The Sustainability of the Olympic Landscape

Between International and Local Project

Abstract

There is an undeniable economic link between these cities, thus forming a global landscape (Sassen, 2004). In order to assert their presence at the international level, these cities are particularly keen to hold important events –including mega-events, and most notably, Summer Olympics (Smith, 2012)– through which they can ensure their metropolitan development in multiple directions. The Olympic Games have the capacity to organize, within the host city, a true cycle of life characterized by a pre- event and post-event. The issue then becomes for the metropolis to find ways to instrumentalize this mega-event to give a long-term vision of its cultural, economic, and infrastructural development (Cashman and Hughes, 1999; Ritchie, 2000; Goad, 2001; Searle, 2002; Preuss, 2007; Hiller, 2006; Bondonio and Mela, 2008).

More specifically, this propotition is based to leads to a reflection on the urban landscape’s capacity of transformation and its mutation through the choice for the conception of the public and private actors around the same controversy. This research is supported by a qualitative approach based on a flexible research design. A structuralist and interpretative approach was undertaken both for data collection and for the analysis of the selected content. More specifically, this study considers the case studies of Rome (1960), Montreal(1976) and London(2012), both in their pre-event and post-event phases. The objective is to evaluate the organization of the event from its conception to its management, as well as how its heritage and its transformative action were considered. In the end, this research shows that the Olympic Games have an operational value of concertation that interweaves different scales: international, metropolitan, and urban.