Would Regional Olympics be a Better Urbanist Solution?

The Olympics closing ceremonies are behind us and the City of Sochi is beginning to ponder what to do with $51 billion of streets and stadiums that were built for a now concluded two-week party.

It won’t be an easy task for Sochi.  A report by a South Carolina television station provides a short summary of the fate of past Olympic host cities.  There are a few bright spots, but the overall picture is bleak.

I’ve often suggested that a rotation of Olympic sites might be a reasonable way to control costs and to minimize the civic disruptions of massive Olympic construction.  (The British Open uses a similar “rota” of golf courses and has been an admirable success for more than 150 years.)  Perhaps the four most recent Summer and Winter Olympic host cities, with one site added for geographical balance, could be the start of a conversation.  The quadrennial Olympics would return to each host city every twenty years.

But even that concept seems troublesome.  Perhaps sufficient uses can be found for the athletic venues in the twenty years between Olympics, but what about the other Olympic necessities?  How does one build an Olympic Village that can sit idle for two decades without becoming a wound in the civic fabric?  If the Olympic Villages are converted to housing, how does the host city evict the tenants for two weeks during the Olympics?  Or must new Olympic Villages be built every twenty years, stretching the urban area?

Writing in Next City, Will Doig suggests a possible solution, allowing Olympics to become more regional. 

Olympics have always been somewhat regional, particularly the Winter Games.  The alpine venues for the Sochi Olympics were about an hour from Sochi.  The same hour of travel applied to Vancouver.

But the Summer Games can also have a geographical spread.  I attended the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics.  The first event I watched was a soccer game at Stanford Stadium in Palo Alto.  The next was rowing on Lake Casitas in Ventura County.  I was well into my Olympic experience before I even reached the Los Angeles Basin.  And once there, I watch water polo in Malibu and basketball in Inglewood.  The only Olympic sport I watched in the City of Los Angeles was baseball at Dodger Stadium.

But Doig takes the concept to a higher level.  Among other ideas, he suggests a possible Ohio Olympics that would include events in Cincinnati, Columbus, and Cleveland.

I find great merit in the concept.  The disruption to each of the partial host cities would be reduced.  It would be a shame to lose the concept of the single “Olympic Plaza” in the host city where all can mingle, but sacrificing that element to the long-term health of our cities seems a reasonable tradeoff.

So, what might a Northern California regional Olympics look like?  And could the North Bay participate?

To begin, I would expect to have major pods of activities in San Francisco, Oakland, San Jose, and Sacramento.

The Opening and Closing Ceremonies could be at the new stadium in Santa Clara.

The last time San Francisco looked at an Olympic bid, the proposed rowing venue was Lake Natomas on the far side of Sacramento.  Perhaps gymnastics could be put in whatever basketball arena eventually results in Sacramento.

San Jose was a long-time site of a professional tennis tournament.  It could presumably host the tennis competition.

And so on throughout Northern California.

And what about the North Bay?  Could we fill a gap?  If memory serves, the Olympics include road racing and velodrome racing for bicycles.  I suspect that a fine road course could be found through the vineyards of Napa and Sonoma Counties.  And I wouldn’t be surprised if Napa could also make good use of a velodrome, perhaps complementing the wine and food attractions of the region.

And I would certain hope that a marathon course could begin in southern Marin County before crossing the Golden Gate Bridge.

A regional Olympics isn’t going to happen for awhile yet, probably not in my lifetime.  The current model still has too many potential host cities happy to willfully harm themselves for two weeks of glory.  But the regional model makes a lot of sense as fiscal and urbanist realities become more evident.  And it’s always good to have a new model to replace a failed model.

Meanwhile, it’s onward to Rio 2016.  Today is the official start of the “Will Rio be ready?”and “Can Brazil financially survive the Olympics?” worry fest.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

New Olympic Event: Toderian versus Putin

Another Olympics is underway.  For the next two weeks, we’ll be reintroduced to sports that will seem compelling while the competition is underway, only to then be forgotten for another four years.

But there is one sport that has held my interest for a long time and will continue to do so.  That is the challenge of reconciling Olympic facilities with the communities in which they’re located.

Finding a nexus between urbanism and the Olympics may seem a stretch, but over the past few decades city building has become a key selling point for many Olympic bids.  From Barcelona in 1992 to Sydney in 2000 to London in 2012, the prospect of leaving the host city a stronger and more functional place has been a factor in securing the Olympic bid and in convincing the citizens to accept the financial costs.

But blending urbanism and the Olympics is neither an easy nor a quick task.  Although it required two decades for the rips in the civic fabric to heal, Barcelona is now considered perhaps the most successful Olympics at advancing the host city.  The Sydney Games provided some civic benefits, but the location of the venues at the urban fringe limited the value of those benefits.  And it is far too early to judge how the aggressive city building aspects of the London Games will succeed.

Meanwhile, the Beijing Games of 2008, with their focus on dramatic architecture with little thought to the long-time use of the buildings, may be the greatest failure yet of Olympic city building.

Looking back at my archives, I find to my surprise that I wrote five posts around the time of the London games about the Olympics and urbanism.  In reviewing them, I find that they stand up well, mostly because I found great articles to link.  I wrote about the Olympics and the city, Olympic bidding, and three posts (1, 2, and 3) looking back at the London experience and the Olympics in general.

But all the Olympics noted above were Summer Games.  And there is a fundamental difference between Summer Games and Winter Games.  The Summer Games are the far bigger endeavor, but the sports don’t have geographic limitations and can usually be located in the larger cities that typically locate at lower elevations.  In larger metropolitan areas, Beijing’s failure notwithstanding, there are more opportunities to retask Olympic buildings to community uses.

The Winter Games, which require convenient access to an alpine area, offer a more restricted pool of civic candidates.  And the smaller size of many cities in the pool makes the assimilation of the Olympic structures more problematic.

Nowhere is this challenge more clearly delineated than between Vancouver 2010 and Sochi 2014.  Vancouver, favorably located close to world-class Whistler ski area and with a metropolitan population of 2.3 million was able to mount the Olympics for a cost of $7 billion and was able to absorb the Olympic facilities with only a few hiccups.

In comparison, Sochi also had good alpine proximity but had a population of only 350,000, barely larger than Santa Rosa here in the North Bay.  Over $51 billion was required to ready Sochi for the Olympics.

Nor are cost and population are the only differences.  Vancouver committed to doing the Olympics on a financially frugal basis.  Existing settings were touched up where possible.  And every newly constructed structure had a post-Olympic use determined before the first shovel of dirt was turned.  Brent Toderian, who was the Vancouver Planning Director during the Olympic planning and who has often been cited in this blog, is perhaps the best spokesman for the Vancouver approach.

In an article published in the days after the London Olympics, Toderian lays out much of what made the Vancouver effort successful.  He provides a roadmap to civic involvement, creative re-use, and planning processes that should have informed all future Olympic efforts.

But the roadmap described by Toderian seems to have been misplaced by Vladimir Putin, who instead decided to use the Sochi Olympics to showplace the return of a post-Soviet Russia to the world stage.  If his goal was to show grandiose but unevenly executed visions, cronyism, and missed deadlines, he succeeded brilliantly.  And at only seven times the cost of the Vancouver Games.

This photo survey of seven years of site development illustrates the mixture of success and misdirection.  Overall, the sense is that the Sochi facilities are more likely to go the way of the Beijing Bird’s Nest than of the Vancouver Convention Center, pictured above, which was a key Olympic venue and remains in daily use.

And early stories coming out of Sochi about the incompleteness of many new facilities further illustrates the Sochi missteps.  As Katie Baker of Grantland writes, many of the early arrivals in Sochi are reporters who are accustomed to the occasional rough edge.  But as spectators begin arriving, expecting a first-class Olympic experience and finding some of the Sochi shortfalls, the spotlight may be further shifted away from the athletes.

Overall, the conclusion is unavoidable that Vancouver played the game well, further cementing the city in the firmament of urbanism.  Sochi is nowhere close.

I don’t expect to approach the five posts that I wrote about the London Games, but I will return to the Sochi Games at least one more time.  And, my concerns about the city planning aspects notwithstanding, I also expect to enjoy much of the competition.  Who’s willing to provide my quadrennial reintroduction to curling?

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Olympics Hangover – Part 3

For a final look at the 2012 London Summer Olympics, I have a couple of stories with surprise twists.  Urban successes that resulted from unsuccessful Olympic bids.  I’ll conclude with a story again illustrating the difficulty of mounting an Olympic Games in a democracy.  And I’ll add a final “North Bay Lesson”.

In Stockholm, a bid for the 2004 Summer Olympics was unsuccessful, but the momentum begun with the bid resulted in the redevelopment of Hammarby Sjostad, sited at a derelict industrial site in desperate need of reuse.   The Stockholm government set high sustainability standards for the development and generally met the standards, working in partnership with numerous private developers.

As reported in Future Communities, when the city began to develop a plan in the aftermath of the failed Olympic bid, they expected that the primary market to be seniors who had moved to the suburbs in the 1970s and were now eager to return to the city.  Instead, young families made up most of the new residents, requiring more schools to be added to the plan.

Another late adjustment was vertical mixed use, with shops added to many of the residential buildings.  The retail spaces were easily rented.  It should be surprising to many American urbanists that the mixed-use was a late addition.  In much of the U.S., mixed use is usually a primary requirement for an urban project.

The Stockholm government established a goal of 0.5 cars per home for Hammarby Sjostad.  The goal wasn’t met, but 80 percent of all trips are nonetheless being made by foot, bicycle, or transit.  It is a remarkably sustainable development, perhaps more so than might have resulted if the Olympics bid had been successful.

In New York City, the American Planning Association reports on the Hudson Yards project that was energized by a bid for the 2012 Olympics and then moved ahead when the bid was unsuccessful.

Although Hudson Yards has made good progress, hurdles remain.  Opponents claim that it will result in a Hong Kong-like density and are looking for reduced density.

Mayor Bloomberg likens the project to Canary Wharf which, considering the concern of many East Londoners that Canary Wharf is a pocket of gentrification surrounded by continuing blight, was perhaps not the best way to advocate for the project.

I don’t know enough to judge whether Hudson Yards is truly a good urban fit for New York City.  I suspect that it’s sized more to the need for office space than to the support of urban life.  But I also suspect that it’s a better project than would have resulted if the Olympic bid had been successful.

North Bay Lesson: Even when an initial urban scheme fails to come to fruition, look to harness any enthusiasm and momentum in support of another vision.  The region might be better off with the fallback solution. 

And finally, to underscore the difficulties into which a New York City Olympics would have run, the New York Times reports on the donation of a proposed velodrome for Brooklyn Bridge Park, an acclaimed public place that is still under development.  Neighbors are questioning the traffic impacts, the size of the structure, and the accommodation for what they consider an elitist sport.  They may be right, but what does their opposition tell us about what would have happened had there been a need to build a velodrome for the Olympics?

Next time, I promise to leave the Olympics behind, at least until the 2014 Sochi Winter Games.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Olympics Hangover – Part 2

In a continuing post-Olympics review of what the land-use planning world is saying about the London Games, today we’ll look at the housing problems in East London, both before and after the Games and at the sustainability of the Olympic improvements.  Once again, I’ll add a couple of “North Bay Lesson” notes.

A Bloomberg article highlights the housing issues around the London Olympics site.  The chance to address housing deficiencies was a key element of the London Olympic bid.  To show their sincerity, the London Olympic Committee took local residents to a meeting of the International Olympic Committee.  But through the opening of the Games, few improvements have been accomplished.

Instead, the international economic problems and the loss of existing housing to redevelopment have resulted in illegal “sheds with beds”, many of which have plumbing so deficient that the 19th century blight of raw sewage running in the street has returned.

New housing is being built, but much of it is beyond the financial capability of the current residents, raising the specter that “gentrification is likely to be part of the [Olympic] legacy.”

As the director of a London non-profit notes, “London councils are reluctant to set aside land for cheap housing because they earn so much money by selling to developers.  Without cheap housing, people have to move away from their families.”

Ricky Burdett, writing for British Politics and Policy at the London School of Economics, takes the long view of the London Olympic land-use issues.  He notes the depth of the problems to be solved in East London.  The points of concern have long included employment, housing, infrastructure, and public health.  “[The] life expectancy of a man, for example, is five years lower in east London compared to parts of west London.”

Burdett goes on to argue that the land-use process around the London Olympics is generally similar to how London land-use issues are usually addressed, only on a far quicker schedule.  “The project has become an elaborate chess game in time and space that mirrors, in an accelerated fashion, the normal, organic planning process that determines London’s DNA.”

He also noted the higher level of sustainability which London targeted, including the possibility that the velodrome, basketball arena, and other stadiums will be dismantled and shipped to Glasgow for the 2014 Commonwealth Games or to Rio de Janeiro for the 2016 Olympics.  “London has invented a new planning methodology for the construction of the games and what it leaves behind for its so-called “Olympic Legacy.”

Burdett closes with the same warning as many others.  “But all this will only be possible if city government retains control and ownership of the land, and puts in place checks and balances to ensure that land values and gentrification do not push existing communities in the vicinity out.”

North Bay Lesson: Once again, the Olympics are orders of magnitude above any likely North Bay land-use issues, but lessons about creating housing options for all demographic are applicable.  As someone noted at a recent OneBayArea public meeting, those with resources can always find places to live.  But we must remain attentive to the lower-income housing options.

Lauren Parr of the Urban Land Institute describes the London Olympics land-use process as working in reverse, as having a vision of where the future of East London lay and then working an Olympics into the shorter-term picture.  From Bill Hanway of AECOM, “We always knew what we wanted to end up with; we worked backwards.”

Parr notes that making places for education was also important, “Historically, many of the major regeneration projects in London have begun with educational facilities, which are valuable in their contribution to place creation.”

North Bay Lessons: Regardless of the size of the community, visualizing where the community wants to be in twenty years should be a key step.  In California, General Plans fill some of that role, but the question is whether the community as a whole, and not just the 200 citizens who participate in the process, buy into the vision.

 The American Planning Association offers a write-up of the obsolete industrial site, known as the Lower Lea Valley, that existed before the Olympic redevelopment began, describing it as “an unregulated valve where the city could let off steam.”

After an extended word tour of the Olympic park, the writer notes the key design challenge is to avoid making the park look like it was constructed solely for the Olympics.  The goal was to create “the impression of a park in which the Olympics happens to be taking place, rather than a relentless campus tailored to this one-off event. “

The writer then concludes with a worry about the future of the park site and whether it can be made to integrate with its surroundings.  “It relies on the London Legacy Development Corporation – which will manage the park for at least the next ten years – and the nature of the forthcoming neighborhoods to ensure that the place does not become a privatized enclave of gated communities and sponsored mega-events, forever sold off to the highest bidder.  Any sense of the old Lea might have been smothered for now, but it must be allowed to return to give this place the character it needs.”

To close, the Sustainable Cities Collective provides a summary of the sustainability measures met by the London Games.  And the San Francisco Chronicle adds thoughts on the design of the event venues, noting that the 80,000-seat Olympic Stadium will be reduced for 25,000 seats for future uses and that most venues will be dismantled and taken away, so that “a ghost town of sports venues isn’t left behind.”

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Olympics Hangover – Part 1

The Olympics are behind us.  The glorious spectacle of the Summer Games is gone, not to reappear until Rio de Janeiro in 2016.  But the urban planning community continues to chew over the implications of the Olympics.  And justifiably so.  In terms of resources committed and public attention, the Olympics are among the biggest urban projects anywhere.  I’ll share some of the Olympian thinking below.

I don’t expect the North Bay to host even a part of an Olympics in my lifetime.  Nor would I wish for it.  But once we adjust our sense of scale, the Olympics issues have their lesser-scale counterparts in local life.  I try to connect the dots, at least from my perspective, in the interleaved “North Bay Lesson” paragraphs.

Dezeen Magazine reports on a study by Dutch architectural firm XML which argues that it will be increasingly difficult for liberal democracies to host an Olympics.  The argument is that the conflict between the spending of public dollars and benefits that accrue to private businesses is becoming too great to pass muster in a democracy.

Dezeen also notes that much of the Olympic finances are based on television revenues.  With technology changing the way television is viewed, it’s unclear if the television can continue to be a cash cow for the Games.

I found the Dezeen conclusion about the hosting of Olympic by liberal democracies to be both credible and deeply disturbing.  It should be cause for reflection by the International Olympic Committee on what it seeks in the awarding of bids.  And land use professionals everywhere should reflect on what it implies about the ability to implement major projects in a democracy.  Hosting the Games only in dictatorships would be a repudiation of everything the original Greeks intended for the Olympics.

North Bay Lesson: The Dezeen concern about public expenses versus private profits is pertinent to urban development.  In good urban development, rehabilitation of aging public infrastructure is often inextricably bound up with new private development.  This should be a good and worthwhile partnership.  Bbut is often a point on which opponents can focus, claiming unfair benefits to the private sector and sidetracking projects that could benefit the community.

Simon Jenkins of the Guardian takes a pessimistic view on the near-term financial impacts from the London Olympics.  He argues that the recent history of mega-sporting events tells a consistent story.  “Postmortems on Atlanta, Barcelona, Sydney, Athens and Beijing all tell of hotel slumps, unpaid debts, empty parks and subsequent disillusion.”

He contended that politicians, who should understand the tourism reality, have refused to play fair with the facts.  “Had the government said from the start that London was a rich city staging the Olympics as a costly but generous gesture to the world, there could be no further argument.”

Jenkins concludes that the biggest problem is London’s continuing the trend of overly-elaborate Olympic spectacles.  “The real victims of London's mind-numbing mendacity will be the poor and hapless citizens of Rio in 2016. They really cannot afford it.”

I think Jenkins is generally correct in his criticisms, but overly severe.  With the possible exception of Beijing, it seems likely that most Olympics will leave behind some benefits, although it may take twenty years for those benefits to become evident.  And good planning also has a role.

North Bay Lessons: Urbanism is best served by a slow but steady, incremental process.  Making a big splash with an out-sized project is almost guaranteed to include missteps.  Unfortunately, the land-use process offers economies of scale to larger projects.  Communities should look for ways to provide additional encouragement to smaller projects.

DW  reports that the post-Olympics experience for Barcelona was positive and that good urban changes were set in motion by the 1992 Games.

With this argument, and the concrete examples of improvements in Barcelona life offered by the writer, DW buttresses my suggestion above that most Games eventually result in at least some positive municipal improvements, even if twenty years are required.

The London Telegraph reports that the planning team for the 2000 Sydney Games is impressed by how the London planning team didn’t repeat a major Sydney mistake.  Rather than putting the Games at the far extent of the metropolitan area, forcing a transit expansion, London placed the Games where a functioning transit system was already in place.  “It should be obvious that any Olympic legacy is only as good as its connectivity.”

Transit is essential for everyday life and especially for mega-events.  It’s hard to imagine how the London Olympics could have worked if more spectators had arrived by private car.  If anything, many of the reports from London have been about how quiet the streets have been with the spectators packing the Tube and the locals staying home.

North Bay Lesson: The SMART train is a good start, but transit is likely to assume an ever increasing role in North Bay life.

On a lighter note, after recently writing about the new font that was designed to promote Chattanooga, I was intrigued to note that the London Olympics had their own font.  And that Rio has already created a font for 2016.  It seems to be a trend.

I want to like the London font.  It has a style that I enjoy.  And I find that many words, such as “London”, “inspire”, and “excite”, look great in the font.  But I don’t like the way “Olympics” looks.  And any font in which the aesthetics varies between words can’t be a good font.  Co.design agrees, ranking it the worst font in the world.  Probably an overstatement with Olympics underway, but still not an endorsement.

The Rio font seems a little more balanced, but I don’t find it exuberant enough.  It seems comfortable and laid-back, which is a good Brazilian trait.  But it seems to lack Carnival.  And the Olympics would seem require a touch of Carnival.

North Bay Lesson: In terms of fonts, probably none.  Unless there is an unknown North Bay community of font designers, it seems unlikely that any local community will emulate Chattanooga.  But there is a lesson about how design makes a difference, how having a coherent design is key to presenting a consistent community image.

I don’t see much recognition of that point in the North Bay.  As an acquaintance recently pointed out, Petaluma has a half-dozen different wayfinding systems, each with its own aesthetic style.  We can do better.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

Why Olympic Bids Go Bad

I recently wrote about how the urban renewal potential of Olympic host cities is often unrealized.  With the London Olympics now underway, more experts are weighing in about the challenges of being a host city and how host cities can do as well as possible.  Although the Olympics would seem to be at an impossibly large scale, the thoughts can have application to the North Bay.

Andrew Zimbalist, writing in Atlantic Cities, describes the three points on which Olympic bids go astray.  Zimbalist, an economics professor at Smith College, is well-respected author on the subject of public financing of sports venues.

In Zimbalist’s view, the problems for the host city begin early, during host city selection.  As he describes it, the issue is what economists call a “principal/agent” problem.  It describes what happens when the incentives of the principal and the agents acting on behalf of the principal are different.

A bid to be a host city is often encouraged by private entities which stand to benefit financially from the bid process and also from pre-Game efforts if the bid is successful.  But these entities have relatively little risk if the bid is unsuccessful or if the pre-Game costs exceed budget.  They are the agents of the city, but their risk/reward situation is very different from the city, which would be responsible for most overruns.  That misalignment leads to excessive and flawed bids.

It’s akin to the concerns often expressed about the banks which struggled during the recent recession and received government support.  In the words of many, “The risks were socialized, but the rewards were privatized.”  The same phrase can apply to the bid for an Olympics.

Zimbalist’s next point is that, in a competitive bid situation, the winner is often the city which most greatly overestimates the financial upside.  Cities that accurately assess the financial issues probably can’t win a bid because their plans won’t be sufficiently grand.

I’m reminded of the story of a developer with long-standing friendships in the local development community. He was in a hard-fought price competition to secure a key downtown parcel that he eventually won.  When he was congratulated by the press, he responded “I just paid more for the parcel than all of my best friends thought it was worth.  I’m not sure I deserve congratulations.”  Perhaps the mayor of a city which wins an Olympic bid should feel the same.

Zimbalist’s final point is the costs will always escalate between winning the bid and the start of the Games.  From my personal experience, there are always surprises during conception, design, and construction.  Only rarely do those surprises result in lower costs.  Here in the North Bay, we need only look a little south, to the 2013 America’s Cup, to see how pre-event planning can go in odd and unexpected directions

Urbanist Brent Toderian would likely grant Zimbalist the validity of his arguments, but presents three lessons from the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games to mitigate some of the risk.  Writing in Atlantic Cities, Toderian proposed that every venue should have another intended use after the Games.  In his words, “If you don’t really have a viable use for that huge stadium after the Olympics, it just might be that you’re not the kind of city that should host the Olympics at all.”

Next, he proposes that having the local citizens treat the Olympics as a public festival creates a sense of goodwill that will have lasting benefits.  He notes that London 2012, like Vancouver 2010 and many preceding hosts, had an anxious and skeptical air in the days before the opening ceremony.  He then recalls that Vancouver 2010 quickly changed into a civic celebration that impressed observers and created long-term optimism.

Toderian acknowledges that celebrations must ultimately be grassroots upwellings, but suggests that Olympic organizers do everything possible to lay the groundwork for the public to spontaneously embrace the Olympics.

Lastly, Toderian suggests that the Olympics are an opportunity to revisit the municipal transportation system, including the use of transit.  He notes that Vancouver expanded its transit system and induced more people to use transit, both during the Games and afterwards.  “Most importantly, post Olympics research found that over a quarter of those who got out of their cars and tried transit, biking, and walking, stayed out of their cars after the Olympics ended, and many more came back to transit in the intervening years, citing the Games as a perception-changer.”

So, how much, if at all, does this palaver about the Olympics pertain to the North Bay?  Even if we assume that the Bay Area never secures an Olympic bid, the lessons above still apply, albeit at a much smaller scale.

Every year, North Bay communities are offered opportunities, such as a new drugstore in Sebastopol, a new retail shop in Sonoma, or a downtown development in another city.  These opportunities have risks and rewards.  The questions that potential Olympic host cities must answer aren’t that different from the questions that the North Bay cities must answer.

Looking at downtown Petaluma, one can argue that Theatre Square was the local Olympic bid of the last decade.  Were the principal and agent incentives aligned?  Did Petaluma overbid to secure the project?  Had adequate allowance been made for cost overruns?  Was the public ready to embrace the project with enthusiasm?  Did Theatre Square adequately accommodate the transportation future of the community?

None of the questions have clear or definitive answers.  But the Olympic lessons provide a prism through which to reexamine the process.

With all this now said, go find a television and enjoy the Olympics.  These really are two great weeks of entertainment.  Worries about the redevelopment issues can be set aside until after the closing ceremonies.

Schedule note: The monthly meeting of Petaluma Urban Chat will be Tuesday, August 7.  (We moved from our established date because of scheduling conflicts.)  As usual, we’ll convene at the Aqus Café at 5:30pm.  We’ll talk about meeting dates for the fall, an interesting offer for a future meeting, summer travel insights, and whatever else might arise.

Milestone: This is the 100th post that I’ve written for this blog.  Thanks to all who stop by.  You make the effort worthwhile.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)

The Olympics and the City

I recently wrote about recuperation time in the city, the pause needed for a city to assimilate new elements and to recover from changes in the urban fabric.  (It’s the same thought that Jane Jacobs had when she argued against a “cataclysmic flow of capital” in “The Death and Life of Great American Cities”.  The only difference is that her phrase is proscriptive, while mine is prescriptive.)

The topic comes to the fore this week with the commencement of another Olympics.  Because whatever else the Olympics may be, they are a tremendous source of change in the host city, bringing resources that go far beyond Jacobs’ worst “cataclysmic” fears.

Many host cities, especially for the Summer Olympics, look to use the Games as a way to jumpstart redevelopment, to be their own versions of Robert Moses.  But, as with Moses, the record of those attempts is mixed, with the poor results generally outweighing the good.  Some Olympic cities have effected positive urban transformations that took root soon after the Games.  The more frequent result is a long period of post-Games stasis before additional investment capital brings about a pale version of the initial vision.

Cassell Bryan-Low in the Wall Street Journal recounts the fate of recent Summer Games hosts.  By her accounting, 1992 host Barcelona and 2000 host Sydney eventually received a level of success with their Olympic improvements, but only after years of waiting and additional investment.  Meanwhile, 2004 host Athens and 2008 host Beijing still have many unused facilities.

Looking even further back, Micheline Maynard, writing for Atlantic Cities, considers the legacy of the 1976 Montreal Games.  Long-time Mayor Jean Drapeau, building on the success of the 1967 Montreal Expo, sold the Olympics as a bigger and better city endeavor that was guaranteed to finish in the black.

He was wrong.  The 1976 Games finished in a fiscal hole that took years to fill.  Even in the mid-1980s, the Montreal Games were considered an abject failure.  Today, the vision of history has changed, with the 1976 Games considered to have helped move Montreal into the upper tier of world cities.  But of the remaining improvements that were built for the 1967 Expo or the 1976 Olympic Games, most are tourist attractions, with few serving a role in the day-to-day life of the city.

In an opposing opinion, Vancouver urbanism consultant Brent Toderian writes with enthusiasm about his experiences with the 2010 Vancouver Winter Games.  (Toderian was last seen in this blog quoting H.L. Mencken on complexity.)  Writing in Atlantic Cities, Toderian argues that the Games were a good investment for Vancouver.

Although he describes the downtown redevelopment and the sustainable Olympic Village, he argues that the single greatest impact was the sense of civic and national pride that resulted from the successful Games.  In his words, “if Beijing’s goal was national reputation and identity building, Vancouver’s Games accomplished that in spades, without a single piece of star-chitecture”

However, Winter Games are smaller affairs.  And, with more of the facilities located outside of the urban area, they have a lesser impact on the host city.

Against this backdrop of uneven and generally less than optimal results, London approached the 2012 Summer Games as an opportunity to redevelop a rundown area of East London. 

To highlight the challenge, the London Olympic land-use planners had a flawed example of urban redevelopment on their immediate skyline.  An article for Yahoo News notes that the nearby Canary Wharf project is an example of how not to do redevelopment, with large, sterile buildings cheek-to-jowl with aging and rundown residential blocks. 

(During a visit to London a few years ago, I was unfamiliar with Canary Wharf but intrigued by the architecture, so disembarked from the Tube to look around.  I quickly reached the same conclusion as the Yahoo article.  Architecturally interesting buildings and grounds, but without much human-scale or consideration of how the local residents would likely use the site.  The photos with this post are from Canary Wharf.

I was there on a mild early spring Friday afternoon, the kind of day when the more intrepid folks would begin emerging from their winter hibernation and using the public realm.  And yet, except for a few well-wrapped bankers enjoying beer at the outside tables of a pub, I mostly had the place to myself.  Canary Wharf may be a financial success, but it’s a failure as a public place and as a community.)

The Yahoo article goes on to report the concerns of critics that the post-Games redevelopment plans will fall into the Canary Wharf trap and “will only create an island of prosperity amid run-down neighborhoods.”   Adding to that apprehension is the nearby and newly-built Westfield shopping center, the largest in Europe, that is taking trade away from existing businesses, weakening the ties that held the current neighborhood together.

Richard Burdett, professor of urbanism at the London School of Economics, succinctly expresses the challenge for the post-Game planners.  In his words, the redevelopment will be a success “if it feels like a normal part of the city – and I think that’s the ambition of the project.”

To their credit, the London planners recognized the enormity of the task and the history of failures and partial successes.  Juliet Davis, writing for British Politics and Policies for the London School of Economics, was a member of the planning team and provides an overview of the process.

She starts by describing the prior conditions in the area now occupied by the Olympic Village.  It was an area of low-income residents, with 42 percent in the bottom five percent of household income.  It was also subject to high levels of transience.  Davis notes that the site is near the boundaries of several older cities that were swept away in the 1965 creation of Greater London, but not before leaving a legacy of fragmented planning.

Davis then notes two specifically troublesome elements of the long-range planning.  First, the extent of the redevelopment was so broad that much of the existing development had to be swept away, creating what Davis calls a tabula rasa.  But that blank slate included wiping away churches and clubs that the local residents, poor as they were, held dear, thus assuring local opposition and resentment.

Also, investors were eager to see a successful long-term vision of the redevelopment, with illustrations showing healthy and prosperous residents.  In Davis’ words, “People had to appear to be happy in these images.  They could not smoke or drink or display hallmarks of dysfunction or poverty.”  Therefore, it had to be assumed that the current residents, the folks who redevelopment should have been aiding, would be relocated elsewhere.   Thereby bringing the Canary Wharf concern into play.

Davis sums up the challenge faced by the planners in a final paragraph that is heavy in planner jargon, but still worthy of pondering:

The challenge of creating a positive legacy in terms of communities lies in two key areas.  Firstly, it depends on designs that genuinely facilitate social relationships that can both endure and evolve.  Secondly, it depends on how people are reengaged in the site over time.  In the short term, this engagement lies in the democracy of the urban planning process.  Longer term, it is about the capacity that inhabitants have to creatively inhabit the venues, spaces and new developments on the Olympic site and, to create their own urban cultures and futures.

The last sentence beautifully captures the recuperation process that I believe to be so important.

Lastly, Feargus O’Sullivan of Atlantic Cities compares the Beijing and London Olympics.  He gives the edge to Beijing on architecture and opening ceremonies, but suspects that overall London may come out ahead because of their long-term vision for redevelopment.  As he describes it, the key is “planners displaying a real effort to avoid the post-Games dereliction of some previous hosts.”

Lest anyone misconstrue my message, I love the Olympics and eagerly await the chance to be reacquainted with the broad reach of the Games, broad both in geography and in range of athletic endeavor.  Like many, I may grumble about the hype, the commercialization, the nationalism, and the frequent rule-bending, but I believe, at its core, that the Olympic ideal is good and worthy of emulation.

And the story of the South Sudanese runner who will be allowed to compete under the Olympic flag is a reminder of all that can be good about the Games.

With that said, how do I reconcile the Olympics with the potential for harm to the host cities, a fate that London, despite their aggressive planning, might still not be able to avoid?  By dusting off an idea that others have proposed.  I suggest that a limited number of “permanent” host cities be selected.  Perhaps ten total, five each for the Summer and Winter Olympics.  The host cities would then be put on a twenty-year schedule.

With a guaranteed return every twenty years, most Olympic venues can survive for more than one Olympics.  A well-built track-and-field can survive three or even four re-uses.  (My grandfather worked on the construction of the Los Angeles Coliseum for the 1932 Summer Olympics.  After several facelifts, it remains in use for college football 80 years later and could probably host another Olympics.)

Even if a facility such as an aquatic center or velodrome can only be used for one or two Olympics, its replacement can be built on the same site, minimizing the disruption to the urban fabric.

I understand that selecting ten Olympic host cities for perpetuity would be controversial, with the also-rans feeling permanent exclusion.  However, that downside seems an acceptable trade-off for the potential damage that is now done to two new host cities twice every four years.  Not to mention being a less expensive approach.

As always, your questions or comments will be appreciated.  Please comment below or email me.  And thanks for reading. - Dave Alden (davealden53@comcast.net)