Olympic Cities City Agendas, Planning, and the World’s Games, 1896 – 2020

The first edition of Olympic Cities, published in 2007, provided a pioneering overview of the changing relationship between cities and the modern Olympic Games. This substantially revised and enlarged third edition builds on the success of its predecessors. The first of its three parts provides overviews of the urban legacy of the four component Olympic festivals: the Summer Games; Winter Games; Cultural Olympiads; and the Paralympics. The second part comprisessystematic surveys of seven key aspects of activity involved in staging the Olympics: finance; place promotion; the creation of Olympic Villages; security; urban regeneration; tourism; and transport. The final part consists of nine chronologically arranged portraits of host cities, from 1936 to 2020, with particular emphasis on the six Summer Olympic and Paralympic Games of the twenty-first century. As controversy over the growing size and expense of the Olympics, with associated issues of accountability and legacy, continues unabated, this book’s incisive and timely assessment of the Games’ development and the complex agendas that host cities attach to the event will be essential reading for a wide audience. This will include not just urban and sports historians, urban geographers, event managers and planners, but also anyone with an interest in the staging of mega-events and concerned with building a better understanding of the relationship between cities, sport and culture.

1. Introduction (John R. Gold and Margaret M. Gold), Part I: The Olympic Festivals, 2. The Enduring Enterprise: The Summer Olympics, 1896–2012 (John R. Gold and Margaret M. Gold), 3. The Winter Olympics: Driving Urban Change, 1924–2022 (Stephen J. Essex and Jiska de Groot), 4. The Cultural Olympiads (Beatriz García), 5. The Paralympic Games (John R. Gold and Margaret M. Gold), Part II: Planning and Management, 6. Olympic Finance (Holger Preuss), 7. Promoting the Olympic City (Stephen V. Ward), 8. Olympic Villages (Tony Sainsbury), 9. Security (Jon Coaffee and Pete Fussey), 10. Urban Regeneration (Andrew Smith), 11. Olympic Tourism (Mike Weed), 12. Olympic Transport (Eva Kassens-Noor), Part III: City Portraits, 13. Berlin 1936 (Monika Meyer), 14. Mexico City 1968 (Michael Barke), 15. Munich 1972 (Monika Meyer), 16. Sydney 2000 (Robert Freestone and Simon Gunasekara), 17. Athens 2004 (Margaret M. Gold), 18. Beijing 2008 (Ian G. Cook and Steven Miles), 19. London 2012 (Graeme Evans and Özlem Edizel), 20. Rio de Janeiro 2016 (Gabriel Silvestre), 21. Tokyo 2020 (Yasushi Aoyama)

John R. Gold is Professor of Urban Historical Geography at Oxford Brookes University. Margaret M. Gold is Senior Lecturer in Creative Industries at London Metropolitan University.