La metabolizzazione delle Olimpiadi. Capacità trasformativa e lascito dei mega-eventi nel paesaggio urbano

In recent years, there has been an increase in the number of metropolitan cities around the world. There is an undeniable economic link between these cities, thus forming a global landscape (Sassen, 2004). The latter includes cities wishing to leave their national context with the ambition of excelling at the international level. Each city has its own vision of the potential action needed to implement this radical change (Secchi, 2006). In order to assert their presence at the international level, these cities are particularly keen to hold important events – including mega-events, and most notably, Summer Olympics (Smith, 2012) – through which they can ensure their metropolitan development in multiple directions. Indeed, the Olympic Games have the capacity to organize, within the host city, a true cycle of life characterized by a pre- event and post-event. The issue then becomes for the metropolis to find ways to instrumentalize this mega-event to give a long-term vision of its cultural, economic, and infrastructural development. Already, it is possible to highlight the weakness in the scope and nature of a vision proposed over the long term. Indeed, what is really at stake for a metropolis, through the development of the Summer Olympic Games, is to design an urban landscape that is transformed with and beyond the legacy of the Olympic Games into its material and immaterial brands (Cashman and Hughes, 1999; Ritchie, 2000; Goad, 2001; Searle, 2002; Preuss, 2007; Hiller, 2006; Bondonio and Mela, 2008). For this reason, the main proposal of this research is to examine the possible identification of a metabolism of the Olympic Games and its material heritage in the post-event phase. More specifically, this thesis is based on a theoretical framework that reconstructs the concept of the urban landscape’s metabolism. This concept of urban metabolism emerged at the beginning of the 20th century. It leads to a reflection on the urban landscape’s capacity of transformation and its mutation through the choice for the conception of the public and private actors around the same controversy. From a methodological point of view, this research is supported by a qualitative approach based on a flexible research design. A structuralist and interpretative approach was undertaken both for data collection and for the analysis of the selected content. More specifically, this study considers the case studies of Rome (1960), Montreal (1976) and London (2012), both in their pre-event and post-event phases. The objective is to evaluate the organization of the event from its conception to its management, as well as how its heritage and its transformative action were considered. In the end, this research shows that the Olympic Games have an operational value of concertation that interweaves different scales: international, metropolitan, and urban.