Geography Compass 2/1 (2008): 300–318, 10.1111/j.1749-8198.2007.00080.

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Olympic Cities: Regeneration, City Rebranding

and Changing Urban Agendas
John R. Gold1* and Margaret M. Gold2
1
School of Social Sciences and Law, Oxford Brookes University
2
London Metropolitan Business School, London Metropolitan University

Abstract
Winning the right to host the Olympic Games is widely regarded as the most
significant prize on offer in the never-ending contest between the world’s leading
cities for prestige and investment. This essay explores the implications and sig-
nificance of being an Olympic city. After recognising the Olympics as a mega-event
with inherent mega-project tendencies, it provides a chronological survey that
shows the changing agendas that host cities have brought to bear on staging the
Games. The increasing scale of their ambitions is noted, particularly with respect
to urban regeneration and city rebranding, while also recognising the financial
and human costs involved. The next part throws light on contemporary practice
through a study of the proposals for the Lower Lea Valley in London’s East
End – the site of the future Olympic Park for the 2012 Summer Games. The
conclusion suggests an evolving research agenda, framed particularly around the
London 2012 Games and the notion of legacy.

Introduction
On 23 March 2007, Prague’s 66-member local assembly voted to bid for
the right to host the 2016 Summer Olympic Games. Ahead lies competition
with the other applicant cities – Chicago, Tokyo, Rio de Janeiro, Madrid,
Doha (Qatar) and Baku (Azerbaijan) – in advance of the short-listing
process in 2008 and then, if successful, the earnest campaigning before the
International Olympic Committee (IOC) holds its final selection meeting
in Copenhagen in October 2009. Yet, initial pronouncements from
Prague’s leaders gave no sense of any real expectation of winning the bid.
Given that Prague was a first-time applicant and that London, another
European capital, was staging the preceding event in 2012, the city’s
leadership regarded candidacy for 2016 primarily as an investment,
providing much needed experience for staging succeeding bids to hold
the Olympics in either 2020 or 2024 (Prague Daily Monitor 2007).
This degree of long-term commitment is not unusual. Numerous
applicant cities have fought repeated but unsuccessful campaigns for the
© 2008 The Authors
Journal Compilation © 2008 Blackwell Publishing Ltd
 Olympic cities 301

right to stage the four-yearly Summer Games or, increasingly, their Winter
counterparts. The reasons for their resolve lie in the rewards popularly
associated with the Olympics. Despite the enormous expenditures on
stadia and Games-related facilities, any host city may reasonably expect
hefty injections of funds from its share of ticket sales, sponsorships, mer-
chandising and broadcasting rights. Bid teams can also confidently predict
that the host city will receive a medium-term stimulus to its construction
industry, a brief tourist boom, and a short-term boost in employment at
Games venues and in the associated administrative sector. Other anticipated
benefits are less dependable but may well occupy a prominent place in the
aspirations of the city authorities bidding for the Olympics. These include
the hope of that being the Olympic city will boost the urban economy,
permanently reposition the city in the global tourist market, promote
regeneration, allow the revamping of transport and service infrastructures,
create vibrant cultural quarters, and establish a network of high-grade
facilities that could serve as the basis for future bids.
Perhaps the most eagerly sought and most elusive benefits, however,
arise less from the financial balance sheet than from opportunities for place
promotion – the conscious use of publicity and marketing to communicate
selective images of towns and regions to a target audience (Gold and Ward
1994, 2; see also Boyle 1997; Ward 1998) – or its more focused incarnations
as ‘city marketing’ (Ashworth and Voogd 1990; Jessop 1998; Kavaratzis
2007) or ‘(re-)branding’ (Berci et al. 2002; Kavaratzis 2004). In a world,
where large cities actively compete for recognition and status, the prestige
of the Olympics and the sustained attention that they attract provides
unparalleled opportunities to make a statement on the world stage. While
even constructing a serious bid shows that a city is ambitious for global
attention (Ward 2007), capturing the Games allows municipal authorities
to undertake long-term activities designed to boost or alter the image of
their cities. Yet, changing a city’s image in the outside world is far more
difficult than, say, the rebranding of a commercial product (Bennett and
Savani 2003; Kavaratzis and Ashworth 2005) and the perceived excellence
of the Olympic ‘brand’ as the summit of sporting achievement often fails
to rub off on to the city that stages the Games. Certainly, the historic
record shows numerous instances where inadequate planning, poor stadium
design, the withdrawal of sponsors, political boycotts, heavy cost overruns
on facilities, the forced eviction of residents living in areas wanted for
Olympic facilities, and subsequent unwanted stadia leave a legacy that
tarnishes rather than enhances the reputation of the host city (see Payne
2005; Preuss 2004; Tomlinson 1999).
This essay explores the implications and significance of being an Olympic
city against this background. Its first part provides context by recognising
the Olympics as the leading example of the genre known as mega-events,
while being simultaneously subject to the distinctive financial and
logistic characteristics that planning researchers associate with so-called
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302 Olympic cities

‘mega-projects’. The second section provides a brief chronological survey

that shows how host cities have only recently attached wider ambitions,
such as the pursuit of large-scale urban regeneration, to the staging of the
Games. While pointing to the endless flexibility of the Olympics as a
festival able to absorb changing agendas, it also comments on the heavy
financial and human costs involved. The next part throws light on con-
temporary practice by considering a case-study of the plans for London
2012, looking particularly at the proposals for the Lower Lea Valley – the
site of the future Olympic Park in the city’s East End. The conclusion
suggests an evolving research agenda, framed particularly around the
London 2012 Games and the notion of legacy.

Mega-Events and Mega-Projects

The last 150 years have seen exponential growth of substantial, prolonged
and spectacular celebrations of human achievements in the arts, sport and
science (Hall 1992; Ritchie 1984). These events vary in type and organisa-
tion. Many are so-called ‘hallmark events’, which become synonymous
with the places where they are habitually staged. They include the ever-
lengthening lists of cities staging street circuit road races (e.g. Boston,
Buenos Aires, Shanghai and London) or international arts festivals such as
those held at Edinburgh, Glastonbury, Roskilde, Chelsea and Salzburg
(Boyle 1997; Burns et al. 1986; Gold and Gold 2005; Mattie 1998; Prentice
and Andersen 2003; Waterman 1998). These can draw in huge tourist
revenues and focus international media attention on the host city, but by
virtue of their recurrence are run by cores of permanent staff that utilise
well-established sets of practices to stage their events.
In contrast, there are a select number of prestige ‘mega-events’ that
have an ambulatory character and are normally subject to a bidding process
by potential hosts. Defined as festivals that achieve sufficient size and scope
to affect whole economies and receive sustained global media attention
(Getz 1997; Horne and Manzenreiter 2006; Roche 2000), ‘mega-events’
include the World’s Fairs (although these are now of declining influence);
the World Cups in soccer, rugby union and cricket; the larger regional sports
gatherings (e.g. European Championships, Asian Games and Pan-American
Games); and the Olympic Games (e.g. García 2004; Gold and Gold 2005;
Jones 2001). In the case of the Olympics, the Lausanne-based IOC holds
the sole rights to award its Winter or Summer Games and selects the
winning bids after lengthy processes of visits, meetings and consultations.
Once awarded, primary responsibility for financing and organising the event
then rests with the host.
The Olympics, however, undoubtedly pose special problems over and
above those experienced by other mega-events. The first stems from the
fact that, unlike hallmark events, the Olympics are extraordinary rather
than recurrent occurrences in the life of a city. The IOC favours the
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 Olympic cities 303

principle of continental equity, preferring to see the Summer and Winter

Games move from continent to continent in line with the founding
notions of spreading the Olympic message to the four corners of the
earth. The festivals, therefore, migrate between cities in contrasting cultural
contexts and, frequently, within different political systems. Most host cities
only receive the nomination to stage the Games once, although there are
instances when a second or third nomination has been secured after the
passage of many years. Hence, while general lessons can be drawn from
the experience of predecessors, the organisers inevitably face a steep
learning curve by virtue of having to assemble from scratch the teams
required to bring the Games to fruition and to establish their specific
working practices. Logistical difficulties will emerge, mistakes will be
made, and deadlines will be tested.
Second, the Olympics comprise a set of interlocking component festivals
rather than a single festival. The group led by Baron Pierre de Coubertin
that re-established the Olympics in the 1890s sought to recapture the
ethos of the four-yearly festival held for more than a millennium in
ancient Greece (see MacAloon 1981; Müller 2000). Their analysis recognised
that the classical Games functioned as a panegyris – a festive assembly in
which the entire people came together to participate in religious rites,
sporting competitions and artistic performance (Phillips and Pritchard
2003). In modern imitation, the IOC decided that the Olympics should
have an associated cultural programme, although opinions differed over
time as to whether this should be conceived as requiring competitions or
merely exhibitions. The Summer and Winter Games (the latter founded
in 1924) have also converged with the Paralympic Games for disabled
athletes – an event that traces its origins to 1948 and which now takes
place in the host city immediately after the main Olympic competitions
(Gold and Gold 2007a,c). Compared to other mega-events, this multi-
stranded character inevitably imposes additional strains on resources, adds
to logistical problems and, in the case of the cultural Olympics, requires
very different planning and administrative skills than those normally
associated with sporting events.
Finally, the Olympics are distinctive by virtue of the sheer magnitude
of facility and infrastructural provision and by the penchant of organisers
to select technologically complex but inherently expensive concepts for
stadia design. As a result, the creation of Olympic sites frequently shares
the characteristics of construction schemes known as ‘mega-projects’.
Defined as prestige schemes involving large-scale and high-risk investment
over a lengthy period, mega-projects notoriously suffer heavy cost overruns,
often fail to deliver the supposed benefits and regularly provoke financial
crises (Flyvbjerg et al. 2003). Indeed, the Olympics may suffer more in
this respect than other mega-projects by virtue of having an immutable
deadline for completion. When works fall behind timetable, this can add
cost pressures by forcing organisers to instigate expensive emergency
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304 Olympic cities

building programmes, with round-the-clock working and additional

contractors brought in order to get laggard projects back on schedule.

Changing Agendas, Mounting Costs

These transformations into the status of being a mega-event and a
mega-project that had major implications for the host city, however, only
occurred gradually (e.g. see Chalkley and Essex 1999; Gold and Gold
2005c; Guttmann 2002). The early Olympics were relatively small festivals
staged in existing stadia or using temporary facilities. The first Games of
the modern period, Athens 1896, set an early pattern of low expenditure,
pressing into service the existing Zappeion building and the restored
Panathenian stadium, with new construction restricted to a velodrome,
shooting gallery and seating for the swimming events. Paris 1900 and St.
Louis 1904 saw the Olympics subsumed as a minor partner into the
broader festivities that accompanied International Expositions (World’s
Fairs). It was not until London 1908 that the Olympics received their own
purpose-built stadium, in the shape of the 93,000 spectator capacity
White City stadium, built on former agricultural land at Shepherd’s Bush.
Succeeding Olympics saw the host city continue to supply the necessary
facilities for the sporting competitions, embrace the Games by providing
venues for hospitality and associated cultural programmes and, from 1924
onwards, start to develop ‘Villages’ to house athletes and officials (Moragas
et al. 1997). Yet, the net effect on the city’s wider standing or urban
fabric remained minimal. Cities did not seek that advantage and the IOC
was keen to prevent profiteering from the Games. Even Berlin 1936,
easily the most iconic and politically resonant Summer Games prior to
the World War II, had little lasting impact on its host city, despite the
creation of the Reichssportfeld, then the world’s largest sports complex,
in a peripheral district to the northwest of the central area.
Only at Rome 1960, after the end of post-war Austerity, did the full
potential of the Olympics as an instrument of urban transformation start
to dawn. The organisers capitalised on two areas where relevant facilities
were already available: the Foro Italico in the north of the city; and EUR,
a district in the south initially designed as a spectacular setting for the
(cancelled) 1942 Esposizione Universale di Roma. The former supplied
the Stadio Olimpico (originally built in 1936); the monumental and
spacious qualities of the latter provided an ideal core for the Olympic
facilities, including the Palazzo dello Sport (Sports Palace), the velodrome,
the Piscana delle Rose (swimming pool) and the Fontane Sports Zone
training area. These ‘Olympic areas’ made a permanent contribution to
the city’s sporting and cultural life. Beyond them, the Village at Campo
Paroli converted to private-sector housing (Wimmer 1976, 202). Rome
also gained from infrastructural improvements undertaken with the Games
in mind. These included new roads and bridges built to connect the
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 Olympic cities 305

Village to the main Olympic sites, modernisation of the airport, improvement

of the telephone, telegraph and radio networks, and initiatives to expand
hotel accommodation.
Rome’s example was repeated by Summer and, to a lesser extent,
Winter Games throughout the 1960s and 1970s. Tokyo 1964 saw major
redevelopment projects before the Games, with the city’s authorities
spending US$2.7 billion on works that provided the requisite Olympic
facilities and that might help to cater for Tokyo’s infrastructural needs up
to the year 2000. These included housing, hotel developments, harbour
improvements, a monorail system, water supply, sewage disposal and a
public health programme (Essex and Chalkley 1998, 195). The Winter Games
at Grenoble 1968 saw extensive road construction, airport development
and investment in cultural facilities that was designed to facilitate economic
growth and promote regional development.
The untroubled sense of combining hosting the Olympics with urban
development was, however, soon to reveal strains emanating from the
political arena. Mexico City 1968, the first Games held in the developing
world, witnessed political protests from groups opposed to Olympic
expenditure in the face of competing needs. The repression of student
activists and the massacre at the Tlatelolco rally on 2 October, with 260
deaths and over 1200 injuries (Toohey and Veal 2000), showed a darker
side to Olympic spectacle (see Barke 2007). Munich 1972 saw the incursion
of international terrorism. The undoubted success of the Games in bringing
urban regeneration and infrastructural improvement to a city experiencing
rapid demographic and economic growth (Essex and Chalkley 1998, 195)
was offset by the abiding memory of the hostage-taking by the ‘Black
September’ Palestinian group that eventually led to the death of 11 Israeli
athletes and officials, five of the eight terrorists and a German police
officer. It effectively ensured that future host cities would have to add a bill
for security measures that recognised the Olympics’ new, and unwanted,
status as a prime terrorist target.
Montreal 1976 saw the Olympics reach their post-war nadir. Chosen
as another prime vehicle for the Drapeau regime’s attempts to raise the
city’s international profile after the success of the 1967 World’s Fair (Expo
’67), Montreal 1976 clearly revealed the Games’ mega-project tendencies.
Its final shortfall of US$1.2 billion, which crippled city finances for the
next two decades, was primarily caused by confused political goals, poor
financial and logistical management, and severe budget deficits on over-
ambitious buildings. The most notable example was the stadium (Figure 1).
The chosen design by the French architect Roger Taillibert, architect of
the critically acclaimed Parc des Princes in Paris, embraced an unmistakeable
and costly monumentality. In particular, it featured an innovative system
for opening and closing the stadium’s roof involving a 575-foot (190-m)
tower, inclined at 45 degrees, which supported the roof on 26 steel cables.
This radical conception produced problems that plagued construction. In
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306 Olympic cities

Fig. 1. Taillibert’s folly. The Olympic Stadium for Montreal 1976 (architect Roger Taillibert), as
seen in October 1998 (Source: Authors’ photograph).

fact, the infamous roof was not completed until 1987 and quickly became
unusable, leading in the fullness of time to a stadium with an impressive
observation tower and a non-retractable roof. The Montreal organisers
also favoured unnecessary infrastructural improvements – best exemplified
by the remote and expensive international airport at Mirabel, which
closed three decades later without ever achieving any useful function.
The damage done to the credibility of the Olympics by Montreal 1976
proved temporary, with the exemplars provided by Los Angeles 1984 and
Barcelona 1992 effectively restoring the Summer Olympics as the acme
of desire for place promoters and urban regenerators. Briefly, the
organisers of the Los Angeles Games provided a new funding model that
combined finely tuned commercialism with cost-consciousness in the face
of limited public funds. Through judicious use of sponsorship and attention
to post-Games use, Los Angeles 1984 made a profit of US$225 million
that was channelled into American sports bodies and programmes and
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 Olympic cities 307

Fig. 2. The Olympic Village, Barcelona 1992. This housed 15,000 participants primarily in two
tower blocks, intended for conversion after the Games to a hotel and offices (Source: Authors’
photograph).

injected an estimated US$2.4 billion into the Southern Californian economy.

Barcelona 1992 illustrated what might be achieved by way of Games-related
urban regeneration. With a challenging package of measures that countered
years of neglect under the Franco regime, Barcelona’s planners ploughed
83% of the total expenditure for the 1992 Games into urban improve-
ments rather than into sport (Varley 1992, 21). The Metro system was
extended, the coastal railway rerouted, the airport redesigned and
expanded, and the telecommunications systems modernised. There were
also 4500 new flats provided by the Olympic Villages, five major nodes
of new office development, extensive investment in the cultural sector
(especially museums) and 5000 new hotel rooms (Coaffee 2007, 155).
Significantly, too, the public gained access to five kilometres of coastline
and new beaches (Figure 2).
Yet, while Los Angeles and Barcelona provided the basis of current
policy for staging the modern Olympics, the incursion of significant
amounts of private investment and creation of private–public alliances to
finance the Games proved problematic. This became readily apparent at
Atlanta 1996. With Georgia’s constitution limiting the role that the city
could play and stiff resistance to raising funds from those means within its
power (taxing tickets or increasing sales tax), Atlanta 1996 saw a private
consortium undertake the organisation of the Games. Its approach rested
on a consensus that saw the Games as helpful to Atlanta’s place pro-
motional agenda, while also turning place promotion inwards as a means
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308 Olympic cities

of ‘galvanising local support and fostering civic pride’ (Hubbard and Hall
1998, 8). Business leaders wanted the Games to stimulate economic
growth and to carry out urban improvement of a cosmetic nature, with
an emphasis on beautification and removal of eyesores, rather than
addressing fundamental social questions (Burbank et al. 2001, 82). The
promoters stressed that these benefits would accrue without involving
tax-payers’ money, with Andrew Young, a former mayor of Atlanta who
became joint chair of the Organising Committee stating that the Games
were ‘not a welfare programme (but) a business venture’ (cited in Rutheiser
1996, 238; see also Whitelegg 2000).
The resulting Games worked to the benefit of Atlanta’s business com-
munity, but fell short the ambitions of the leaders of poorer communities,
who anticipated benefits regarding job prospects, better roads and
improved housing (Maloney 1996, 196). The Olympics also failed to meet
the hopes of Atlanta’s place marketers, who wanted to broaden the city’s
image as a cultural centre. Instead, they found themselves having to
counter a barrage of negative reports, including criticism for overt com-
mercialism, tawdry ceremonial content (Tomlinson 1999), systems and
transport failures and for the ruling regime taking advantage of the
Olympics to mount an attack on the city’s underclass. Aggressively using
city ordinances to ‘beautify’ areas surrounding Olympic venues, the city
displaced poorer residents, closed hostels, and further designed the
homeless out of the landscape by means of such measures as sleep-proof
benches and intermittent sprinklers (Lenskyj 2000, 138 –139; Burbank
et al. 2001, 113). Not all, however, was negative. Although the post-Games
partial demolition of the 85,000-seater Olympic Stadium to create a new
47,000-seater stadium for the Atlanta Braves baseball team may have been
partly designed to prevent the owner (Ted Turner) from relocating the
team away from Atlanta, the action spared the city from having an
expensive and underused athletics stadium – as was subsequently the case
with both Sydney and Athens.
Response to the commercialism of Atlanta coupled with the IOC’s
consciousness of the spiralling cost of the Olympics subsequently focused
attention on environmental sustainability and latterly ‘sustainable legacy’ –
albeit with no huge success to date. Sydney 2000, for example, provided
the opportunity to address the problems of heavily polluted brownfield
land by building the Olympic Park at Homebush Bay, approximately 9
miles (14 km) upstream from Sydney’s city centre. Although immediate
post-Games analysis (e.g. Haynes 2001) argued the success of the Olympics
in achieving dramatic infrastructural and environmental improvement to a
blighted area at roughly neutral economic cost (Gold and Gold 2007b,
45), subsequent reappraisal views the matter less favourably. In particular,
questions are asked as to whether the decontamination of toxic waste sites
had been fully tackled and about the viability of the heavily underused
and loss-making Olympic Stadium (latterly the Telstra Stadium).
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 Olympic cities 309

Athens 2004 recorded a similar experience. Although Athenians

witnessed the reconstruction of their city’s tourist infrastructure, creation
of an Archaeological Park, and investment in the cultural sector and public
transport, wider questions soon surfaced about the sustainability of the
Olympic facilities. Despite its landmark buildings being intended to symbolise
the new Athens, the Olympic Sports Complex at Maroussi remains heavily
underused and inaccessible to the public except when soccer matches are
held at the stadium. The other complexes at Faliro and Helleniki struggle
to find alternative uses. All face mounting debts because repayments on
borrowing and the costs of security and maintenance still have to be met.
Presented with this evidence, the questions of how to turn the lavish and
large-scale facilities required for the Summer Olympics into sustainable
legacy for the host city now preoccupy planners of future Olympics
almost as much as issues linked to the preparation of the Games themselves.
Confirmation of this point is seen in the ‘green credentials’ claimed
for Beijing 2008, for which the facilities now approach completion. The
Beijing Games balance the promotional and regenerative interests of
both host nation and city. Always intended to act as a historic marker to
proclaim China’s re-emergence on to the world stage as an economic and
military power, the Games represent a joint effort by the Chinese national
government, which seeks to absorb the Olympics into national economic
regeneration, and a city authority keen to undertake urban regeneration.
Most investment has been channelled into Beijing itself, with an Olympic
Park covering an area of 1215 ha, including an 80,000-seater stadium,
14 gymnasia, an athletes’ Village and an international exhibition centre,
surrounded by a 760-ha forest and greenbelt (Cook 2007, 291). Regener-
ative plans include construction of new hotels, road infrastructure, expansion
of the international airport and much needed investment in parks and
water recycling centres. At the same time, it is again clear that, as with
many previous Games, the Olympics have become part of the rationale
for demolition of so-called ‘substandard housing’, in which the criteria
used to define dilapidation have a remarkable habit of yielding sites in
places wanted for redevelopment. This process of demolition particularly
threatens the old hutong and siheyuan areas – comprising single storey,
often dilapidated houses arranged along narrow lanes – that find themselves
standing in the way of the grand structures of an internationalised Olympic
metropolis (Cook 2006). Indeed, the Geneva-based human rights group,
the Centre on Human Rights and Evictions, estimates that a total of
1.5 million Beijing residents will have been evicted by the time that the
Opening Ceremony takes place (Engel 2007).

London 2012
The supreme malleability of the Olympic festival, readily able to absorb
the varying agendas held by the municipal authorities ruling the cities in
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310 Olympic cities

which the Games are held, continues to be a feature of planning for future
events. The 2012 London Games will retain the trajectory of large-scale
intervention in search of sustainable legacy (Evans 2007). Although the
organisers will use a series of existing venues throughout the capital for
particular sports – such as Wembley Stadium (football), Wimbledon (tennis)
and Hyde Park (riding events) – the locations for most of the other venues
would be concentrated in an Olympic Park situated in a regenerated
portion of the Lower Lea Valley.
A full account of the evolution of London’s 2012 bid, which dates back
to 1995 (Shoval 2002, 592–593), lies outside the scope of this article (see
Evans 2007; Lee 2006), but three features merit further discussion. First,
the lack of any real conviction that London would overhaul Paris, the
long-time favourite, in the contest to gain the nomination for 2012 would
prove to have important implications for financing and marketing the
Games (Gold 2007). Proceeding on this assumption, for example, the
London bid team skimped on providing accurate costs, which quickly
proved woefully inaccurate. Whereas the bid document forecast a £2.375
billion capital budget and £1.5 billion operating budget, to be supple-
mented by additional financing of transport and site infrastructure, the
headline figure had already risen to £9.325 billion by May 2007 (Gold
and Gold 2007c, 318). Among elements absent from the original costs
were policing and security (£600 million), value-added tax (£836 million)
and a hefty programme contingency cost of £2.747 billion added at the
Treasury’s behest to cover cost overruns. Equally, lack of belief that the
Games would come to London served to reduced levels of opposition.
Some ideological resistance was apparent, but the Olympic good news
story and the outsider status of the London bid lessened the negative press
(Evans 2007, 308). Even within the designated boundaries of the Olympic
Park, opposition remained local and ill-coordinated until after the bid had
been won.
Second, the sense that the nomination was destined for Paris effectively
changed the terms in which the bidding team conceived their task,
viewing the bid partly as an exercise in city marketing and partly as a
longer-term statement of enduring principles. As Evans (2007, 299)
noted, London’s bid document placed ‘greatest emphasis . . . on the legacy
and after-affects of the Olympic leverage opportunity, rather than the
event, its content and purpose.’ The document, for instance, outlined a
four-yearly programme for the Cultural Olympiad. It also made consid-
erable strides towards integrating the Paralympics into the Games’ planning
and to offering the notion of a barrier-free city (Gold and Gold 2007a).
The theme of inclusiveness also extended to ethnicity. The bid strove
hard to offer a rebranding of London away from being identified by its
historic heritage to that of a diverse city with a vibrancy based on its
multiculturalism. Much was made of London’s diverse ethnic identities
and the multicultural character of the five ‘Olympic boroughs’ in the East
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 Olympic cities 311

Fig. 3. The Pudding Mill River, tributary of the River Lea, bisecting the southern part of the future
Olympic Park. After clearance, the 80,000-seater Olympic Stadium will be located to the
left and the warm-up athletics tracks to the right (May 2007) (Source: Authors’ photograph).

End (Greenwich, Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest),

where the main events would be housed. The theme of the world coming
to London to meet the world was carefully fostered in marketing the notion
of London 2012 and, indeed, was tellingly picked up in the presentation
made at the IOC’s final selection meeting in Singapore in July 2005.
Finally, the bid offered to concentrate most activities in a nucleated
Park, a known preference of the IOC, and addressed the growing concern
for sustainable legacy by using the mega-event as a vehicle for regenerating
one of the largest areas of brownfield land in the London region. Situated
on the city’s northeast margins, the Lea Valley experienced the marginality
that stemmed from it being a place to avoid, having been used as a site
for noxious industries and a perennial dumping ground for waste products
(Figure 3). Yet, its character as an elongated strip of open space crisscrossed
by water channels has also sparked the imagination. For example, the
influential Greater London Plan saw it as supplying the ‘opportunity for a great
piece of constructive, preservative and regenerative planning’ (Abercrombie
1945, 105), with the possibility of a ‘green wedge’ that would serve as a ‘lung’
for the people of London. For the bidding team, too, it had the immense
advantage of being adjacent to the central urban area without having a
large residential population that Olympic developments would displace.
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312 Olympic cities

As awarded in July 2005, the plan envisaged the complete transformation

of the portion of the lower Lea Valley between Stratford and Hackney
into a 600-ha Olympic Park (London Organising Committee for the
Olympic Games [LOCOG] 2004). This would house the main 80,000-
seater stadium and participant’s Village, together with the Paralympic
tennis and archery facilities, hockey centre, velodrome, fencing hall, handball
arena, aquatic centre, basketball arena, media centres and warm-up
facilities. The area would be served by a major transport interchange,
located 1 km to the east of the stadium at Stratford and served by under-
ground, national rail, Eurostar and bus services.
The lack of settlement in the Olympic Park, coupled with the fact
many of the 300 displaced businesses represented small firms with minimal
political clout, supplied the impression that regeneration of a physically
blighted area would take place with little human cost (Engel 2007). That
impression has been actively encouraged by developers, because it allows
a conveniently dystopic image against which to juxtapose the shining
future apparently on offer. The plans anticipate the revalorisation of the
Lower Lea Valley through its environmental transformation, renewed
social capital and general associations with the Olympics. Although
popular preferences are for creation of new family houses rather than flats
– of which there is currently an adequate supply given the proximity to
the adjacent Docklands regenerations – the plans seek to attract residents
to additional 3600 flats in the Olympic Village and 9000 in the Olympic
Park area as a whole. Beyond development of the Olympic Park, work
has already started on projects that will transform 73 ha of dereliction into
Stratford City – a £4 billion metropolitan centre in East London, with
more than 100 shops, three big department stores, cafés, schools, hotels,
parks and health centres that will supply employment for an additional
30,000 workers (London Borough of Newham 2007). The Press Centre
would serve as the basis for a new cultural and media development. Taken
together, these initiatives promise to turn this area into one of Europe’s
largest urban regeneration sites (Figure 4).
Those, at least, are the plans, although previous experience reveals the
difficulties associated with after-Games use. It is true that the Olympic
boroughs suffer considerable social deprivation and that Games will
permit a comprehensive approach to regeneration rather than the previous
‘patchwork’ of funding schemes (Audit Commission 1989). It is also
probable that assiduous quarrying of the Olympic brand will have some
impact on the image of the five boroughs and perhaps assist local businesses.
Yet, just as there is doubt that the Olympics will bring the forecast
employment benefits to the surrounding areas due to skills deficiencies, so
too are there reservations as to whether the developments will address the
needs of the existing community or encourage gentrification. Experience
also highlights the gaps between promises and delivery. Infrastructural and
environmental improvements – elements that can make a major difference
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 Olympic cities 313

Fig. 4. Clearance work for the Stratford City development project, May 2007 (Source: Authors’
photograph).

to post-Games use – may experience cost–saving modifications or even

abandonment. The recent Summer Games in Sydney and Athens, for example,
both raised questions as to whether decontamination of toxic land had been
properly tackled; an issue of continuing relevance for London. Budgetary
problems, too, normally lead to cutbacks for lower profile elements. For
instance, London’s ambitious cultural programme, designed to supply national
signature events and smaller projects at regional or local level over the four
years of the Olympiad (LOCOG 2007, 6), remains particularly vulnerable.

Conclusion
The question of legacy, so important for London’s bid for the 2012
Games, is also central to any research agenda deriving from the modern
Olympics. Addressing the notion of ‘legacy’, however, immediately
encounters the problem that it is an evolving concept that was not part
of the original vision for the revival of the Games. Official records show
the first significant mention of the term occurred in 1956 in relation to
the Melbourne Games (McIntosh 2003, 450), with the idea of a physical
legacy only becoming a significant factor from Rome 1960 onwards. As
the 20th century wore on, preoccupation with infrastructural change and
city marketing progressively eroded the attention paid to the sporting
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314 Olympic cities

dimension. Scale exerted an intoxicating appeal, with the IOC seemingly

developing a partiality for supporting comprehensive interventions that
somehow mirrored, and possibly served to justify, the steadily increasing
size and demands of the Games. A proposal that offered a striking
regenerative transformation such as London’s Lea Valley might serve as a
symbol of the positive virtues of staging the Olympics and act as a fig leaf
for the enormous expenses required and incurred.
A particular goal for research during the years leading to and after 2012,
therefore, is to examine the reality of legacy in light of the forecasts.
Eleven areas of inquiry, which are partly anticipated by the latest policy
document on this subject (Department of Culture Media and Sport
[DCMS] 2007), would seem particularly germane in this respect:

• to investigate whether patterns of public participation in sport prove to

alter significantly, both in the Olympic boroughs and further afield;
• to see whether appropriate skills have been successfully inculcated in a
part of London where low levels of achievement are often highlighted
and where the pace of economic change requires new skills sets for future
employment prospects;
• to examine the extent to which city marketing has delivered any significant
rebranding of London and the UK as a ‘creative, inclusive and welcoming
place to live in, visit, and for business’ (DCMS 2007, 4);
• to assess the progress of cultural tourism and the extent to which it has ben-
efited from the four-yearly Cultural Olympiad associated with the Games;
• to evaluate improvements in cultural infrastructure, audience development
and participation levels in the arts as a result of the Cultural Olympiad;
• to analyse whether or not Games-related development delivers a
regenerated Lea Valley and East London and draws to related regener-
ation projects, for example, in the Thames Gateway;
• to examine the extent to which the rhetoric of environmentalism
successfully translates into provision for sustainable living, especially in
the Olympic Park;
• to evaluate whether the improved transport infrastructure, especially public
transport, has not only benefited East London and improved its connec-
tions to the rest of London and beyond, but also whether the Olympics
delivers tangible improvements in public transport for Londoners generally;
• to assess whether London has become a more user-friendly city for the
disabled, in which greater understanding is matched by a barrier free
environment;
• to investigate whether the sports complexes constructed for the Olympics
gain significant post-Games usage and not, as with other recent Olympics,
become white elephants; and
• to examine the extent of benefits for cities and regions outside London,
particularly when recalling initial concerns that benefits from so large a
project should not be confined to the capital.
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 Olympic cities 315

This list is not exhaustive but covers many of the key areas of Olympic
activity. Addressing it would certainly help to supply firmer evidence for
the ongoing debate over legacy that, if left to official sources, would
inevitably accent the positive and gloss over the real balance sheet if that
should prove to be adverse.

Short Biographies
Dr. John R. Gold is Professor of Urban Historical Geography and a
member of the Institute for Historical and Cultural Research at Oxford
Brookes University, Oxford, UK. A frequent radio and television
broadcaster, he is the author or editor of 14 books on architectural and
cultural subjects. The four most recent are Representing the Environment
(Routledge, 2004, with George Revill), Cities of Culture (Ashgate, 2005,
with Margaret Gold), The Practice of Modernism: Modern Architects and Urban
Transformation, 1954–1972 (Routledge, 2007), and Olympic Cities: City
Agendas, Planning, and the World’s Games, 1896 –2012 (Routledge, 2007,
edited with Margaret Gold).
Margaret M. Gold is Senior Lecturer in Arts and Heritage Management
at London Metropolitan University and a member of the University’s
International Institute for Culture, Tourism and Development. She is
Course Leader for the BA in Arts Management and the MA in Arts and
Heritage Management. Her books include Imagining Scotland (Scolar Press,
1995) and Cities of Culture (Ashgate, 2005) and editor of Olympic Cities:
City Agendas, Planning, and the World’s Games, 1896–2012 (Routledge,
2007) – all joint with John R. Gold. Her current research interests include
heritage interpretation and cultural festivals.

Note
* Correspondence address: John R. Gold, School of Social Sciences and Law, Oxford
Brookes University, Gipsy Lane Campus, Headington, Oxford OX3 0BP, UK. E-mail:
[email protected].

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