How cities are redefining the meaning of Olympic legacy

I have long been fascinated by how spaces change when crowds move in. I commute through North Greenwich station - where the O2 is - and it never ceases to amaze me how that experience changes daily based on who is playing the arena. Of course North Greenwich is far from alone. Almost every settlement in the country has a space transformed by a sporting event, a weekly market, or even an annual fete.

The far extreme of this is, of course, the Olympics - an event at such a scale that a small city must be built to house its few weeks of events. What is perhaps even more fascinating than how crowds change a place is what our approach to designing for them says about the society we are.

The key challenge with spaces built for crowds is what they become once the crowd has left. A report by the IOC in 2022 tracked nine hundred and twenty three venues from twenty five summer and twenty three winter games, noting that 92% of all the permanent venues were still in use, with only 4% closed, inactive or abandoned (the remainder had been demolished). The report paints a rosy picture of cities left with vibrant venues that boost the local economy for decades to come.

It acknowledges the growing scale of the games, noting that for the first modern games in Athens (1896) just eight venues were needed, whereas this rose to thirty five for the summer games in Rio (2016). It goes on to note that the proportion of temporary venues has increased over time, seeming to suggest the cities are not then blighted by large empty venues.

Just a scroll through the first couple of pages of google results tells a slightly different story though. Many of these venues and their adjoining acres of crowd channelling public spaces may still be in use - but they are not thriving hubs of revitalised city districts. They are all but empty, their vast infrastructure dwarfing the population that uses it. The giant venues often becoming something more akin to an oversized leisure centre, slowly mouldering as the upkeep is just too high.

There are success stories though. London (2012) worked hard from the beginning to imagine Stratford after the games, and a little over a decade later, it is now bedding in to become a successful piece of city. New housing, educational and cultural venues are beginning to complete on site, and the Olympic Park itself has opened a large green space to all of East London. A wonderful place to spend a summer weekend afternoon. In the decades to come the memory of the Olympics will fade, but the city will have grown up around it, claiming the Olympic infrastructure with the sheer volume of people that London attracts.

It has taken a lot of work and investment though and not everywhere can or will be able to do this. News reports suggest that Rio’s (2016) ambitious legacy plan has largely run out of steam, the good intentions never seeming to materialise.

>> Also read: Championing sustainability: How Paris 2024 is reshaping the future of the Olympics

The next two summer games are trying a new strategy, seemingly informed as much by this ‘white elephant’ syndrome as the climate crisis. Paris (2024) has stated that 95% of the venues for the games are existing or temporary. Much of the money has been spent renovating or rejuvenating existing venues, hoping to stitch severed suburbs into the centre. The results will unfold over the next few weeks but it’s a bold strategy, and could offer a model to future host cities. Los Angeles (2028) claims to be a games of even more radical reuse with the IOC stating that 100% of the venues are pre-existing.

We are a long way off from 2028 but I find here a very interesting shift in human culture. Within my lifetime the Olympics has gone from being an event which governments used as an opportunity to demonstrate wealth to the outside - pouring billions into venues that will only truly be inhabited for a few weeks - to one that is being utilised to fast track planned urban rejuvenation.

In the past these global temporary events catered entirely to the eyes of the outside, but now the balance seems to have shifted. The way governments are planning for these next few Olympics suggests they care more about the crowds that live in a place than the ones that come for just a few weeks in a sporting summer. It seems unlikely that all will succeed in this ambition but the shift, to me, feels like a step in the right direction for humanity.

>> Also read: Olly Watts of ES Global on the Paris Olympics: ‘Even if I say so myself, it’s magnificently iconic’