All rights reservedBrownill, SueKeivani, RaminSilva Omena de Melo, Erick2024-10-212024-10-212016978-85-7785-551-1https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.14235/2093Proceedings of the IV World Planning Schools Congress, July 3-8th, 2016 : Global crisis, planning and challenges to spatial justice in the north and in the southLegacy has risen up the Olympic agenda in the 21st century as a rationale for hosting the Games and for the spatial transformations of cities that have accompanied this. In particular the ‘urban legacy’ of Olympic city building has been evident in host cities influenced by global policy models such as the 1992 Barcelona games. From 2003 ‘promoting a positive legacy’ was added to the IOC Charter and became a criterion in assessing bids. Yet there is no agreed definition of legacy and it is therefore a complex and contested concept open to many different interpretations and the subject of political debate and action over its conceptualisation and realisation. Equally contested is how legacy is to be interpreted and understood. While some academic accounts have been geared to how to achieve legacy within normative policy discourses (see for example Davies, 2012; LERI, 2007) others have taken a much more critical stance focusing on the displacement and lost alternatives that constitute the ‘dark side’ of legacy (Thornley, 2012; Broudehoux and Sanchez, 2013). This is often accompanied by a theoretical understanding which sees mega-events and their urban transformations as manifestations of neo-liberal urbanisation, entrepreneurial governance and the entrenchment of socio-spatial polarisation. Following Hardy (1999), mega-events and their legacies are the ‘carnival mask’ or ‘circuses’ (de Souza, 2012) which act to soften and hide these unequal processes. Depicting the spread of Olympic city-building as a result of the top-down transfer of a universal urban policy has become common (Gibbons and Wolff, 2012b).EnglishopenAccessconferenceObject946-949