Vancouver's successful bid for the 2010 Winter Olympic and Paralympic Games took place at a transformational moment for the International Olympic Committee (IOC). In the first decade of this century, the IOC began to require host cities to address a much wider range of local impacts of the ‘global Games’, and to undertake planning initiatives to ensure maximum local social inclusion. In this article, we present a case study of the policies and principles of social inclusion used by the Vancouver Organizing Committee (VANOC) in preparing for the 2010 Games. We use key informant interviews, document analysis and participant observation to study a specific programme — Building Opportunities with Business (BOB) — that was showcased as one of VANOC's prominent demonstrations of social inclusion. Our evidence suggests that Games planning processes have become even more powerful instruments for the promotion of liberal philosophies through neoliberal local governance regimes; social inclusion is promised through the proliferation of ever more institutionally diffused public–private partnerships. With the neoliberal shift from public service provision to private sector entrepreneurialism, individual employability becomes the primary goal of, and normative justification for, social inclusion policies. Heavily circumscribed VANOC efforts at specific types of social inclusion have met with limited success, but it appears clear that the fusion of transnationally mobile mega‐events and prevailing doctrines of neoliberal entrepreneurialism has become a significant new framework for local urban social policy.RésuméLa candidature de Vancouver pour les Jeux olympiques et paralympiques d'hiver de 2010 a été acceptée alors que le Comité international olympique (CIO) était en mutation. Depuis la première décennie de ce siècle, le CIO incite les villes d'accueil à se préoccuper d'un éventail beaucoup plus large d'impacts locaux liés aux ‘Jeux planétaires’ et à mener des initiatives d'aménagement afin d'optimiser l'inclusion sociale locale. Cet article présente une étude de cas des politiques publiques et des principes d'inclusion sociale appliqués par le Comité d'organisation de Vancouver (COVAN) pour préparer les Jeux de 2010. Des entretiens avec des informateurs clés, une analyse documentaire et l'observation de participants permettent d'étudier un programme communautaire particulier, BOB (Building Opportunities with Business), présenté comme l'une des expériences les plus probantes d'inclusion sociale du COVAN. Les données suggèrent que les processus de planification des jeux sont devenus des instruments encore plus efficaces de promotion des philosophies libérales à travers des régimes de gouvernance locale néo‐libéraux, les promesses d'inclusion sociale passant par une prolifération de partenariats privé‐public toujours plus diffuse sur le plan institutionnel. Compte tenu de l'évolution néolibérale (de la fourniture de services publics aux initiatives entrepreneuriales privées), l'employabilité individuelle devient l'objectif premier, et la justification normative, des politiques d'inclusion sociale. Les efforts du COVAN, strictement circonscrits à certains types d'inclusion sociale, n'ont connu qu'un succès limité. Toutefois, il paraît évident que la fusion de méga‐événements mobiles à l'échelon transnational et des doctrines actuelles de l'entrepreneurialisme néolibéral a généré un nouveau cadre important pour la politique sociale urbaine locale.
There has been a substantial and continuous critique of the world city concept for several years now. One of the main thrusts this critique is taking is that the world city literature is insensitive to urbanisation processes in the global south and builds its theoretical advances on the empirical examples and perspectives of the global north. This paper traces the origins of world city research before examining the more recent critique of this extensive literature on world cities. The main argument is that the concept of the world city as developed by many prominent writers on the topic is not a recent resurgence of modernisation theory in urban studies, as implicitly submitted by its critics. Instead, it is not only conceptually relevant in the context of third world urbanisation, but provides ample room for critical evaluations of urban development in Africa and the global south more generally.
Many view information and communication technologies (ICTs) such as mobile phones, computers and the Internet as tools that can significantly strengthen the quality and depth of Africa's engagement with the world economy. This paper interrogates the impacts of Africa's burgeoning ICT ‘revolution’ through an examination of their use among small, medium and micro-scale enterprises (SMMEs) in South Africa's and Tanzania's wood products and tourism sectors. The findings reveal that while new ICTs are being adopted rapidly, they are generally used for communication purposes, not deeper forms of information processing and management. This ‘thintegration’, while positive in many ways, has done little to stop a trend towards the devaluation of the goods and services provided by the SMMEs surveyed here. Moreover, ICTs are enabling new forms of outside intervention and intermediation into African markets, often further marginalising local firms and industries. The article details these outcomes and demonstrates why ‘thicker’ and more transformative kinds of ICT integration will remain elusive in the absence of changes to non-ICT-specific structures and power relations that limit Africa's ability to participate in the global information economy.
Theories of growth machines and urban regimes have informed the study of urban political
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