Sports Tourism and urban regeneration

Stratford and the Olympic site – Urban regeneration case study

I have been teaching the ongoing redevelopment of Stratford in London as a case study of urban regeneration for 2 years. As I am sure you are all aware the area is undergoing huge changes for the Olympics next year as 6 major sports stadiums, an athletes village and a media centre are all being built. The hope is that the redevelopment will bring with it further investment into the area and there are already signs of this with the large Westfield shopping centre being constructed right by the Olympic site. Having recently visited the site with a group of students I thought I would add a few thoughts to a case study that I am sure many people are teaching.

Prior to the Olympic bid Stratford was one of London’s more deprived areas, not a no go zone by any means but unemployment rates were high income was low, housing quality was pretty poor etc. The case study lends itself well to both GCSE and A-Level specs as a lot is being done to ensure the sustainability of these games and clearly the current exam specs have a real focus on sustainability. The world marvelled in 2008 when the games went to China at the impressive show put on in Beijing but the feeling was that the games in London needed not just to impress but to leave a legacy. The stadiums in China will, in all likelihood, turn into white elephants in the future, seldom seeing use and slowly rotting away. Unfortunately this is the case with a number of events which have preceded it, with the Montreal, Atlanta and Athens stadiums all being victim of this fate and the 2010 world cup stadiums in South Africa already falling into some state of disrepair. The exception to this doom which has followed after Olympics is Sydney where the games were planned with sustainability in mind, the result is that the venues continue to make money and create jobs for the people. London therefore used the success of Sydney to model their ideas on and tried to adapt as many of the good ideas from those games as possible (I use information on the success of Sydney as a starting point for my GCSE and A-level lessons – which ideas could work for London).