Mega-Event and Stadium Legacies in the Global South: The Case of South Africa

The lasting social value of mega events: experiences from green point community in Cape Town, South Africa

“…What is important is that the findings complement other comparative studies (e.g. Knott et al, 2015;Bek et al, 2019;Bama and Tichaawa, 2020), drawing similarities between the findings. As such, the worth of the findings in this study remain useable, and the idea of leveraging social legacy continues to be a matter of debate.…”

The Urban Legacy Impacts of Mega-Event Stadia: Selected Case Studies from South Africa

“…These mega-events have often been justified as catalytic in terms of their ability to engender urban transformation and other legacy benefits Tichaawa, 2018, 2019;Kim et al, 2019;Müller and Gaffney, 2018). According to Philips and Barnes (2015), the planning of urban development in the developing context involves making the urban landscape more livable by addressing challenges around urban poverty, inequality and environmental decay, and as such, urban planners tend to rely on leveraging megaevents as urban planning strategies for their development related impacts, a position which is acknowledged by other scholars in the area (Bama and Tichaawa, 2020;Byers et al, 2019;Ferrari and Guala, 2017;Steinbrink et al, 2011). In addition, urban planners and event proponents have been noted to use the hosting of mega-events along four integral dimensions, in relation to which scale should be considered: visitor attractiveness; mediated reach; cost, and transformative impact Tichaawa, 2018, 2019;Müller, 2017).…”

“…According to Cottle (2010), such investments often attract a high premium to the host community which, as opined by Müller and Gaffney (2018), include capital cost of material interventions in the city such as the upgrading or building of new sports venues, roads, railway lines, airports, conference centres, security systems, and hotels and often runs into billions of dollars, which is several times the operational cost of putting on the event itself (Humphrey and Fraser, 2016;Gold and Gold, 2016). The escalating costs, and the increasingly substantial sums of taxpayers' resources that are regularly sunk into preparing the stadia for such hosting activities, often are followed by either low keyed legacy outcomes with little or scant policy learning taking place (Bama and Tichaawa, 2020;Girginov, 2011;Grix and Brannagan, 2017;Kim et al, 2019;Leopkey and Parent, 2012;Tomlinson, 2014). Legacy should, therefore, be considered as a high-risk strategy for justifying exorbitant expenditures on sport mega-events with no dedicated focus on research that informs the existence and process through which sport mega-events enhance the attainment of legacies (Byers et al, 2019;Zimbalist, 2017).…”

“…Legacy should, therefore, be considered as a high-risk strategy for justifying exorbitant expenditures on sport mega-events with no dedicated focus on research that informs the existence and process through which sport mega-events enhance the attainment of legacies (Byers et al, 2019;Zimbalist, 2017). Extant literature related to sport event legacies suggest that legacy planning should be adopted at the inception stage of the conceptualisation of the events and that an impacts and implementations team be constituted and adequately funded after the event in order to ensure that the legacy plan is executed and monitored in the events' aftermath -especially legacy considerations around infrastructure linked to stadia (Bama and Tichaawa, 2020).…”

“…The stadium can be used to promote the development of other activities to ensure its financial sustainability in the long-term The stadium is a "White Elephant" (waste of public money) and should be demolished Mounting evidence, especially in the developing context, presents challenges to the ability of mega-events in producing sustainably positive stadium infrastructure legacies (Bama and Tichaawa, 2020;Boykoff, 2014;Cottle, 2010;Molloy and Chetty, 2015). In this vein, a significant portion of Cape Town respondents (57.4%) indicated that the maintenance costs of the stadium were exorbitant, while 25.9% and 28.5% gave similar responses in Durban and Port Elizabeth, respectively (V9).…”