Living With London's Olympics

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The quadrennial summer Olympic Games are renowned for producing the world's biggest single-city cultural event. This mega-event attracts a live audience of millions, a television audience of billions, and generates incredible scrutiny before, during, and after each installment. This is due to the fact that underpinning the 17 days of spectacular sporting events is approximately a decade worth of planning, preparing, and politicking.

It is during this decade that prospective host cities must plan and win their bids before embarking upon seven years of urban upheaval and social transformation in order to stage the world's premier sporting event. This book draws on seven years of ethnographic inquiry around the London 2012 Olympics and contrasts the rhetoric and reality of mega-event delivery.

Lindsay argues that in its current iteration the twin notions of beneficial Olympic legacies and Olympic delivery benefits for hosting communities are largely incompatible. Review: Cities bidding for the Olympic Games now routinely spend as much time addressing issues of long-term legacy as to plans for the sports competitions.

In this pioneering text, Iain Lindsay presents a wealth of ethnographic data to show how the seven-year preparations for London 2012 fared in light of the original claims. It is required reading for anyone interested in the realities of planning for the world's most significant sporting and cultural mega-event. - John Gold, Professor of Urban Historical Geography, Oxford Brookes University, UK Iain Lindsay has produced a fascinating study of the London 2012 Olympics, specifically regarding how the world's biggest mega-event was experienced and endured by its immediate hosts, the local people in one of the UK's poorest, most ethnically complex, and transient areas.

The book is urban anthropology at its very best - richly ethnographic, vividly detailed, and sharply critical - and is essential reading for anyone with an interest in sport mega-events, community relations, and urban redevelopment. - Richard Giulianotti, Professor of Sociology, Loughborough University, UK The 2012 London Olympics was a remarkable mega-sporting event that was also tasked with responsibility for the delivery of the regeneration of a blighted segment of the UK's capital.

Iain Lindsay has written an astonishingly detailed account of life from within the maelstrom of this delivery. The seven years that Lindsay spent in the field offer a nuanced view of the promises made to local communities when the Games were awarded to London, as well as an examination of how, come Games time, those promises had morphed into a free-market jamboree from which local communities were excluded.

This is a fine example of socially committed urban ethnography. - Dick Hobbs, Professor, University of Western Sydney, Australia