Lasting Legacies? Robert Oliver John Lauermann Mega Event Planning

MEGA EVENT PLANNING Series Editor: Eva Kassens-Noor FAILED OLYMPIC BIDS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF URBAN SPACE Lasting Legacies? Robert Oliver John Lauermann Mega Event Planning Series editor Eva Kassens-Noor Michigan State University East Lansing MI, USA Te Mega Event Planning Pivot series will provide a global and cross-disciplinary view into the planning for the world’s largest sporting, religious, cultural, and other transformative mega events. Examples include the Olympic Games, Soccer World Cups, Rugby championships, the Commonwealth Games, the Hajj, the World Youth Day, World Expositions, and parades. Tis series will critically discuss, analyze, and challenge the planning for these events in light of their legacies includ- ing the built environment, political structures, socio-economic systems, societal values, personal attitudes, and cultures. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/14808 Robert Oliver · John Lauermann Failed Olympic Bids and the Transformation of Urban Space Lasting Legacies? Robert Oliver John Lauermann Virginia Tech University City University of New York Blacksburg New York VA, USA NY, USA Mega Event Planning ISBN 978-1-137-59822-6 ISBN 978-1-137-59823-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59823-3 Library of Congress Control Number: 2017949191 © Te Editor(s) (if applicable) and Te Author(s) 2017 Te author(s) has/have asserted their right(s) to be identifed as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Tis work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifcally the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microflms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. Te use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specifc statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. Te publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, express or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. Te publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional afliations. Cover illustration: © Stephen Bonk/Fotolia.co.uk Printed on acid-free paper Tis Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by Springer Nature Te registered company is Macmillan Publishers Ltd. Te registered company address is: Te Campus, 4 Crinan Street, London, N1 9XW, United Kingdom Acknowledgments Te authors appreciate the assistance of Lewis Bellas for his collegiality and critical insight informing several of the arguments presented in this book. Frequent words of encouragement and editorial recom- mendations ofered by Valerie Tomas, Erik Olson, and Peter Goheen arrived at key moments in the writing process, forcing us to not only be patient, but concise. Over the years, the Olympic Study Centre archives and staf have been invaluable resources. Te research was supported in part by grants from the Olympic Studies Centre and the US National Science Foundation. Te Departments of Geography at Virginia Tech and Texas A&M have likewise supported the research and writing of this project, and we thank our colleagues at these institutions for their support. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the expertise and enthu- siasm of Eva Kassens-Noor and the entire team at Palgrave Macmillan for seeing this project through to fruition. v Contents 1 Why Bid? Te Logic of Pursuing Sports Mega-Events 1 2 Bidding and Urban Development 27 3 Policy Mobilities and the Bid 49 4 Planning Across Bids 69 5 Post-bid Legacies? 87 6 Post-bid Rescaling 107 7 Anti-bid Politics 129 8 Conclusion: Rethinking the Horizons of Failed Bids 147 Index 153 vii List of Figures Fig. 3.1 Origins of the bid consulting industry Constructed from corporate records, IOC archives, and interviews; reprinted from Lauermann (2014a) 57 ix List of Tables Table 4.1 International multisport events 75 Table 4.2 High frequency mega-event bidders 77 Table 7.1 Characteristics of recent anti-bid protests 138 xi 1 Why Bid? The Logic of Pursuing Sports Mega-Events Abstract Tis chapter presents some of the key shifts that have occurred in the Olympic bidding process. An apparent crisis in the lack of bid cities during recent mega-event competitions has prompted the International Olympic Committee to stress that bid cities should be looking to produce a positive urban legacy and to marry Olympic objectives with urban development goals. Yet, as the IOC attempts to be relevant by inviting cities to partake in legacy planning, there is an emerging concern that bid cities are using the bidding process to leverage urban development objectives that are at best only tangentially related to the bid. Tis chapter proposes that we have entered a new era of Olympic bidding that has fundamental implications for the “geography of failure.” Keywords Legacy planning · Leverage · Olympic Agenda 2020 Candidature process Tis book evaluates why cities choose to bid for the Olympics, why Olympic bids fail, and whether cities can beneft from failed bids. Mega-event planning is an expensive and risky proposition for cities. In a best case scenario, a city will win its bid and go on to host © Te Author(s) 2017 1 R. Oliver and J. Lauermann, Failed Olympic Bids and the Transformation of Urban Space, Mega Event Planning, DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-59823-3_1 2 R. Oliver and J. Lauermann the world’s most-watched event while simultaneously generating urban development legacies. In a worst case scenario, a city will win its bid but go on to experience a “winner’s curse” of cost overruns and poorly planned, under-utilized infrastructure. Tere is a robust debate over the costs and benefts of hosting the Olympics, as scholars and practitioners across a range of disciplines have analyzed the impact of mega-events on urban policy, planning, and practice. However, there is another pos- sibility: many cities bid for the Olympics but go on to see their bids fail. Tis latter group of mega-event planning stories requires us to ask a diferent question: what are the costs and benefts of planning for the Olympics, especially when the plans fail? Te bidding process creates far more losers than winners, by design. Between 1990 and 2016, there were 13 Olympic host cities. During that same period, 67 cities submitted 99 bids to the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and even more cities developed preliminary bids during intra-national competitions to become their country’s ofcial bid city. Te IOC secures the type of Olympics it wants by pitting cities against each other, and thus failure is a core characteristic of mega-event planning. However, despite the fact that failure is a central feature of the process, there is comparatively little research on the urban impacts of all this failed bidding. Our book seeks to expand the geography of mega- event analysis, building from a well-developed literature on Olympic host cities to analyze the urban efects of mega-event planning in unsuc- cessful bidding cities. We demonstrate that failed Olympic bids can have a signifcant impact on urban planning, policy, and land use—despite, or sometimes even because of, their failure to bring the Games to town. Tis chapter introduces how mega-event planning can generate urban development, as plans are designed to generate legacy impacts and as the planning process is leveraged to achieve development goals. While there is much debate over the success rate of legacy and lever- aging approaches, they are widely circulating tropes in urban politics. In Chap. 2, we track how mega-event planners use “framing narratives” about event-led development to catalyze and mobilize political support for their projects. Olympic bids have become a vehicle for promoting a wide range of development ambitions, which may be only tangentially related to the Games. We show that bidding is often a politically 1 Why Bid? The Logic of Pursuing Sports Mega-Events 3 strategic exercise, and the strategy is often shared geographically across cities through the mobility of planning expertise (as we detail in Chap. 3), and temporally as strategic ideas are recycled from one bid project into the next (as we detail in Chap. 4). While individual bidding projects may fail, the political strategies that motivate Olympic bidding live on when failed bids are able to catalyze legacy efects (Chap. 5) or when the strategies are rescaled into smaller but nonetheless ambitious planning projects (Chap. 6). Tis under-the- radar form of planning allows local elites to pursue long-term development strategies during and after a failed Olympic bid. In this way, bidding relies on a “politics of contingency” (Chap. 7) that allows mega- event boosters to contradictorily promote bids as low risk preliminary plans yet high impact plans that can generate urban development even if they fail. However, citizens are increasingly aware of and concerned about the process. As we document in Chap. 7, a growing cohort of anti- bid protest movements has sought to contest not only the Olympics, but the use of failed Olympic bids as development vehicles. Bid failure due to competition is quite diferent from that caused by local opposition movements.

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