Mega sport events and spatial management: zoning space across Rio’s 2016 Olympic city

ABSTRACT

Hosting the Olympic Games demands the efficient and effective sequestration of public space across the city to stage official sports, cultural, and commercial activities. Specifically, this paper examines how fast-tracked urban development processes create exclusive, commercial enclaves to maximize leverageable benefits for external actors. We focus on the case of Rio 2016, drawing on: (i) observations across the city and event zones, including Live Site, Last Mile, and transit spaces, (ii) interviews with key event, policy and visitor economy stakeholders, (iii) documentary analysis of Rio’s plans and promises outlined in official bid documentation, and (iv) supplementary sources documenting Olympic planning effects. Our findings illustrate how the legal power of the Host City Contract and highly-circumscribed Olympic regulations create the conditions for managing urban space that enables the circulation of visitor flows to – and the containment of consumption within – newly privatized, temporarily constructed urban zones that favour global interests.

KEYWORDS:

• Mega sport events
• spatial management
• visitor economy
• event zones
• visitor circulation and containment
• Rio 2016 Olympic Games

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

David McGillivray David holds a Chair in Event and Digital Cultures. His research focuses on two main areas of activity. The first area of interest is the contemporary significance of events and festivals (sporting and cultural) as markers of identity and mechanisms for the achievements of wider economic, social and cultural externalities. The second main area of interest is the affordances of digital and social media in enabling (and constraining) participation in civic life, including in relation to major sport events. He has published extensively on the topic of accelerated leisure cultures and digital technology, focusing on the wider social and cultural implications for producers, consumers and regulators across the lifespan. He is the co-editor of Digital Leisure Cultures: Critical Perspectives (Routledge, 2017) and co-author of Event Policy: From Theory to Strategy (Routledge, 2012) and Event Bidding: Politics, Persuasion and Resistance (Routledge, 2017). He is currently Deputy Editor of the Annals of Leisure Research and sits on the Editorial Board of Leisure Studies.

Michael B. Duignan Mike’s research interests include socioeconomic, political and spatial analysis of mega- events, right through to smaller grassroots cultural and sporting festivals – namely the opportunities and challenges host small business communities’ face during the planning, delivery, and ‘legacy’ stages. He is also interested in regional and tourism development, specifically the role of ‘slow tourism’ in destination management and place making.

Eduardo Mielke Eduardo is Head of Research and Associate Professor at King Abdul Aziz University, Saudi Arabia. He specialises in tourism planning, development and management in the context of cultural and sporting contexts.