Hoping for a vibrant London 2012 legacy
If there is a radical difference between the London Olympics and all the other great sporting or cultural events ever organised anywhere else in the world, it lies in the issue of legacy.
What in the rest of the world has amounted to little more than ill-defined concepts, outcomes or commitments gone up in smoke, has become in London an overriding imperative that stands a very good chance of revolutionising the use of the word legacy itself.
Before London, the issue of what might happen after a major event was discussed in a general way – what would happen to structures that would be obsolete once the party was over, permanent benefits of investment in public transport that would counterbalance the ephemeral nature of the event itself, and so on – but legacy, with its negative as well as positive overtones, has almost never been mentioned.
The sheer structural effort that has gone into the forthcoming Olympics will make legacy and all the ideas that go with it – the shift in attention from the short to the long term, the assessment of social as well as strictly entrepreneurial interests and benefits, and above all a more visionary approach to urban transformation – an accepted part of everyday language.
“Cool” neighbourhoods
For starters, London’s candidacy was entirely predicated on the upgrading of a huge swathe of the existing city, the Lower Lea Valley east of the “cool” neighbourhoods of Hackney and Victoria Park, and north of Canary Wharf, the business and residential area that has become an icon of 1990s development. The location isn’t just an empty hole in which to set down an event in exchange for a couple of underground stations, but (in part) a poverty-stricken area one and a half the size of Venice (2.5 million sqm) which, thanks to the leverage of the Games, will receive some £20 million of targeted investment.
This groundbreaking concept has been accompanied by major changes to procedures in which both the event and its legacy have been planned right from the start, simultaneously. The aim is to avoid white elephants – buildings and structures that might turn out to be useless and costly to run once the Games are over. To make such ecologically and economically sustainable planning a reality means thinking about temporary and permanent transformation as parallel processes, and handling the shift from the one to the other in new and original ways.
Working out two separate masterplans for the same site means not just replacing sports facilities (stadiums and athletics tracks) with home, office, retail and other more urban functions, but also morphing a totally enclosed and controlled site designed for a mass event into an open, integrated, fully accessible district, as East London should be.
