Mega-events and social change by Maurice Roche

Author:Maurice Roche [Roche, Maurice]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781526117106
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Manchester University Press
Published: 2017-06-05T00:00:00+00:00

Mega-event place-making: the Olympic complex in a centralised spatial model

There are evidently various different ways of designing and organising a successful Olympics which is both successful at games-time and also carries some potential to generate positive legacies in the post-event period. For instance Barcelona, as we have noted above, opted for what has been referred to as a decentralised spatial model, with multi-sites, some situated accessibly in the downtown area and others at more distant locations (such as Vall d'Hebron, about five kilometres away). The accessible downtown sites included the main stadium and the athletes’ village. The Olympic stadium was a renewal and reuse of a pre-existing stadium. It was located on Montjuïc hill, some distance (about four kilometres) away across the central city from the athletes’ village, which was a new construction on the coast near Barceloneta. By contrast Sydney's spatial model (with the exception of the media facilities which were sited at Darling Harbour in downtown Sydney) was simultaneously much more detached from the downtown city but also much more centralised.

As we have seen, Sydney's Olympic project differed from Barcelona's in that most of the main venues and facilities it required were newly created in a single integrated sport complex at the Homebush Bay site. They included the very large main stadium and also the nearby Olympic Village at Newington. The difference between these two facilities post-event highlights some further ambiguities relating to Sydney's Olympics and its urban legacies. The athletes’ village was long planned to be the core of a new Sydney suburb and was designed to a high environmental standard. This involved the recycling of building-waste during the construction phase, and, for post-event housing, the building-in of solar-energy-powered water heating together with the use of recycled water for toilets and garden irrigation. The housing was sold to the public post-event, thus contributing to event costs, and the suburb has subsequently developed into a functioning community with health, educational and retail infrastructures and services.

The Sydney Olympic Park site consists of a complex of specially created sport, exhibitionary, cultural and multi-purpose event facilities. The sports-related facilities include the main Olympic (now ANZ) stadium (seating 110,000 during the Olympic Games, but scaled down to 83,000 post-event in 2003); a large indoor arena (the ‘Sydney Super Dome’, now the ‘Allphones Arena’, seating 21,000); and an aquatics centre (the Sydney Olympic Park Aquatic Centre, SOPA, seating ten thousand), together with a series of venues for athletics, tennis, hockey, archery and BMX mountain biking. Other significant sports-related and also exhibitionary facilities are provided by the Sydney Showground organisation, and these include the Sydney Showground Stadium (now the ‘Spotless Stadium’, seating 25,000), and the Dome and Exhibition Complex (seating ten thousand). While these large-scale facilities were fully utilised during the Games event, the immediate post-event period which brought an afterglow for some brought fears of ‘white elephants’ and waste for others.

Evidently the full complex could not have survived on the basis of local public interest and demand from the city's inner western suburbs.

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