Francesc Muñoz

Olympic urbanism and Olympic Villages: planning strategies in Olympic host cities, London 1908 to London 2012.

The central argument of this chapter is that the urbanization of the Western world during the 20th century cannot be understood fully without consideration of the contribution of major urban events. The Great Exhibitions and the Olympic Games are two clear examples of this type of urban mega-event. In Olympic urbanism, the villages – designed as a shelter for the athletes and occupied by residents after the Games – stand out as urban artefacts that enable us to explore the relations between architecture and urban planning to communicate a specific urban image. It is in the Olympic Village that architecture most clearly places itself in the service of creating the image that the host city aims to project internationally. In this sense, building typologies, formal languages and urban design itself are part of an urban landscape specifically conceived to highlight given values of modernity and specific values of the place. At the same time, the architecture of the Olympic Villages manifests the ambition to reproduce, in controlled fashion in a small, limited space, the urban models and architectural proposals that, due to rigidity and difficulties, cannot be put into practice in the real space of the city. As the quotation that introduces this chapter shows, the architecture of Olympic Villages recreates a miniature world, a spectacular image of the city without the deformations, shortcomings and excesses of the real urban space where urbanism cannot completely control the forces that shape the city. Gradually, at the same time as architecture acquired