Rising East Online

Editorial

The only game in town?

by Phil Cohen

‘There is much more to the Games than the sporting events – it is a cultural festival that involves hearts and minds as well as bodies, and one which East London is well placed to celebrate….’

For over a century East London has produced world-class boxers, wrestlers, footballers, swimmers, and athletes of every kind. Over the same period it has been the host to people from many nations, providing a home from home for immigrants and refugees from trouble spots around the globe. These two facts are intimately linked.

Sport was and still is one of the key ways the East End can compete with the rest of London on anything like a level playing field. For manual workers, sport has traditionally provided a means of putting the strength, discipline and skill they develop on the job to other, more pleasurable - and sometimes more profitable - uses. For immigrants, often discriminated against in the labour market and excluded from public life, sport has provided a way of opening doors that might otherwise stay shut.

As a result, East London has grown a rich mix of physical cultures. Some are directly linked to Olympic sports, but others, such as skateboarding, rollerblading and breakdancing, comprise new forms of urban athleticism which have yet to be officially recognised.

And of course there is much more to the Games than the sporting events – it is a cultural festival that involves hearts and minds as well as bodies, and one which East London is well placed to celebrate. The area is a hive of creative industry – it is home to world-class designers and artists, media and music makers, many of them local boys and girls made good, while back on the streets there is a vibrant youth scene in which East meets East on the other side of the tracks.

For all of these reasons, the announcement that London was to bid for the 2012 Games, and that the Olympic stadium and athletes village was to be located in the Lower Lea Valley with Stratford serving as its main transport hub, was initially greeted with considerable local enthusiasm.

In November 2003, the London East Research Institute organised a public meeting in Stratford Town Hall, attended by representatives from a broad range of community organisations who gave the panel of stakeholders a pretty good run for their money.

The main concern voiced was that the ‘Olympics effect’ – the impact of such a mega event on the local economy – would be genuinely beneficial. As Gavin Poynter stresses in his lead article, the bid does not make sense unless it is seen as part of a wider process of regional economic development. The Olympics must be about more than giving a short-term boost to the visitor economy. They must help us deal with some of the deeper and more intractable problems caused by industrialism and its decline.

Sharon Zukin, speaking at London East’s First Docklands lecture in June 2004, drew on the experience of the New York bid to add a further note of caution about the limits and conditions of the Olympics ‘trickle down’ effect. We have reproduced some extracts of her talk, linked to a wider debate about the role of cultural regeneration which is taken up in the interview with David Powell, who is responsible for the London 2012 cultural strategy.

In both these forums, members of the audience voiced enthusiasm, and sometimes anxiety, about the environmental impact of siting the Games in East London. Cormorants may now nest where once smoke stack industries dominated the landscape, windsurfers may skim along the old dockside, but many heavily polluted brown field sites remain. The piggy backing of the bid on existing plans for the regeneration of the Lea Valley is eminently sensible and makes greening the Games in principle a much easier proposition.

Some of the proposals for sustainability in the plan are bold and imaginative. We certainly need to use state of the art eco-construction methods and we need a stadium lit and heated by wind and solar power, an athletes’ village built out of recycled materials, a transport system that gets large numbers of people to and from the events without turning the Olympic site into a giant car park – 10,000 free bicycles should help a lot!

But we also need training programmes that skill local people in the new eco-technologies, and without such a compact the heritage of the Games will be all too short-lived. So it is good to be able to report that the campaign led by London Citizens has succeeded in extracting a commitment to ensure that London’s Games, unlike Athens, will be built on the enhancement of the local skills base and not on the exploitation of an immigrant labour force.

It is also essential to realise that the Olympics of 2012 will be taking place in highly charged and inherently unstable geo-political environment, a world in which both local and global affiliations, whether of nation, religion, ethnicity or culture, have taken on complex and contradictory forms in ways unimagined by the founders of the modern Olympic movement.

No one wants a Fortress Olympics, but, as Brendan O’Neill argues in his article, risk analysis and international security issues are likely to dominate the organisation of the Games unless somehow the ‘war against terror’ abates. Certainly the importance of widening access to the Games, by making them affordable to the people of East London and to young tourists, has to be set against the increased cost of surveillance. These are not easy priorities to reconcile.

All these issues are recognised in London 2012’s bid document, submitted recently to the International Olympics Committee (IOC); moreover, many of them are addressed more imaginatively than in the other cities’ bids. Nevertheless, some nagging doubts remain.

In the IOC’s critique of London’s bid, they focused on some manifest problems of technical infrastructure, especially transport links. You do not have to be an expert in transport planning to wonder whether the failure to deliver Crossrail in time for the Games, plus the everyday commuter experience of just how overstretched London’s public transport system is, indicates that in this decisive area London’s bid is just no match for Paris.

Just as significantly, perhaps, the IOC pointed to a problem for which there is no technical fix: the discrepancy between the level of public support claimed for the Games by London 2012, and what their own survey of local opinion found on the ground. A credibility gap has opened up which will not be overcome by token consultations and strenuous exercises in urban imagineering.

London 2012 has waged a vigorous TV and poster campaign designed to convince Londoners – and especially East Enders – to ‘back the bid’ (by email). And of course there has been no shortage of endorsements by prominent politicians, athletes and media personalities, from David Beckham (alias the lad from Leytonstone) to Kelly Holmes and Mathew Pinsent, not forgetting Helen Mirren and Jeremy Irons. Our mediascape feature reviews the campaign and its coverage in the national and local press.

Any project that has the Morning Star and the London Evening Standard, not to mention Tony Blair and Ken Livingstone, carrying the same torch clearly has a lot going for it! Yet the terms in which the bid is being promoted have given rise to widespread concern. It is not just that some of the more extravagant claims for the benefits are ultimately unverifiable but that no proper research procedures have been put in place to evaluate the impact of the bid itself, let alone its eventual legacy, if we get it. In the event that the bid fails, the expectations that have been raised in East London by the ‘dare to hope, dare to win’ spin will fall back on the already fertile brown fields of local cynicism. It is important then that measures are put in place now to ensure that any such fallout effect is minimised or mitigated.

Secondly, and far more serious, is the culture of spin that has enveloped the construction and dissemination of London’s Olympics story. The key press statements issued to launch the submission document all emphasise the bid as a platform for the re-animation of Londoners’ - and by extension the nation’s - belief in themselves. In this context the bid is being used as a new kind of loyalty test – Blair’s Olympics test going one better than Tebbitt's Cricket test.

Anyone who focuses on the difficulties of delivering the bid and how to overcome them is thus seen as being somehow ‘off message’ and ‘letting the side down’. This is not exactly the best way to win the hearts and minds of communities who have little enough reason to trust political promises, and whose identification with a unitary notion of the British nation is at best shaky. In my article I look at how the rhetorical strategies associated with telling the Olympics story cannot help but bear the imprint of contradictions that are internal to the Olympics movement itself.

No one, of course, wants to be a party pooper; but important though the inculcation of a ‘can do’ attitude is, it is only likely to work if it is embedded in a realistic, and that means evidence-based, policy for promoting ‘bottom up’ regeneration. The negative media coverage of London’s bid would be less damaging if it were not for the vacuum created by the absence of any infrastructure of popular participation in urban planning.

London’s bid should, and perhaps still could, be used to develop such an infrastructure by supporting local community-based initiatives. The failure to do so has fed the popular belief in the capital that in the wake of the Millennium Dome fiasco, London is just no good at ‘grand projects’.

Against this background we have asked a number of London East’s specialist consultants to review key aspects of the bid. Paul Kitchin looks at the ‘British Sporting Model’ which informs much of London 2012 thinking about delivering the Games. Bill Risebero then examines some of the issues raised by designing a compact site in the Lower Lea Valley which will work as sustainable built environment.

Turning to the community aspects and ways in which they could be strengthened, Mike Locke looks at the issue of volunteering and assesses the problems as well as the possibilities of using this as a means of civic renewal. Alan Walsh examines the potential of the bid for developing a sports, recreation and health promotion strategy for East London which really engages where our young people are at.

In his review of ‘After the Goldrush’, the recent Demos pamphlet on the bid, Mike Rustin questions whether the ambition to marry top-down and bottom-up approaches into one seamless mega event is quite as easy as some of the Demos contributors seem to suggest.

Ultimately the problem with the Olympic bidding process is that the outcome is determined by the internal geo-politics of the IOC itself, which in turn reflect the state of international relations. Moreover, with the bid, as increasingly with the Games themselves, it is a case of winner takes all. It’s all about going for gold. There are no prizes for coming second to Paris!

But perhaps, after all, the best test for the strength of London’s bid is the extent to which it challenges this logic and demonstrates that even and especially if London does not win, the people of Stratford and the Lower Lea Valley will not be the losers. This is not to do with immediate perks, like getting a new Aquatic Centre whatever the outcome; it is about the long-term effect of enabling historically disadvantaged groups to swim, not sink in the flows and contraflows of the global city economy, of which East London and the Thames Gateway are now a key growth point.

That challenge is something we all welcome and whose address gives Rising East Online, along with the London 2012 bid, its public platform and its raison d’etre.

Professor Phil Cohen is executive director of the London East Research Institute where his main responsibility is developing a funded programme of scholarship in the community with special reference to the Thames Gateway Regeneration Plan.

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