Competition through Interurban Policy Making: Bidding to Host Megaevents as Entrepreneurial Networking

Abstract

Recent scholarship on policy mobility, globally active municipal governments, and transnational city-to-city policy making suggest a new dynamic in entrepreneurial cities: entrepreneurialism based not only on place competition, but also based on practices of interurban networking. This paper argues that cross-city initiatives to share planning expertise can function both as policy-making networks and as markets for policy knowledge, as urban governance stakeholders strategically leverage intercity initiatives for sharing urban planning knowledge. Bidding to host sporting 'megaevents' highlights these networked entrepreneurial strategies. A comparative study of bids to host the Olympic Games over a twenty-year period shows that policy-making knowledge (templates, models, and best practices) shared between cities is both necessary for competing to host events, and represents 'policy commodities' that planning coalitions can use as part of their entrepreneurial portfolios. While much commentary on interurban policy making focuses on how policy practices are received by cities or mobilized by international businesses or policy makers, this paper signals to a multidirectional entrepreneurial strategy: although megaevents federations and sponsors developed megaevents knowledge networks to leverage urban planning for profit, many local development coalitions have incorporated these same networks into their competitive strategies.

Boston’s Olympic bid and the evolving urban politics of event-led development

“…But this translation of expertise was not only top-down: Boston's planners promoted their soon-to-be-gained expertise in both national and global urban policy debates. Such "policy boosterism" (McCann, 2013) is a recent but increasingly common practice among mega-event bidders (Lauermann, 2014a). Of note is the bidders' emphasis on marketing Boston as a site of innovation, contending that the city is not only capable of hosting a Games but also well placed to develop new planning models for the Olympics in general.…”

“…American firms played leading roles in the early stages of codifying Olympic planning knowledge following the Atlanta 1996 Games (Lauermann, 2014a(Lauermann, , pp. 2643(Lauermann, -2644.…”

“…This consolidation of the Olympic brand required a standardization of urban planning, a "decision to brand the whole city 'Olympic'" (Payne, 2006, p. 190). This task was accomplished through a series of joint ventures co-owned by the IOC, many of which were subsequently restructured as consultancies (Lauermann, 2014a). Concurrently, experts from past Olympic host cities formed their own consulting firms to advise prospective host cities (Cashman & Harris, 2012;González, 2011).…”

“The city” as developmental justification: claimsmaking on the urban through strategic planning

“…The policymaking tools associated with those strategies (templates, models, guidelines for best practice, etc.) are an important currency in constructing a city's identity, as policymakers "sell" their expertise outside the city to build extra-local legitimacy in support of local projects (Lauermann, 2014a). The point is that promoting the urban brand to local constituencies is often accomplished by disseminating the same policy tools that are produced by strategic planning, through extrospective "policy boosterism" by local authorities in global knowledge circuits (McCann, 2013), city-to-city "policy tourism" by technocrats learning from each other (Cook & Ward, 2011), or "diplomatic entrepreneurship" between municipal governments (Acuto, 2013, p. 490).…”

Mega-events and the Preservation of Urban Heritage: Literature Gaps, Potential Overlaps, and a Call for Further Research

“…Despite attempts to generally define mega-events through inclusive terms, works aimed at discussing the phenomenon as a whole typically tell the story of a specific event, with most narratives describing the Olympics and the Expo, by far the two most well-known and visible mega-events (Andranovich, Burbank, and Heying 2001 Within this diversity of focus and content of a mega-event, cities tend to manage and utilize them in similar ways as they are viewed as an exception to the typical rules of planning (Morandi and Di Vita 2017). For some events, special laws and governing bodies or outside consultants are established specifically to ensure their expedient delivery (Lauermann 2014;Müller 2014). Events can also be used to complete preexisting projects that have languished through traditional planning processes for years.…”