Mapping the Olympic growth machine

2015

Urban Geography

Municipal governments produce a seemingly endless supply of urban strategic plans, which purport to define the city by making claims on its future development trajectories. Critics note that this claimsmaking on "the city" renders it conceptually vacuous and overextended. Yet it is essential to question the degree to which speculative policymaking is merely rhetorical. Discursive claimsmaking on the city through strategic planning documents is an important technique in urban politics-a form of targeted simplification that benefits particular stakeholders by defining the city around sites in which they are invested. Bids to host sporting "mega-events" like the Olympic Games are a case in point: event planning corporations routinely make claims on the city, which strategically simplify its forms and processes, often by defining the city in ways that mediate between particular land investment projects and broad visions for citywide development. The implication is that claimsmaking on the city through urban strategic planning is intentionally simplistic and acts as an ideological practice for justifying urban development projects.

Section: Bids As Strategic Claimsmakingmentioning

confidence: 99%

“The city” as developmental justification: claimsmaking on the urban through strategic planning

2015

Urban Geography

“…The Boston bid project ultimately failed in response to these shifting urban political conditions, making it a compelling illustration of the potential impact of these trends. As in a number of cities which recently cancelled their bids, this form of politics disrupts conventional narratives about Olympic urban politics-in which local elites are able "to push policies they wouldn't dream of during normal political times" (Boykoff, 2014b, p. 3) (see also Andranovich, Burbank, & Heying, 2001;Cochrane, Peck, & Tickell, 1996;Eick, 2010;Hall, 2006;Hiller, 2000a;Surborg, VanWynsberghe, & Wyly, 2008;Van Wynsberghe, Surborg, & Wyly, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 95%

Boston’s Olympic bid and the evolving urban politics of event-led development

2015

Urban Geography

The sports mega-events industry is in the midst of a significant reorganization, and the urban politics of event-led development planning is increasingly tumultuous. Three trends stand out: (1) the mega-events industry has been professionalized through consultancies, sports federations' urban policy programs, and city-to-city knowledge-sharing partnerships.(2) Critics of mega-events have been successful in drawing attention to state intervention and public subsidies involved in megaevent planning. (3) A proliferation of anti-bid social movements has pursued a form of urban politics, which more aggressively questions the legitimacy of using mega-events to pursue urban development. I evaluate the implications of these trends with a case study of a bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympic Games in Boston. The failure of the Boston bid illustrates increasing tensions between cities and the mega-events industry.

“…The internationalization of this entrepreneurialism is well documented: some commentators signal to the top-down ability of global sports federations like the IOC and FIFA to expand into emerging markets (Eick, 2010;Wamsley, 2002); while others highlight geopolitical (Black and Peacock, 2011;Dawson, 2011) or commercial (Hall, 2006;Hiller, 2000;Surborg et al, 2008) aspirations on the part of local organizers who use megaevents planning as a means to an end with little interest in franchise holders' objectives. My analysis adds to the conversation by documenting how megaevents bidding signals to the type of strategic policy making which defines the messy landscape of contemporary urban entrepreneurialism: competition by selectively transnationalized policy making (Smith et al, 2014;Surborg et al, 2008) that relies on mobile assemblages of experts and expertise (McCann, 2013;McCann and Ward, 2011). It is characterized by globally oriented municipal governments (Acuto, 2013;Gonzalez, 2011) and new geographies of legitimacy and expertise which draw on a geographically diverse group of stakeholders, including those based in the Global South (McFarlane, 2012;Roy and Ong, 2011).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 96%

Competition through Interurban Policy Making: Bidding to Host Megaevents as Entrepreneurial Networking

2014

Environ Plan A

Recent scholarship on policy mobility, globally active municipal governments, and transnational city-to-city policy making suggest a new dynamic in entrepreneurial cities: entrepreneurialism based not only on place competition, but also based on practices of interurban networking. This paper argues that cross-city initiatives to share planning expertise can function both as policy-making networks and as markets for policy knowledge, as urban governance stakeholders strategically leverage intercity initiatives for sharing urban planning knowledge. Bidding to host sporting 'megaevents' highlights these networked entrepreneurial strategies. A comparative study of bids to host the Olympic Games over a twenty-year period shows that policy-making knowledge (templates, models, and best practices) shared between cities is both necessary for competing to host events, and represents 'policy commodities' that planning coalitions can use as part of their entrepreneurial portfolios. While much commentary on interurban policy making focuses on how policy practices are received by cities or mobilized by international businesses or policy makers, this paper signals to a multidirectional entrepreneurial strategy: although megaevents federations and sponsors developed megaevents knowledge networks to leverage urban planning for profit, many local development coalitions have incorporated these same networks into their competitive strategies.