Sustainable Physical Legacy Development Via Large-Scale International Sport Events
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Master's Degree Thesis Sustainable Physical Legacy Development via Large-Scale International Sport Events Elin Olsson Elizabeth Moore Marvin Lannefeld S. Solaleh Abedi Blekinge Institute of Technology Karlskrona, Sweden 2020 Examiner: Henrik Ny Ph.D. Primary advisor: Pierre Johnson M.Sc. Secondary advisor: Giles Thomson Ph.D. Sustainable Physical Legacy Development via Large-Scale International Sport Events .+0.4410 .+;#$'5*113' #37+0#00'('.& 1.#.'*$'&+ Blekinge Institute of Technology Karlskrona, Sweden 2020 Thesis submitted for completion of Master of Strategic Leadership towards Sustainability, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Karlskrona, Sweden. $453#%5 In an increasingly urban society, cities pose both challenges and opportunities to move towards a more sustainable society. This study examines the role of large-scale international sport events in sustainable development within host cities, with a focus on the physical legacies that they leave behind. The research seeks to offer guidance to enhance sustainable physical legacy development, informed by Games’ strategy documents, impacts on host cities and professional opinions. The research was conducted using three key methods: an examination of key strategy documents, a literature review of academic and grey literature to record infrastructure projects and interviews with professionals who had worked with four specific Games (Vancouver 2010, London 2012, Gold Coast 2018 and Birmingham 2022). The findings implied that social infrastructure and transport projects were most commonly recorded and that the sport event industry operates with a Triple Bottom Line understanding of sustainability. Based on the findings, a design thinking framework was used to design and propose guidelines. The guidelines recommend a shift to the 3-nested dependencies model and propose the development of key skills (leadership for sustainability and flexibility) and key actions (sustainability education/communication and audit). ':813&4: Sustainability, Infrastructure, Olympics, Commonwealth Games, Legacy i Statement of Contribution Back in December 2019, four master’s students found each other over a shared interest in how sports events could become more sustainable. They were: Solaleh, who holds a medical degree and lived in many different cultures, originally from Iran; Elin, a Swedish water-engineer with a heart for social actions; Lizzie, who is an Oxford graduate with academic training in French and Russian plus experience in sports events; and lastly, Marvin, who has a background in urban planning and sustainable mobility from Germany. An exceptional thesis process of five months enabled these master students, with diverse backgrounds, to form a highly efficient thesis team. The diversity in their backgrounds and character were great strengths, while dealing with the uncertainty and complexity of writing a degree project. Elin was a committed, thoughtful, and hard-working member of the thesis team. She led several group meetings very effectively. Elin always played an active role in group discussion and found balance between critical reflection and encouragement. She always stayed positive and upbeat and lived up to her can-do attitude. Elin took the leading role for the assessment of Games sustainability definitions and descriptions – this involved leading group discussion and analysis for this section, as well as writing up the methodology, results, and discussion section for this part. To achieve results for this part, Elin designed a framework that could be used as an adaptation of the FSSD. Solaleh was an honest, hard-working, and thoughtful member of the thesis team. She completed the tasks that she took on in an excellent manner. Solaleh also played an active role in reaching out to interviewees, but more specifically, she took the leading role for the Assessment of Games’ Impacts on Host Cities – this involved leading group discussion and analysis for this section, as well as writing up the methodology, results and discussion section for those chapters. As part of this section, Solaleh designed a table to improve our analysis of the results. Memorably, Solaleh hosted a team social event, which was great for team morale during a challenging time in which had significantly altered our ways of working. Elizabeth was a committed, enthusiastic, and honest member of the thesis team and encouraged the group to learn while doing. She took the lead in the analysis of interviews, using coding to make sense of all the information found in the interviews. She developed a framework for categorising infrastructure projects for the purpose of assessing Games’ impacts on host cities. She initiated and led a huge number of interviews, and as a native English speaker, Elizabeth has provided guidance in wording and phrasing which has been greatly appreciated. Elizabeth created a project plan and led a key planning meeting to ensure that the team stayed on track. She took the lead in the identification of reasons for Games' impacts on host cities. It is impressive how much she gets done in a short time. Marvin has been focused on setting the scene for the thesis. He did a great job of structuring all information found in literature and writing it all up into the introduction. He pulled out the stops when it came to securing interviewees and ended up being the lead contact for ten out of sixteen interviewees, additionally, he took the lead in the design of the interview questions for the semi- guided interviews. Marvin was also responsible for design – both by giving our documents a nice overall structure and lovely graphics and by proposing and guiding the creation of the resulting guidelines with the design thinking framework. All done in a very open, and efficient manner. Memorably, he took the role of the tech master and came up with effective and fun designs for skype meetings. ii There is no need to say that all members contributed to all parts of the thesis. Everyone researched information that is presented in the introduction and has led and transcribed interviews. Additionally, everyone assessed information that led to the outcome of all result chapters and the guidelines. All members of the thesis team were active in discussions and results and contributed to the write-up and presentation of the thesis. iii Acknowledgements We, Elin Olsson, Elizabeth Moore, Marvin Lannefeld and S. Solaleh Abedi would like to express our gratitude and appreciation to the wonderful network of advisors, learning facilitators, sport- and sustainability professionals, designers and everyone else who supported us throughout this learning and writing journey, especially in these challenging times of a global pandemic. First, we would like to thank our primary advisor Pierre Johnson M.Sc. for his excellent guidance and recommendations throughout the whole thesis process. His sharp eye and supportive comments helped us throughout the whole process. We are also grateful for the encouragement of our secondary advisor Giles Thomson Ph.D., who took the time to give us valuable insights and contacts from his professional background, in urban planning and his experience in working with the London 2012 Olympics. We are sending a special ‘thank you’ to the professionals who took time out of their busy schedules to participate in video interviews with us. Because of the European GDPR-law, you will stay the unnamed heroes of our thesis. Please know that we will be forever appreciative of the time we spent together and that without your input this thesis would not be the same, and probably would not have been possible at all. We would also like to thank Karl-Henrik Robèrt, Dave Waldron and Göran Broman for establishing the MSLS program, enabling us to experience this unique learning journey. Our gratitude also goes to Merlina Missimer who as the program director of MSLS had to deal with an unprecedented situation and still supported us during those challenging times. Furthermore, we would like to emphasize how grateful we are for all the guidance and support we have been given by all the MSLS-staff. Lastly, we would also like to thank the MSLS class of 2020 for sharing this experience with us, your support and friendship were invaluable. iv Executive Summary 0531&6%5+10 Human activities are systematically undermining the ecological and social systems. The longer society waits to transition to a sustainable state, the more harm will have been done, making it even harder to sustain human society and causing the transition and the situation to be even more severe (Broman and Robèrt 2017). Cities have the potential to play a key role in this transition. Urban areas produce large proportions of global emissions (United Nations 2015), but also provide space and opportunity for innovation (United Nations Development Programme 2016). Infrastructure could play an important role in cities' potential for a transition towards a sustainable society. All sport events bring negative impacts on the environment (Meurer and Lins 2017; Zouain et al. 2019), however, there is also potential to create lasting impacts for the host cities and support the movement towards sustainability. There are many examples of how sport events are occasions for wide-ranging city redevelopment (VanWynsberghe, Derom, and Maurer 2012). Both the Olympics and Commonwealth Games are large-scale international multi-sport events which for each instalment move to another location and bring significant infrastructure development to their host cities. If sport events overall contribute or counteract a move towards a more sustainable society has been a controversial topic (Boykoff and Mascerenhas 2016; VanWynsberghe, Derom, and Maurer 2012) and cannot be answered with certainty. All planning choices are a series of delicate balances and trade-offs, as it is with all projects that are assessed regarding sustainability. But because they represent some of the largest global events with the highest budgets in the world, the Olympic and Commonwealth Games both bring transformative potential for their host cities. The term sustainability is ambiguous. If a common understanding of sustainability could be found perhaps sport events would be able to achieve more positive outcomes.