Greg Andranovich - Contesting the Olympics in American Cities: Chicago 2016, Boston 2024, Los Angeles 2028

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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Arguably we are at a tipping point in the history of the Olympics and Contesting the Olympics in American Cities makes a major contribution to debates about the future of the Games and other sports mega-events. Written by renowned experts in the field of the urban politics of mega-events, this will become a standard reference point for students, teachers, researchers and anyone interested in the recent past and future development of the Olympics.

Professor John Horne PhD, Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan

Sport reveals choices in communities. In the period 20132018, 14 European and North American cities withdrew from potential bids to host the Olympic games. The Covid-19 pandemic resulted in the postponement of the 2020 Tokyo Olympic Summer Games for at least a year, pending resolution of the global pandemic. In December 2020, Japans NHK News (, 1112). Does the conduct of the Olympic games live up to these principles and truly support the value of human development? If the Olympics do not live up to their own fundamental principles, then why are cities making the policy choice of bidding to host them?

This book examines such policy choices by taking a closer look at these questions from the perspective of the emergent anti-Olympics opposition and resistance. The opposition and resistance groups in American cities offer a critique of our social and political institutions in two ways. First, they question whether the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the Olympic games make sense as a basis for urban growth and development. We examine the institutional framework for bidding and hosting the Olympics, focusing on how and why it is changing. This institutional framework reveals the distortions and contradictions inherent in corporate global sport, more specifically the ways in which it contributes to certain urban policy outcomes such as the financialization of land uses in cities that can exacerbate sociospatial inequalities . Second, opposition groups question the lack democracy in policymaking and the policy processes used in urban governance. We examine the claims, strategies, and tactics of the anti-Olympics opposition, and how these changed over time. This examination allows us to identify the critique of urban economic development policy as producing an urbanism built on the profitable consumption of land and based selectively on values that promote individualism, self-reliance, and the sanctity of private property rights while neglecting the values that promote community, public responsibility, collective connection, and caring. We examine the Olympic bids and opposition in three different citiesChicago , Boston , and Los Angeles . Our assessment of these cities anti-Olympics opposition is based on documentary analyses of the official bid books, media coverage of the bidding processes, IOC documents, and analysis of materials produced by and conversations with key members of the opposition and resistance in Chicago , Boston , and Los Angeles (as well as observation of meetings, activities, and events in Los Angeles ). These cities are useful cases for identifying, as theory suggests, the weak points in the relationship between society and political institutions that allow opposition and resistance to emerge. Studying the anti-Olympics contestation holds the promise of understanding the possibilities for broader societal and political change (e.g., Lefebvre ).