Niloufar Vadiati - The Employment Legacy of the 2012 Olympic Games: A Case Study of East London

The Mega Event Planning Pivot series will provide a global and cross-disciplinary view into the planning for the worlds largest sporting, religious, cultural, and other transformative mega events. Examples include the Olympic Games, Soccer World Cups, Rugby championships, the Commonwealth Games, the Hajj, the World Youth Day, World Expositions, and parades. This series will critically discuss, analyze, and challenge the planning for these events in light of their legacies including the built environment, political structures, socio-economic systems, societal values, personal attitudes, and cultures.

More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14808

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The use of large-scale events, such as Olympic Games , to foster urban development has been called the festivalisation of urban policy . The number of cities pursuing this strategy rose after Los Angeles experienced remarkable fiscal benefits from its staging of the 1984 Olympic Games and Barcelona revitalized its beachfront by using the 1992 Olympic Games to demolish its industrial buildings. But the number of cities competing to host the Olympics dropped after many highly publicized scandals regarding cost overruns, as in Athens prior to the 2004 games, and the displacement of locals, as in Beijing 2008, Rio 2016 and Sochi 2014.

This pivot offers new insights into spectacle-driven development policy by focusing on an under-researched aspect: employment. While studies of the socio-economic impacts of large-scale events mainly focus on such topics as fiscal effects, impacts on direct investment, tourism and international reputation, this study concerns labour market mobilisation and locals share in the Olympic job market.

The pertinent literature tends to focus either on the planning and staging of the (temporal) event or on the (long-term) socio-economic and socio-material impacts. Studies with the former focus mostly revolve around issues of project management and delivery; the latter is concerned with matters of urban development . This research seeks to bridge the gap between these two discursive territories by explicitly addressing the question of how the imperatives of project management and delivery shape the longer-term consequences of large-scale Olympic projects within host cities and among local people.

This study examines the London 2012 Olympics for two reasons: It pioneered a concern with the events social legacy and it placed employment at the core of its legacy agenda. Regarding the global job market of London, this study provides an empirical account of how the worlds biggest mega-event was experienced in terms of employment by residents of its immediate host, East London , one of the UKs poorest, most ethnically complex and transient areas.

Given my background as an urban planner, I investigate the urbanity of the Olympics through one of its social-economic courses, which is the distribution of job opportunities. My familiarity with ethnic communities in East London inspired me to approach the subject as an ethnographer and provide an empathetic understanding of locals career drives , aspirations and values.

The motivation behind this research at its outset came from my own experience as a UCL MSc graduate with a migration background who was then residing in London. In 2010, I was eager to obtain one of London 2012 s skilled jobs, at a time when the London labour market was suffering from the UK economic recession. What I witnessed during the job-seeking process went beyond the negotiation over the companies openings; it was rather a renegotiation of place ownership and a redefinition of identity. Thus, I became interested in more in-depth examination of how people pursue their careers in a complex and changing environment, which was then facing sport-led urban regeneration .

Although this study focuses on the reality of the employment legacy of London 2012 , the findings may well have a bearing on the idea that hosting a mega-event such as this could lead to the reproduction of inequality in the local labour markets of host cities . I hope that the present account will contribute to future discussions by providing a valuable contextualisation.

I am indebted to all those individuals who gave up their time to talk to me about their experiences working for the 2012 Olympic Games or living nearby. I was fortunate to be able to interview them and I hope this project does justice to their accounts.

Also, thanks to all the London 2012 staff I interviewed, particularly Mr Klaus Grewe, for providing key understandings about professional life at a high-profile mega-project.

Also, I thank my advisor, Dr Joachim Thiel, for his hugely valued support, and Dr Paul Watt, for providing critical insight into this study.