently, Müller (2015) has revisited the definitional ambiguity of the mega-event concept which brings together the key, but still quantitative factors, which distinguish them from other hallmark or special events. In his analysis, in order to be considered as mega-events, they should:

1. Attract a large number of visitors.
2. Have a large mediated reach.
3. Come with large costs.
4. Have large impacts on the built environment and the local-regional population.

Although, in the past, visitor numbers were an indication of the size of the event, in order to experience a sporting mega-event today it is no longer essential to travel and watch it in situ. In fact, the widespread broadcasting of sporting competitions since the 1980s has meant that the vast majority of those who watch an event do so on TV or other media (Horne, 2007); Sugden and Tomlinson, 2012). From Montréal 1976 to the London 2012 Olympics, the value of broadcasting rights for the Summer Games has risen from $34.9 to $2,569 million – almost 23 times in real terms. This is an indication of the evolution of the global media economy, but also of the commercialisation of large events. According to the International Olympic Committee (IOC), about half of the world’s population, 3.64 billion, saw at least one minute of coverage of the 2012 Summer Games (IOC, 2014). From Barcelona 1992 to London 2012, the number of accredited media personnel almost doubled to more than 24,000 – more than two media representatives per athlete (Chappelet, 2014). This growth underscores the extent to which large events are mediated rather than directly experienced. This has also meant that their design focus has widened from the facilities and site itself to branding and communication design, merchandising, and sponsorship (Evans, 2019).

Non-sporting events are, however, more fundamentally experiential and festival in nature. In these cases. size still matters in mega-event positioning, particularly in Asian countries where their appeal and more regimented social system guarantees very high levels and reach of attendance (e.g. Japan’s Aichi Expo 2005 attracted over 22 million visits, albeit with a budget of $3.3 billion). As Shanghai – ‘the culmination of a 30-year process of opening and re-integrating with the world’ – boasts (Land, 2010, 14):

Figure 1.3 China Pavilion at Shanghai Expo, 2010

Source: author.

World expo tends naturally to stupendous scale, but never like this. Expo 2010 is by far the largest ever staged in almost every conceivable respect. It has far more participants and visitors than any expo has attracted before, drawn to most expansive site, developed by the most enormous urban development process the world has ever seen. It takes place in the largest city in the world’s most populous country. It is not only the first china expo but also the first Expo in the developing world.

This contrasts with European events, notably Hanover’s Expo in 2000 which failed to attract even half of its 44 million target – even after cutting entrance ticket prices – posting a loss of $1.3 billion for the regional government. In the same year London hosted the Millennium Festival at Greenwich Peninsula (Evans, 1995), which also failed to achieve it’s 12 million visitor target by over 50%.

The mega-event phenomenon sits generally within urban and regional studies and also alongside other forms of urban regeneration – housing, industry, science & technology (including ‘smart’ and ‘tech city’) and culture-led (Evans, 2001), with all the tensions and issues that arise – from gentrification to globalisation. As the examples of mega-event legacies included in this book reveal, all these variants of regeneration feature in post-event site development (see Aelbrecht on Lisbon, Chapter 4), whilst the festival nature of these situates major events as a particular form of culture and culture-led regeneration. This has important implications for cultural policy since decisions to host (and even just bid for) such extr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• List of contributors
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Introduction
• PART I: Mega-events: placemaking, regeneration and legacy
• PART II: Alternative mega-events strategies: critiques and responses to failed/serial bids
• Index