“The city” as developmental justification: claimsmaking on the urban through strategic planning

Abstract

Municipal governments produce a seemingly endless supply of urban strategic plans, which purport to define the city by making claims on its future development trajectories. Critics note that this claimsmaking on “the city” renders it conceptually vacuous and overextended. Yet it is essential to question the degree to which speculative policymaking is merely rhetorical. Discursive claimsmaking on the city through strategic planning documents is an important technique in urban politics—a form of targeted simplification that benefits particular stakeholders by defining the city around sites in which they are invested. Bids to host sporting “mega-events” like the Olympic Games are a case in point: event planning corporations routinely make claims on the city, which strategically simplify its forms and processes, often by defining the city in ways that mediate between particular land investment projects and broad visions for citywide development. The implication is that claimsmaking on the city through urban strategic planning is intentionally simplistic and acts as an ideological practice for justifying urban development projects.

Keywords:

• strategic planning
• discourse
• performativity
• urban land
• mega-event

Acknowledgments

Mark Davidson, Kevin Ward, and Seth Schindler provided helpful feedback on the paper, as did Richard Shearmur and two anonymous reviewers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Interview with CEO of a Swiss mega-event planning consultancy, June 2014.

2. Interview with IOC host cities program officer, August 2013

3. Bidding materials and institutional records were obtained from archives of sports federations (the US-based LA84 Olympic Legacy Foundation and the Swiss-based Olympic Studies Centre at IOC headquarters) and municipal archives in New York (Borough Councils in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and Queens, and the NYC 2012, Inc. Olympic bidding corporation) and Doha (Qatar University). These are interpreted using in-depth interviews with 30 sports sector consultants, program officers at international sports federations, and local planners in case study locations.

4. Madrid 16 (2007) Madrid 2016 Olympic Candidature File (vol. 1, p. 17); Cape Town 2004 (1996) Cape Town 2004 Olympic Candidature File (vol. 1, p. 5)

5. Groupment d’intérêt publique Paris 2012 (2003) Paris 2012 Olympic Candidature File (vol. 1, p. 33); Tokyo 2020 Olympic Bid Committee (2012) Tokyo 2020 Olympic Candidature File (vol. 1, p. 16)

6. Baku 2020 Applicant Bid Committee (2011) Candidature Acceptance Application for Baku to host the Games of the XXXII Olympiad in 2020 (p. 7); Doha 2020 (2011) Doha 2020: Applicant City (p. 4)

7. Istanbul Olympic Games Preparation and Organisation Council (2012), Istanbul 2020 Olympic Candidature File (vol. 1, p. 23)

8. Canonical discriminant analysis defines vectors in a data set that best separate observations into categories (e.g., typological themes used to define “the city”), based on respective values on the observations’ variables (e.g., institutional characteristics of each bid). These vectors are defined as , where F_km is the discriminant score for bid m in “city” theme k, X_pkm is the value of bid characteristic p for bid m in theme k, and C_p is the coefficient of each characteristic.

9. This function includes capital investment, the ratio of transportation to nontransportation investment, the amount of additional/Olympic-specific investment, the type of institution sponsoring the bid, and the type of institution guaranteeing financial shortfalls on the project. It correctly classifies 77% of cases in each group and is significantly related to the group classifications at a 99% level of confidence (Wilks’ Lambda = 0.41).

10. Moses, Robert (3 June 1967), The Saga of Flushing Meadow, New York World’s Fair 1964–1965 Corporation, Queens Library archives, Queensborough Library archives

11. Investment numbers are from New York World’s Fair 1964–1995 Progress Report, 15 August 1960, New York World’s Fair 1964–1965 Corporation, Queensborough Library archives

12. NYC 2012 (various years), Bid committee fundraising reports, NYC 2012 records at the New York Municipal Archives

13. New York City Planning Commission meeting minutes, docket N060046(A)ZRM (7 December 2005) & docket N080184(A)ZRM (2 July 2008); Hudson Yards Development Corporation meeting minutes (16 November 2005), http://www.hudsonyardsnewyork.com

14. Oliver Koppel and Jay Kriegel, in a New York city council hearing on “Land use issues related to the New York City proposal to host the Olympic Games in 2012” (29 April 2003), transcript from the Laguardia and Wagner Archives.

15. Doha 2020 Applicant File, p 88; in reference to the Qatar National Vision 2030, Qatar National Master Plan 2032, Qatar National Development Strategy 2011–2016, the national Transport Master Plan, and the Qatar Sport Venue Master Plan

16. Interview with CEO of a Doha-based architecture firm, May 2014

17. Doha 2020 Applicant File, p 3

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant [#BCS1333402]) and the International Olympic Committee (Postgraduate Research Fellowship Programme).