A new paper is out in Urban Studies on “Temporary projects, durable outcomes: urban development through failed Olympic bids?” This draws on a sample of land investment projects proposed in 65 Olympic bids (1991-2013), and on case studies of failed Olympic bids in New York City (a failed bid to host the 2012 Games) and Doha, Qatar (bids to host the 2016 and 2020 Games). I argue that ‘temporary’ planning initiatives like Olympic bids need to be conceptualized in a more holistic manner: as embedded within local development agendas and within other Olympic and non-Olympic event management project (through what I term ‘high frequency bidding’).

The paper is behind a paywall, but please feel free to email me for an authors’ copy.

Abstract: However it may be defined, urban ‘development’ typically implies the production of durable legacies. Yet these legacies are often planned through contingent, temporary projects. The role of temporary projects in implementing urban development is often interpreted in linear fashion: projects are viewed as isolated events which incrementally work toward already-existing development agendas. I argue instead that temporary projects play a recursive role in development planning: interpreted as a series of interlinked projects, they not only support but also redefine agendas for durable development. I focus on one type of temporary project: (failed) bids to host the Olympics, which I assess through a comparative 20-year sample of bids and through case studies of failed bids in Doha (Qatar) and New York (USA). I show that event-led development planning leverages project contingency and policy failure to construct long-term development agendas, as cities bid multiple times and recycle plans across projects. The paper contributes to debates over the long-term impacts of speculation and experimentation in urban governance, by assessing the role of contingency in urban politics. Temporariness is an asset in urban politics which can be used to mitigate risk in speculative development planning: since Olympic bids often fail to secure hosting rights, references to the possibility of failure can insulate project planners from critique.

A new paper was recently accepted at Environment and Planning: A. In it I pick up on an emerging debate over the explosion of city-to-city policy parnterships (C40 Cities, the Cities Alliance, etc): scholars have descibed this phenomenon as an ‘oligarchic diffusion’ of public policy between city elites, as city halls develop their own forms of ‘diplomatic entrepreneurship’, and urban policies become transnationally ‘mobile’ between cities via various consulting/knowledge/political networks. Benjamin Barber’s recent TED talk on ‘why mayors ruled the world’ provides a good — but problematically uncritical — summary of this explosion in globally-focused urban-based governance.

The core argument of this paper is that these various forms of sharing policy between cities need to be reconsidered. They are not simply about sharing and learning, but also about selling and branding: there is a deeper entrepreneurial logic behind cities’ decision to build policy partnerships with other cities. Olympic bid cities are a case in point: they extensively network amongst each other, sharing expertise on everything from consultant lists to technical standards. Yet very little of this ‘sharing’ is altruistic: many cities are instead using transnational knowledge networks as a means to build legitimacy for local projects.

The paper is forthcoming at Environment & Planning A. The final version is available on my Academia.edu page.

Title: Competition through inter-urban policymaking: bidding to host mega-events and entrepreneurial networking

Keywords: entrepreneurial city, networked entrepreneurialism, urban policy, bidding, mega-events

Abstract: Recent scholarship on policy mobility, globally-active municipal governments, and transnational city-to-city policymaking suggest a new dynamic in entrepreneurial cities: entrepreneurialism based not only on place competition, but also based on practices of inter-urban networking. This paper argues that cross-city initiatives to share planning expertise can function both as policymaking networks and as markets for policy knowledge, as urban governance stakeholders strategically leverage inter-city initiatives for sharing urban planning knowledge. Bidding to host sporting ‘megaevents’ highlights these networked entrepreneurial strategies. A comparative study of bids to host the Olympic Games over a twenty year period shows that policymaking knowledge (templates, models, and best practices) shared between cities is both necessary for competing to host events, and represent ‘policy commodities’ that planning coalitions can use as part of their entrepreneurial portfolios. While much commentary on inter-urban policymaking focuses on how policy practices are received by cities or mobilized by international businesses or policymakers, this paper signals to a multi-directional entrepreneurial strategy: although megaevents federations and sponsors developed megaevents knowledge networks to leverage urban planning for profit, many local development coalitions have incorporated these same networks into their competitive strategies.

I have had the privilege of working with the International Olympic Committee and Olympic Studies Centre as a recipient of their joint postgraduate research grant. The grant funded a significant portion of my ongoing research, and gave me an opportunity to meet/collaborate with a number of wonderful folks at both organizations. I recently prepared a policy brief for these organizations, which is published here and attached to this post. In the report I lay out a strategy for planning ‘legacy after the bid’, Olympic urban legacies in cities that bid to host the Games but don’t actually secure the hosting rights:

This project examines the urban development impacts of bidding to host Olympic Games. While there is a well-developed scholarship on legacy in Olympic host cities, less is known about the urban legacies of unsuccessful Olympic candidatures. The study addresses this by analyzing land use legacies of bidding in Olympic applicant and candidate cities, during host city elections over a twenty year period (80 bids for Games between 2000 and 2020). It draws on content analysis of bidding documents, and spatial analysis of land use change in bid cities using historical planning documents and maps. The study demonstrates that bids to host Olympics, even when unsuccessful, provide a means for formalizing local development strategies. Likewise, bid plans are often implemented to some degree regardless of a candidature’s success because local stakeholders leverage one sports development plan for use in multiple Olympic and non-Olympic bids, engaging in incremental and speculative investment along the way. The study identifies policy processes that facilitate or hinder urban development legacies after the bid, concluding with recommendations for building local capacity to coordinate across various bids, and for monitoring the urban impacts of unsuccessful bids in cities that bid for the Games multiple times.

The usual disclaimers apply: the opinions presented in the report do not necessarily match those of the indviduals and organizations that contributed to the project. Likewise, any errors or omissions are solely my own. Please feel free to contact me with questions or suggestions for improving/expanding the study.

Lauermann – Olympic Studies Centre report

Mark Davidson and I recently published a paper in Antipode: “Negotiating particularity in Neoliberalism Studies: tracing development strategies across neoliberal urban governance projects”. The journal has a paywall, so please email me for a copy if interested.

The Antipode Foundation also asked us to explain the paper in the following video abstract. This article is highly theoretical, though various empirical papers explaining our argument are forthcoming. The article tackles an vexing problem: The 2007-2008 global financial crisis also pushed neoliberal models of city management into intellectual crisis, as core arguments of the neoliberal political project (privatization of public goods, deregulation, and austerity policy) became increasingly difficult to justify. Critics of neoliberalism were subsequently flummoxed: neoliberal ideologies were empirically debunked, but remained deeply entrenched in Global North political systems (e.g. the evidence made clear that the combination of spending cuts and tax subsidies to the wealthy do not produce trickle-down growth, but austerity politics nonetheless became even more prominent after the crisis). These scholars began to speak about neoliberalism as entering a ‘dead but dominant’ phase, as ‘zombie’ economic policy in which the policies were still in place but had lost their ideological/intellectual staying power. Subsequent debates have continued parsing this dynamic, and it is here where our paper enters the fray.

Our argument, briefly, is that to understand this breakdown, we need to trace out the links/divergences between individual neoliberal policy projects and broader intellectual/ideological projects. In the case of megaevents, this means mapping the dialectical relationships between individual/local megaevents planning projects and the transnational institutions/ideas about event-led development strategies. While this lays our a theoretical framework for doing so, forthcoming papers will trace this empirically (please feel free to email me for working papers).

The full post is available at the Antipode Foundation website, the video is also embedded below:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7JQocPXoWVY