The challenge of urban design in securing post-event legacies of Olympic Parks

Olympic Parks demand a very distinctive built environment in order to function for their primary purpose, namely to host major sporting competitions. These spaces, however, require substantial reconfiguration in the post-event mode to ensure viable, mixed use and liveable places. This paper evaluates the challenges of transforming Olympic Parks, using evidence from four past hosts: Munich (1972), Sydney (2000), London (2012) and Rio de Janeiro (2016). The discussion raises questions about retaining the ceremonial focus of the Olympic Park and whether a more decentralised model might make the associated urban design and planning legacies more deliverable for future host cities

The challenge of urban design in securing post-event legacies of Olympic Parks

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Urban Design

The achievement of sustainability and legacies by the host cities of the Summer Olympiads, 2012–2024

Since the emergence of the concept of sustainable development, the Olympic Games have become a vehicle to demonstrate and promote the principles and practices of sustainability. The aim of this paper is to explain and evaluate how the application of sustainable development in the context of the Summer Olympic Games has evolved. Two processes have been influential in this change: first, the institutional expectations of the International Olympic Committee have encouraged greater responsibility towards the creation of legacies by potential host cities through the IOC Charter, the Olympic Agenda 2020, and the Olympic Agenda 2020+5; and second, the context and inventiveness of host cities has created new perspectives on sustainability to secure the event and raise its global profile. This paper will focus on the sustainability benchmarks established in London 2012 and evaluate whether these have been continued or extended in the subsequent editions of the Summer Games in Rio de Janeiro (2016), Tokyo (2021) and Paris (2024). The changing discourses reveal the tensions between the IOC’s agendas for the event, the motivations of the host cities and the realities of delivery in changing socio-economic and political circumstances. The discussion demonstrates the difficulty in incorporating the environmental imperative into the planning process when external pressures become too grea