Syracuse

Un-linking the rings : cities and the Olympic Games / ed. by Bob Catterall... [et al.]

Catterall, Bob

Edited by Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group - 2012

To attend to the dark side of the Olympics, as it is has begun to emerge over the last decade and now in London, is not necessarily to ignore its bright side or its promise. It is not to ignore the skills and commitment of the athletes or the emotional engagement of the spectators. Nor is it to ignore the utopian promise of an event in which, at best, the nature of achievement and competition is a celebration of positive human potential rather than an exploitation of that potential. Nor is it to blame the Olympics itself for that exploitation. But it is to attend to the evidence for a rapidly emerging trend, dramatised and accelerated by the Olympics, a complex socio-economic, psychosocial yet deeply material, and political trend, a counter-spirit and set of arrangements that need both to be identified, interpreted, and to be addressed, resisted and overcome. Some of the evidence for that trend and its dramatisation and acceleration by the Olympics is identified and interpreted in this issue of City. It comes from London and Athens. Some of the research is presented in two special features, one with a specific focus on the Olympics that extends from London now and back eight years to Athens, the other on architecture and the politics of ‘the new’, with particular reference to London and an excursion to Renaissance Italy. It continues in a reading of the global class dialectics of the nouveau poor looking inwards and outwards from the ‘local’, ‘national’ debt crisis of Greece, and in reexamination of the class structure of London, a new analysis that challenges established views of gentrification and professionalization.

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