In the last two decades the ‘Mega-Event’ has had a growing impact on the development of cities, especially in emerging economies. To understand the impact of these mega-events as a driver of large-scale urban developments, the Dutch architecture office XML did a comparative analysis of cities bidding for the Olympic Games, the biggest mega-event in the world. The research presented in this exhibition compares six cities with an Olympic ambition – Tokyo (2020), Doha (2020), Istanbul (2020), Madrid (2020), Durban (2024) and Cape Town (2024) – and investigates how these cities use the Games for the long-term development of their city. Therefore, the research not only presents an overview of Olympic plans, but also reveals respective attempts to create a future vision on urban societies. The exhibition showshow these societies try to deal with current and future trends by using their Olympic aspirations as a particular way of looking at the cultural, economic, spatial and political developments in the analysed cities.
The spatial concepts of the Olympic bids researched in the project are all based on the existing paradigm of the Olympic Games as a mega-event. However, in the second part of the exhibition XML shows that the Olympic Games are not a neutral, autonomous and immutable event, but have historically been closely tied to political, economic and social developments. A closer look at the history of the Olympics reveals a series of cycles, each lasting about 20 years. Each of these periods creates its own paradigm for the meaning of the Games and for what the Games mean in their era.
Long-term developments such as global warming, geopolitical shifts, migration, population growth, tourism and digitalization are expected to have a huge impact on the world the over next two decades. As a result of rapid urbanization, the city is the locus where these developments converge and global trends materialize.
Fuelled by long-term global trends, XML developed three scenarios that speculate on the future Games by reconnecting the Games to their intrinsic transformative potential. All three models serve the urban agenda of the 21st century, each in an idiosyncratic way. Hence, the models are not only spatial concepts for a major sports event; they can also be understood as theoretical models for new forms of urbanity.At a time when the current model of the Games is under pressure, these three models suggest routes leading to the reinvention of the Olympic Games by using the utopian potential of the Games, as a shared (inter)national project, to reflect and act on the global urgencies of the 21st century.
