According to Christian (2010) the Olympic Games had served as a symbol of modernity for newborn nations. He highlights the fact that at least until the Los Angeles Olympic Games in 1984 the urban planners involved with the city planning for the mega event use to see it as a means of improving the urban environment aiming to create a positive legacy for the host city. Focusing on Tokyo’s Olympic Games of 1964, he states its importance as “rite of passage” to Japan: from the notoriety at wartime and the subsequent poverty at the postwar period to a new “economic powerhouse”.
In addition, he says that it was not an attempt to forget the past but mostly an attempt to find the right track to reach modernity. The development of urban infrastructure, such as, canalization and traffic, was as much important to Tokyo as the symbolic revitalization of the city fabric. Considering these facts, he affirms that Tokyo’s Olympic Games served as an example of how mega-events can be a trigger for large-scale urban improvements.
However, in the last decades these events seems to have lost this urban-improvement character, attempting to enhance marketing opportunities more than trying to reconstruct national identities through the considerations of symbolic politics and local history (Christian, 2010). These kind of mega-events, especially the Olympic Games, has left negative consequences to the host-cities, such as, public bills, unused sportive structures and transport systems inadequate to local necessities (Velloso, 2012 cited in Mezzono and Yamawaki, 2013).
TAGSOLD, C., 2010. Modernity, space and national representation at the Tokyo Olympics 1964. Urban History, 37(2), pp. 289-300. Available from: ProQuest ebrary. [19 January 2015]
In addition, he says that it was not an attempt to forget the past but mostly an attempt to find the right track to reach modernity. The development of urban infrastructure, such as, canalization and traffic, was as much important to Tokyo as the symbolic revitalization of the city fabric. Considering these facts, he affirms that Tokyo’s Olympic Games served as an example of how mega-events can be a trigger for large-scale urban improvements.
However, in the last decades these events seems to have lost this urban-improvement character, attempting to enhance marketing opportunities more than trying to reconstruct national identities through the considerations of symbolic politics and local history (Christian, 2010). These kind of mega-events, especially the Olympic Games, has left negative consequences to the host-cities, such as, public bills, unused sportive structures and transport systems inadequate to local necessities (Velloso, 2012 cited in Mezzono and Yamawaki, 2013).
TAGSOLD, C., 2010. Modernity, space and national representation at the Tokyo Olympics 1964. Urban History, 37(2), pp. 289-300. Available from: ProQuest ebrary. [19 January 2015]