John Lauermann

Mechanisms of policy failure: Boston’s 2024 Olympic bid

Planning for mega-events such as the Olympics is at a turning point. There has been a power shift in the relationship between cities and the International Olympic Committee towards the former. This shift is based on the emergence of anti-bid opposition movements; the increasing complexity of bidding; demands for locally relevant legacies; and a changing political economic relationship between citizens, city governments and sports federations. Our paper draws on a long-term study of Boston’s failed bid to host the 2024 Summer Olympics, based on an ethnography within the bidding corporation and interviews with pro- and anti-bid stakeholders. We lay out the reasons why the Boston bid failed, and conclude that bid failure involves factors that work against elitist powers and towards democratic beneficiaries.

Bidding and Urban Development

This chapter reviews recent urban studies and urban affairs scholarship on three major event-led development models: mega-events as a temporary catalyst for long-term development, as embedded within an urban regime governance strategy, and as a policy experiment. The critical question explored in this chapter is: why do certain cities continue to find it worthwhile to bid in an increasingly tumultuous urban political environment? We argue that the resilience of bidding politics hinges on the degree to which bids are integrated into longer term local development politics: the cities that are most likely to continue bidding are those which are less concerned with actually hosting the Games, but, instead with to use bidding as part of a more holistic development strategy.

Why Bid? The Logic of Pursuing Sports Mega-Events

This chapter presents some of the key shifts that have occurred in the Olympic bidding process. An apparent crisis in the lack of bid cities during recent mega-event competitions has prompted the International Olympic Committee to stress that bid cities should be looking to produce a positive urban legacy and to marry Olympic objectives with urban development goals. Yet, as the IOC attempts to be relevant by inviting cities to partake in legacy planning, there is an emerging concern that bid cities are using the bidding process to leverage urban development objectives that are at best only tangentially related to the bid. This chapter proposes that we have entered a new era of Olympic bidding that has fundamental implications for the “geography of failure.”

Policy Mobilities and the Bid

This chapter examines how political strategies and policy knowledge travel across cities bidding for the Olympics. It introduces urban studies scholarship on “policy mobilities”—interurban flows of expertise, knowledge, and models. This chapter focuses on the role of the bid consulting industry in facilitating policy mobilities, seen particularly in the mobility of expertise surrounding urban technology, sustainability, and urban architecture and design. This chapter argues that policy mobilities are driven by import imperatives (e.g., the need for cities to hire international experts when designing their bids) and by export imperatives (e.g., the desire to legitimate local projects by linking them to globally replicable policy models or templates).

Anti-bid Politics

This chapter evaluates the decline of bidding candidate cities, due to a lack of interest in democratic polities and anti-bid protest campaigns. Protest campaigns are effectively contesting the ‘politics of contingency’ often used by bid boosters—in which the contingent nature of a bid and bid failure is used to pursue projects outside the scope of normal planning procedures. They are also capitalizing on a changing political economic relationship between the IOC and bid city governments, as the latter cancel their bids rather than take on the risks and costs expected by the former.

Planning Across Bids

This chapter analyzes the connections which form across multiple bids, and in particular how plans from one bid get recycled into others as part of long-term development strategies. This chapter frames bid planning as a project, and examines scholarship on project-based learning to assess how learning occurs within and across bids in the same city. One high frequency bidder is used as a case study: bids emerging from Doha (Qatar) illustrate these themes as bid coalitions there regularly pursue mega-events not necessarily to win the hosting contracts, but to link bidding to local real estate projects and national developmental agendas.

Conclusion: Rethinking the Horizons of Failed Bids

The process through which mega-event planning and bid logics evolve and are justified has much to tell us about how urban space is produced in the modern city. This concluding chapter emphasizes the need to shift the emphasis of political debate away from the bid itself, to focus instead on the long-term policy making strategies that motivate bidding behind the scenes. By extending the horizons of bid failure, there is the opportunity to gain critical insight into the formation of urban policy, planning, and practice. This chapter reiterates several important lessons learned for cities considering whether or not to bid for the Games, and illustrates that cities have become adept at leveraging the mega-event bidding process for particular purposes.

Post-bid Legacies?

The central question of this chapter is: What happens in the aftermath of bid failure? Through illustrating how particular Olympic bids mobilize narratives of the future and lay the planning and policy groundwork necessary to make future development possible, we illustrate that even unsuccessful bids can be critical agents of change. An exploration of the failed bid projects of New York, Chicago, and Istanbul, demonstrates that even failed Olympic bids have the potential to trigger or reformulate a host of urban policies, processes, and practices, and can be employed as rhetorical tools designed to influence/project/imprint an image/identity.

How to Bid Better for the Olympics: A Participatory Mega-Event Planning Strategy for Local Legacies

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Several cities have canceled their Olympic bids in recent years because of local protests and referenda. Bidding cities now face a new political reality as they debate whether a bid is in the best interests of local stakeholders. We present a case study of Bostons (MA) ultimately unsuccessful bid to be the U.S. city selected to host the 2024 Olympic Games. Boston 2024, a nonprofit organization, prepared 2 sequential bids. We ask whether, how, and why Boston 2024 changed its planning approach from the 1st to the 2nd bid to respond to significant protests over its failure to meaningfully involve stakeholders, identify specific legacies, and provide accurate cost details. Our findings are limited by our focus on a single case, the small number of interviewees, and the constraints of ethnographic work. Boston 2024 shifted from an elite-driven process to a more inclusive one, from making generic claims about the impact of hosting the Games to describing local legacies, and from opaque budgets to transparent ones. Boston 2024 did not involve city planners in meaningful ways or engage fully with opponents. These changes were thus not sufficient to overcome substantial local distrust and opposition. Takeaway for practice: Cities considering mega-event bids should encourage a fully participatory planning process that provides genuine local legacies and is transparent about costs and who will bear overruns. City planners would contribute significantly to bid planning that meets these objectives. Cities should also pressure Olympic organizations to make supportive changes in their selection requirements.