The Regeneration Games: Commodities, Gifts and the Economics of London 2012*

Abstract

This paper considers contradictions between two concurrent and tacit conceptions of the Olympic ‘legacy’, setting out one conception that understands the games and their legacies as gifts alongside and as counterpoint to the prevailing discourse, which conceives Olympic assets as commodities. The paper critically examines press and governmental discussion of legacy, in order to locate these in the context of a wider perspective contrasting ‘gift’ and ‘commodity’ Olympics – setting anthropological conceptions of gift-based sociality as a necessary supplement to contractual and dis-embedded socio-economic organizational assumptions underpinning the commodity Olympics. Cost-benefit planning is central to modern city building and mega-event delivery. The paper considers the insufficiency of this approach as the exclusive paradigm within which to frame and manage a dynamic socio-economic and cultural legacy arising from the 2012 games.

Notes

[1] See, for example, Sennett, who argues that ‘good city builders of the past … did more than just represent the existing social and political conditions of their times. They sought to interpret and so to transmute the material conditions of the political economy through the expressive medium of walls and windows, volumes and perspectives – an art that concentrated on details, compounded specific discoveries about space into an urban whole. The art of urban design is a craft work’ (Sennett, ‘Capitalism and the City’, 121). Other authors (Parkinson and Boddy, 21) have identified the characteristics of good city building as being linked to enhancing social cohesion, while those seeking to develop a ‘new urbanism’ have focused upon the potentiality for renewed forms of democracy to create cities that are built upon disagreement and conflict ‘but within a framework of universal rights designed to build disciplines of empowerment’ (Amin and Thrift, Cities, 6).

[2] Gregory, ‘Kula Gift Exchange and Capitalist Commodity Exchange’. Further relevant discussions of ‘gift economies’ include Hyde, The Gift; Polanyi (1944); Polanyi et al., Trade and Markets in the Early Empires; Mauss, The Gift. ‘Legacy momentum’ is a concept developed as part of an assessment undertaken by London East Research Institute as part of a broad analysis of the prospects for a good legacy from the London 2012 games. This was published (May 2007) by the London Assembly in a report: A Lasting Legacy for London? Assessing the Legacy of the Olympic Games and Paralympic Games. London, Greater London Authority (May 2007).

[3] Department of Culture, Media and Sport, Transcript of Oral Evidence.

[4] National Audit Office, ‘Preparations for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

[5] Department of Culture, Media and Sport, Transcript of Oral Evidence.

[6] On this consensus among business and academic authors, see, for example, Donovan, East London's Economy and the Olympics; Evans, ‘London 2012’.

[7] Department of Culture, Media and Sport, Transcript of Oral Evidence.

[8]‘ARUP London Olympics 2012 Costs and Benefits Summary’.

[9] Lee, The Race for the 2012 Olympics.

[10] For a detailed ‘insider’ analysis of this process, see Lee, The Race for the 2012 Olympics. Lee was Communications Director for the London 2012 bid team.

[11] International Olympic Committee, London Candidate File, vol. 1, 36.

[12] See Department of Communities and Local Government (2007), Thames Gateway Delivery Plan, available at hhtp://communities.gov.uk/publications/thamesgateway/deliveryplan, accessed 18 April 2008, and National Audit Office, ‘Preparations for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games’.

[13] Barney et al., Selling the Five Rings, 275–88.

[14] Poynter, ‘From Beijing to Bow Creek’, 7–8.

[15] See Hamnett, Unequal City, 1–21 and Poynter, ‘From Beijing to Bow Creek’, 288–316.

[16] Hamnett, Unequal City, 243.

[17] See, for example, London Organizing Committee of the Olympic Games, Towards a One Planet 2012; and Mayor of London. Five Legacy Commitments'.

[18] Newham Council, Regeneration Projects: Stratford City.

[19]‘What Is the Olympic Games Global Impact Study?’, Olympic Review, June 2006, available at http://multimedia.olympic.org/pdf/en_report_1077.pdf, accessed 15 June 2008; Philippe Furrer, Sustainable Olympic Games, a dream or a reality?

See, for example, the IOC regulations governing the procedure for selecting the host city for 2008: IOC, ‘Games of the XX1X Olympiad, in 2008 Host City, Candidate Acceptance Procedure’, available at http://multimedia.olympic.org/pdf/en_report_295.pdf, accessed 15 June 2008.

[21] Burbank et al., Olympic Dreams.

[22] National Audit Office, ‘Preparations for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games’.

[23] Ibid., 13.

[24] Flyvberg et al., Megaprojects and Risk.

[25] National Audit Office, ‘Preparations for the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games’, and ‘Preparing for Sporting Success at the London 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games and Beyond’.

[26] Flyvberg et al., Megaprojects and Risk.

[27] Ibid., 11.

[28] See, for example, The Metro, ‘The London 2012 Logo, the Blogosphere Is Angry’, available at http://www.metro.co.uk/news/article.html?in_article_id=51740&in_page_id=34, accessed 20 April 2008; Ross Lydall, ‘The London Assembly, the Olympics and More Doom and Gloom for Ken’, Evening Standard 25 Feb. 2008, available at http://lydall.thisislondon.co.uk/2008/02/the-london-asse.html; Paul Kelso, ‘Parliament and Public Misled over Olympics Budget says MPs’, Guardian, 22 April 2008.

[29] Paul Routledge, ‘Ken's Gold Muddle’, London Daily Mirror, 18 Jan. 2008.

[30] See, for example, Booth, ‘Gifts of Corruption: Ambiguities of Obligation in the Olympic Movement’, 43–68.

[31] Offer, ‘Between the Gift and the Market, the Economy of Regard’, 450–76.

[32] The lyrics from the Beijing opening ceremony song provides recent evidence of BOCOG and IOC commitments to a strong articulation of these ideas (of family, sharing and mutuality). For example: ‘you and me, from one world, heart to heart, we are one family, for dreams we travel, thousands of miles we meet in Beijing, come together, the joy we share, you and me, from one world, forever we are one family’. Lyrics and music were composed by Chen Qigang. These commitments are instituted in the daily working of the IOC – in the work, for instance, of Olympic Solidarity (Chappelet and Kubler-Mabbott, 2008).

[33] Barney et al., Selling the Five Rings, is the most detailed account of the emergence of a commercialized Olympic movement.

[34] Hyde, The Gift, 4.

[35] Ibid.

[36] For instance, Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific; Sahlins, Stone Age Economics; and Mauss, The Gift.

[37] Hyde, The Gift, 35.

[38] Auge, Non-places: Introduction to an Anthropology of Supermodernity.

[39] Philostratus, ‘On Athletics’, 214.

[40] Sacrifices, for Mauss, are gifts of a particular kind: given to the gods: ‘The relationships that exist between these contracts and exchanges among humans and those between men and the gods throw light on a whole aspect of the theory of sacrifice. First, they are perfectly understood, particularly in those societies in which, although contractual and economic rituals are practised between men, these men are the masked incarnations, often shaman priest-sorcerers, possessed by the spirit whose name they bear. In reality, they merely act as representatives of the spirits, because these exchanges and contracts not only bear people and things along in their wake, but also the sacred beings that, to a greater or lesser extent, are associated with them. This is very clearly the case in the Tlingit potlatch … and in the Eskimo potlatch.’ Mauss, The Gift, 20.

[41] On the Olympics and the World Cup as mega-events, see Roche, Mega-Events and Modernity. On the Super Bowl as a ‘potlatch’, or, in the terminology of the iconoclastic American economist Thorstein Veblen, a spectacle of ‘conspicuous consumption’, see Hopsicker and Dyreson, ‘Super Bowl Sunday’, 30–55.

[42] Hyde, The Gift, 4.

[43]For cultural theorist John Frow, everyday life can be usefully understood as a conjunction of commodity and gift relations. Everyday life is ‘a realm permeated by the archaic patterns of gift-obligation – the dangerous, fluid, subtle generosities that bind members into crystallized orders of relation, in all dimensions of human life, from which they cannot easily be released. These patterns of obligation are, at the same time, in tension with the contractual rationality of the commodity, which produces quite different forms of the everyday. It may produce greater equalities as well as greater inequalities; it may enhance the sharing of wealth, or it may reduce it. It can be seen as a liberation from the ‘antiquated and dangerous gift economy’, or as a destruction of human sharing.’ Frow, ‘Gift and Commodity’, 217.

[44] Nor, however, would we argue for the games to become an entirely private affair, as in Los Angeles in 1984, or, in one extreme scenario, as might emerge from a global auction of the supposed ‘brand equity’ locked in the IOC's five-ring symbolism and other intellectual property assets. Both an entirely public gift-based Olympics mode and a totally commodified Olympics would be untenable … although the privatization of a global asset seems the more plausible scenario.

[45] Appadurai, The Social Life of Things, 11.

[46] Frow, ‘Gift and Commodity’, 217.

[47] Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, 177.

[48] Mauss, The Gift, 98.

[49] Graham and Marvin, Splintering Urbanism.

[50] Bowyer, ‘The Great Frame Up’, 81–109.

[51] Hyde, The Gift, 23.

[52] Auge, Non-Places, 94.

[53] Putnam, Bowling Alone.

[54] Contemporary city-building requires community-driven, planned public amenities and access to soft benefits in the form of skills and training – assets circulating and able to carry on giving within and beyond the local economy.

[55] Hyde, The Gift, 36.