Olympic legacy and cultural tourism: Exploring the facets of Athens' Olympic heritage

This study examines the effects of the Olympic Games on Athens’ cultural tourism and the city’s potential to leverage the Olympic legacy in synergy with its rich heritage in order to enhance its tourism product during the post-Games period. In doing so, a qualitative and interpretive approach was employed. This includes a literature review on Athens’ 2004 Olympics to identify the sport facilities and regeneration projects, which constitute the Olympic legacy and heritage. Based on that, an empirical analysis was undertaken, by collecting official documents about the 2004 Olympics, and conducting five semi-structured interviews with tourism/administrative officials. The findings indicate that the Olympiad contributed significantly to Athens’ built and human heritage, revealing the dimensions of new venues/facilities, infrastructure, transportation and aesthetic image of the city, and human capital enhancement. Hence, the Games affected to the multifaceted representation and reconstruction of the city’s identity and cultural heritage. However, the potential afforded from the post-Olympic Athens remains unrealised due to lack of strategic planning/management. The study concludes that there is a need to develop cross-leveraging synergies between the Olympic legacy and cultural tourism for the host city. Finally, a strategic planning framework for leveraging post-Games Olympic tourism is suggested in order to maximise the benefits of Olympic legacy and heritage in a host city’s tourism development

Branding Stratford: Social Representation and the Re-making of Place

As part of the societal world, architecture and urban space do not have any 'objective' quality. They are representations. Their meaning is produced through the negotiation and interaction of individuals, groups and classes. Yet, such 'subjective' meanings do have a 'material' relevance, as they reflect a dialectical process between the functions, forms, ownership and practices of space. They reveal construal and construction: the way in which architectural spaces are represented on the one hand, and the way in which they are physically constructed and used on the other. Nowhere does this become more evident in our current society than in the arguments around urban renewal and regeneration. The Westfield Stratford City is a typical example. Part of the vast process of the urban regeneration of East London prompted by London 2012 Olympic Games, Westfield is a massive complex of luxury shops, restaurants, bars and five star hotels. It is seen by investors and local and national political authorities as capable of transforming Stratford into a site for shopping, tourism and leisure. It does this in numerous ways, one of which involves reconfiguring the image of the region through the press and media - through visual imagery and linguistic manipulations that promote a neoliberal agenda of gentrification that simultaneously devalue the existent societal structures and communities in the area. This paper offers a Critical Discourse Analysis of the manipulation of Stratford's image by government, business and the media and suggests that the purely financially motivated misrepresentation it reveals, is typical of the urban regeneration ethos at work across the developed world today

Mediating the Asian Olympics: The Summer Games – Image Projection and Gaze Reception

Every Olympic Games involves a dual process of attempting to project favourable images of the host city/country/region and seeking to manage the international gaze that is invited as a key rationale for staging the Games in the first place. How each site seeks to be seen varies, though, with historical, political, social, cultural, spatial and technological context. The three Summer Olympic Games that have taken place in East Asia all attempted to demonstrate in different ways that its host had arrived as a global force. A key variable in each case was the communicative apparatus available to hosts, guests and the world watching from afar before, during and after the event itself. This article addresses Tokyo 1964, Seoul 1988 and Beijing 2008, seeking to demonstrate how the balance of power to represent and be represented has changed significantly over the almost half a century spanning the first and the last Games