ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the role of sporting mega-events in the transformation of the urban landscape, to understand some of their impacts upon local population groups. It investigates the production of the 'Olympic City' as a complex image construction process, which mobilizes multiple agents and requires important social, spatial and political reconfigurations. The chapter suggests that mega-event planning vision can open the way for the state-assisted privatization and commodification of the urban realm, and serve the needs of capital while exacerbating socio-spatial segregation, inequality and social conflicts. It demonstrates many ways in which mega-events are instrumentalized to justify the adoption of neoliberal urban policies, helping them appear at once urgent, necessary, and unavoidable. The chapter shows how the realization of the Olympic city relies upon an aggressive, state-sponsored form of gentrification, as government incentives make it both safe and attractive for speculators to appropriate urban territories, and benefit from unlocked land values.
