Olympic Cities: 2012 and the Remaking of London

Olympic Cities: 2012 and the Remaking of London, by Gavin Poynter and Iain MacRury, eds. (London: Ashgate Publishing, 2009). Reviewed by Gordon MacDonald, The University of Western Ontario, London, Canada. Over the past decade Ashgate Publishing Limited has been running a series entitled Design and the Built Environment. The series is intended provide a site for the dissemination of substantive urban design research. Olympic Cities is one of the most recent volumes to appear in this active series--to date no less than eighteen books have been published since the first appeared in 2001. As with most other volumes in the series, numerous scholars contributed individual chapters to Olympic Cities and the editors attempted to create a unified theme throughout. At the best of times editors face a challenge of encouraging their contributors to stick to an overall theme. With a total of eighteen chapters in Olympic Cities, this was a tall order. The result overall is mostly positive, but there are exceptions. Though the editors strove to ensure that the contributors focus on the specific theme that the Olympic Games create legacies for the cities that host them, this goal is not achieved in all the chapters. Some contributors focused upon legacies that are not of the sporting variety, but that can be linked to the Games. These include the more obvious improvements to cities' infrastructures as well as soft legacies such as enhanced pride by the populace. This expansion of the concept of legacy is important because the usual tendency amongst 'Olympic' scholars has been to focus upon the sporting or financial legacies (both for good and ill) that the Games leave behind after their conclusion.