The Olympics and the opportunity for local improvements

Generally, when planning for the Olympics occurs, there isn't a lot of focus on how to make this international event work locally, before, during, and afterwards. True, cities like Beijing used the Olympics to push forward massive improvements in public transportation. (See the past blog entry, "One reason to get the Olympics.")

Often, such as when the Super Bowl was held in Detroit, where they demolished many recoverable buildings "to make the city look better" there is a rush to do urban renewal without paying too much attention to trying to bring benefits to the "locals" other than whatever "trickle down" benefits might result (e.g., if you live by a stadium, you park cars on your lawn and pocket the money--like people do in Ann Arbor who live close to the University of Michigan Football Stadium, and I did it once for Art Fair...).

So it isn't surprising that interest in sponsoring the Olympics in Chicago is falling off on the part of "every day residents," according to this Chicago Tribune article, "Olympic opposition getting second wind as support in Chicago fades: 47 percent of Chicagoans polled favor the bid, but that support had been at 61 percent in February."

In March I was there for the Main Street conference, and while I was there I met up with two great bloggers, Lynn Stevens of Peopling Places and Aaron Renn of Urbanophile, and I spent some time in Logan Square, and learned a bit about some revitalization efforts there.

I ended up writing a couple blog entries about this, in thinking about how to leverage the possibility of staging the Olympics in Chicago as an opportunity to push forward neighborhood and commercial district revitalization.

See "Chicago Neighborhood Revitalization and the Opportunity presented by the 2016 Olympics" and "Chicago and wayfinding systems."

Anyway, working to up the focus on improvements for Chicagoans is in order, to balance the benefits with the costs.

British Columbia has been doing a lot of forward planning in this way, for the 2010 Winter Olympics. From the 2010 Legacies Now webpage:

2010 Legacies Now is dedicated to strengthening arts, literacy, sport and recreation, physical activity and volunteerism in communities throughout BC leading up to and beyond the 2010 Olympic and Paralympic Winter Games.

We work with communities to discover social and economic opportunities for all British Columbians, so they can create their own legacies and benefit long into the future.

2010 Legacies Now. For everyone. Forever.

They have produced a number of toolkits designed to help communities and organizations make this kind of positive leveraging a reality:

- Reflecting the Community: A Guide for Building Culturally Responsive and Inclusive Organizations
- Cultural Mapping Toolkit
- Cultural Planning Toolkit
- Curatorial Toolkit
- Celebrations Toolkit

2010 Legacies Now logo, cobranded with the Province of British Columbia logo

Likely, the City of Chicago has the opportunity to learn from British Columbia, and their planning around the Olympics.