ABSTRACT
This chapter analyses the urban politics of mega-events by tracing the process of democratic displacement to its source, the bidding process. It demonstrates the social movements which protest Olympic bids, documenting how democratic displacements are accomplished in urban politics. The role of Olympics in the broader neoliberalisation of urban policy is a similarly dominant theme in scholarship and in activist circles. The legacy concept has been critiqued extensively by academic analysts from across the political spectrum, especially for the role that it plays in legitimizing expenditures of public funds on private real-estate projects. Boykoff describes Olympic urban politics as a form of celebration capitalism, the affable cousin of disaster capitalism. Both occur in states of exception and both allow plucky politicos and their corporate cohorts to push policies they would not dream of during normal political. While social movements are starting to share this expertise, there is still much opportunity for building city-to-city alliances among Olympic protest movements.
