Lasting Legacy for Olympics 2012?

Can Olympic Games make a difference for the host city’s peoples – even many of their least advantaged?

One day the multi-million dollar stadiums are the focus of a billion pairs of eyes, and the next a dusty wind is blowing through their empty bleachers. Hosting the Olympics can be a poisoned chalice, as Athens, the birthplace of the games, discovered in 2004. The price of entertaining the world for 21 days was to lumber an ancient city with some very modern ruins.

Is there a secret to hosting the Olympics to a city’s long-term benefit rather than its short-term gain? The canonical example to date has been Barcelona, which used the games as a lever to revitalize the city as a whole.

For 2012, London has set itself a more focused challenge: to take a near wilderness in the Lower Lea Valley, on its eastern fringe, and turn it into a vibrant piece of the capital, a “21st-century garden city”.

Ever since London won the bid to host the games, it has been trumpeting their “legacy”. It was the legacy aspect of London’s bid, after all, that secured victory over its rivals, Paris and Madrid. There will be no grandiose Bird’s Nest stadiums such as the one Beijing used to introduce a new superpower to the global stage. Instead, debate here is focused on whether the £9 billion ($14 billion) cost of the games will deliver not iconic architecture but a social legacy.

A New Kind of Olympic Legacy

Just what do we mean by “social”? East London has experienced government-led developments before now, but the glass-towered financial powerhouse that is Docklands is categorically not social. A social legacy would see the sporting venues being put to daily use after the games; it would give birth to a genuine community on the Olympic site itself, while regenerating the five London boroughs in and around it; it would create jobs and amenities for the long term; it would bring the residents of east London together, not segregate them.

To these ends, London is the first city to have established a body dedicated solely to the successful aftermath of the games. Literally decades after the executives of the Olympic Delivery Authority have ridden into the sunset with their bonuses, the Olympic Park Legacy Company will still be developing this new piece in London’s jigsaw.

Having bought the largest development site in Europe with public money and given the OPLC a freehold on it, the government has wisely opted not to pressure the legacy company into delivering a quick return on its investment. As we shall see, that decision will significantly influence the kind of place that the Olympic site becomes.

The Concept

The umbrella concept for the legacy plan is the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, an area the size of Hyde Park dotted with sporting facilities, parkland and new neighbourhoods. Most of the sporting venues will be converted for public use, with the main stadium likely becoming the new home of West Ham football club.

The park itself will be a major new attraction for east London, with the Arcelor-Mittal Orbit – a viewing platform designed by Anish Kapoor that is a steel baron’s grotesque vanity project – supposedly drawing 150,000 visitors a year alone.

Within the park will be five new neighbourhoods, providing 8,000 new homes, not including the 2,800 homes contained in the Athlete’s Village. Do nearly 11,000 new homes constitute a “social” project? Not necessarily, or not in a progressive sense, especially in a city overrun with new “luxury developments” built for the affluent middle class, sometimes on the very sites of former social housing.

An Urban Plan with Promise

The urban plan is much better than one might have expected. Modelled on London’s great estates, such as the Grosvenor and Portman estates built in the 18th and 19th centuries, they comprise a mix of housing, from four-storey houses and terraces to apartment blocks.

The local boroughs were vociferous about the need for more family homes in a city where most new housing is for one- and two-bedroom apartments. And 35% of the housing will be designated as affordable (50% in the Athlete’s Village), which is a matter of policy in the capital.

The aim, of course, is socially diverse communities. And since the OPLC is under no pressure for swift returns, it aims to build these neighbourhoods one at a time, over 25 years, learning from each iteration as it progresses rather than dashing them all out at once and hoping for the best. “We want to create places that work,” says an OPLC spokesman, “sustainable communities with a focus on family homes.”

The plan, which includes 11 new schools and three health centres, offers seemingly ideal conditions for the future residents of the park. But it’s just a plan. Much will depend on the kind of developers that OPLC manages to attract to these neighbourhoods. Ultimately, building housing is not quite the same thing as building communities.

Five Boroughs

And what about the residents of the surrounding areas? The Olympic site overlaps five boroughs, some of the poorest in the city. To what extent will they benefit from the Olympics? Newham, for instance, in which the larger portion of the park sits, suffers shocking levels of unemployment and child poverty. As far as its mayor is concerned, the social legacy of the games resides in one thing above all else: jobs.

The key opportunity for Newham’s residents will be Europe’s largest urban mall, the Westfield shopping centre in Stratford, which is estimated to require 10,000 staff. Still, Newham council doesn’t feel that the employment prospects for its residents are as transformational as had been hoped.

The borough of Hackney, in which a third of the park sits, has fared rather better. Its transport links have been drastically improved by the creation of four new stations on the Overground rail system. This £50 million extension of the network not only provides a new route to the Olympic site but puts this vibrant part of London on the Tube map for the first time.

But again, the key worry is jobs. The council is focusing most of its attention on the Olympics Media Centre, which is the size of Canary Wharf tower on its side and is envisaged as a new media hub providing thousands of highly skilled and supporting jobs. Until the OPLC secures a tenant for it, however, it is a giant question mark whether those jobs will materialise.

Meanwhile, the former industrial neighbourhood of Hackney Wick, home to the largest concentration of artists in Europe, is precariously poised between regeneration and gentrification. In the short term this community stands to benefit from the OPLC’s community outreach programmes and cultural funding for events and festivals. In the long term they may be priced out of yet another east London neighbourhood (if that wasn’t inevitable anyway).

Engaging Many Voices

A true social legacy demands that the surrounding communities feel included in the process, and that they have a sense of ownership of the park that is on their doorstep – not easy given that the entire site has been walled off for years. Certainly there were public consultations in 2008 in which local residents’ views were heard, but at their worst public consultations can be merely a box-ticking exercise.

More compelling is the competition the OPLC has held to name the five new neighbourhoods. With 2,000 entries so far, it looks as though the legacy company has managed to engage the community in a way that it feels invested in its future.

Even with the best laid plans there is still room for concern that a truly social vision could slip through the city’s fingers. Some worry that the Olympic site will turn into something akin to a business park – especially those who appreciated the somewhat wild, light-industrial hinterland that once characterised London’s eastern edge.

There is always apprehension, too, in a laissez-faire city like London, where developers find such capacious profit margins, that these plans will end up serving only those who can afford the price of entry – owning property in London is increasingly beyond the reach of the average citizen.

A True Legacy

Perhaps it is simply in Londoners’ nature not to dare to be too optimistic. For the signs are good. The process has been exemplary and the intentions were worthy from the outset. And London is a fortunate host, in that the games were never going to come at great human cost – one thinks of the tens of thousands being uprooted in Rio in the slum clearances paving the way for 2016.

If there is a secret to a social legacy, it is simply to plan in the best interests of the host city rather than those of the games. The single biggest lesson that London can offer is the need to establish a legacy company years in advance of the spectacle, and not when the spectators have gone home.