Table Of ContentMEGA 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
The 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. This 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
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017
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Acknowledgments
The 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 offered by Valerie Thomas, 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 staff have been invaluable resources. The research was supported in
part by grants from the Olympic Studies Centre and the US National
Science Foundation. The 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? The 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 This 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 objec-
tives with urban development goals. Yet, as the IOC attempts to be rele-
vant 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. This 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
This book evaluates why cities choose to bid for the Olympics, why
Olympic bids fail, and whether cities can benefit from failed bids.
Mega-event planning is an expensive and risky proposition for cit-
ies. In a best case scenario, a city will win its bid and go on to host
© The 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
