How to Bid Better for the Olympics: A Participatory Mega-Event Planning Strategy for Local Legacies

Abstract

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Several cities have canceled their Olympic bids in recent years because of local protests and referenda. Bidding cities now face a new political reality as they debate whether a bid is in the best interests of local stakeholders. We present a case study of Boston's (MA) ultimately unsuccessful bid to be the U.S. city selected to host the 2024 Olympic Games. Boston 2024, a nonprofit organization, prepared 2 sequential bids. We ask whether, how, and why Boston 2024 changed its planning approach from the 1st to the 2nd bid to respond to significant protests over its failure to meaningfully involve stakeholders, identify specific legacies, and provide accurate cost details. Our findings are limited by our focus on a single case, the small number of interviewees, and the constraints of ethnographic work. Boston 2024 shifted from an elite-driven process to a more inclusive one, from making generic claims about the impact of hosting the Games to describing local legacies, and from opaque budgets to transparent ones. Boston 2024 did not involve city planners in meaningful ways or engage fully with opponents. These changes were thus not sufficient to overcome substantial local distrust and opposition.

Takeaway for practice: Cities considering mega-event bids should encourage a fully participatory planning process that provides genuine local legacies and is transparent about costs and who will bear overruns. City planners would contribute significantly to bid planning that meets these objectives. Cities should also pressure Olympic organizations to make supportive changes in their selection requirements.

Keywords:

• costs
• legacy
• mega-event
• Olympic bid
• public participation

Acknowledgments

We thank Boston 2024, No Boston Olympics, and No Boston 2024 staff and liaisons for their willingness to share their perceptions, ideas, and plans with us and for welcoming us to Boston as researchers and participants in shaping the Olympic bid. We express our gratitude to the many academics and planning professionals who reviewed drafts of our article and provided constructive feedback.

Supplemental Material

Supplemental data for this article can be found on the publisher's website.

Notes

1.  Inflation adjusted to USD 2016. Numbers calculated from 37 bidding documents for Games between 2004 and 2020 (bids date from 1996 to 2013). Records obtained from the Olympic Studies Centre in Lausanne, Switzerland.

2.  Participants in the meetings were assigned numbers; each number was allowed 1 to 2 min at the microphone, and the only way to receive a number was to fill out a marketing survey for Boston 2024.

3.  A hackathon is “an event, typically lasting several days, in which a large number of people meet to engage in collaborative computer programming” (n.d., Oxford Dictionaries). A charrette is “a public meeting or workshop devoted to a concerted effort to solve a problem or plan the design of something” (n.d., Oxford Dictionaries).

4.  Before the interviews, we sought informed consent. Interviews were transcribed and transcripts were sent to the interviewee for verification of the accurate representation of answers and expressed opinion.

5.  Our research approach passed both internal review board (IRB) applications (Michigan State University IRB No. x13-451e and Brown IRB No. 1509001337), which shows the ethical compliance of the proposed research project.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eva Kassens-Noor

Eva Kassens-Noor ([email protected]) is an associate professor at Michigan State University. She researches how mega-events transform cities.

John Lauermann

John Lauermann ([email protected]) is an assistant professor at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York. He is an urban geographer who researches the political economy of mega-events and mega-projects.