Mega-event cities: Art/audiences/aftermaths

Dickinson, Peter; Johnston, Kirsty; Zaiontz, Keren

doi:10.1386/public.27.53.5_7

Cited by 3 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 0 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…More detailed studies focus on specific elements of single events, for example: Olympic opening ceremonies and performance (Simandiraki 2005;Falcous and Silk 2010;Baker 2015); exhibitions' engagement with science (Forgan 1998;Cogdell 2000;Hornsey 2008); mega events as performance or ritual (Benedict 1983;MacAloon 1984MacAloon , 2019Klausen 1999;MacRury 2008;Hinsley 1991); and the role of art, media and architecture (Dickinson, Johnston and Zaiontz 2016;Garcia 2008;Rydell and Burd Schiavo 2010;Jolivette 2009). All these topics are engaged with throughout this book, but especially significant are those works that deal with issues of imperialism, class and varied responses to events (Stephen 2013;Vanke 2008), and that critically analyse events' representations and image-making processes (Broudehoux 2017;Adese 2016).…”

Section: Reading Mega Eventsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Contemporary Archaeology of London’s Mega Events: From the Great Exhibition to London 2012

Gardner¹

2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

A Contemporary Archaeology of London’s Mega Events explores the traces of London’s most significant modern ‘mega events’. Though only open for a few weeks or months, mega events permanently and disruptively reshape their host cities and societies: they demolish and rebuild whole districts, they draw in materials and participants from around the globe and their organisers self-consciously seek to leave a ‘legacy’ that will endure for decades or more. With London as his case study, Jonathan Gardner argues that these spectacles must be seen as long-lived and persistent, rather than simply a transient or short-term phenomena. Using a novel methodology drawn from the subfield of contemporary archaeology – the archaeology of the recent past and present-day – a broad range of comparative studies are used to explore the long-term history of each event. These include the contents and building materials of the Great Exhibition’s Crystal Palace and their extraordinary ‘afterlife’ at Sydenham, South London; how the Festival of Britain’s South Bank Exhibition employed displays of ancient history to construct a new post-war British identity; and how London 2012, as the latest of London’s mega events, dealt with competing visions of the past as archaeology, waste and ‘heritage’ in creating a vision of the future. This book offers significant new directions for the study of mega events in its comparison of how three mega events changed London over three centuries. Drawing on a broad range of theoretical and methodological frameworks and a rich array of sources, it demonstrates the great potential of contemporary archaeology for understanding contemporary urban phenomena.

show abstract

Section: Reading Mega Eventsmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Contemporary Archaeology of London’s Mega Events: From the Great Exhibition to London 2012

Gardner¹

2022

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Moreover, critics charge that festivals programmed explicitly to attract capital tend to exclude critical feminist and queer artists grappling with social and economic injustice in their practice (Harvie, 2013;Schulman, 2012a;Levin and Solga, 2009). As a result, such events tend to avoid work that generates difficult discussions about settler colonialism, and the race and class dimensions of urban inequalities (Catungal and Leslie, 2009a;Dickinson et al, 2016).…”

Section: The Contradictory Role Of Community-engaged Artmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Queering the Creative Citymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Currently, Indigenous arts programmers and curators are finding ways to programme politicised Indigenous artists such as Rebecca Belmore and Kent Monkman within large-scale festivals promoting diversity (Dickinson et al, 2016). Through performative interventions, these politicised artists draw attention to and contest the violence of historic and ongoing settler colonialism in Canadian cities (Dickinson et al, 2016). Critical arts practitioners have also contested creative city placemarketing strategies in cities globally with projects that draw attention to the connections between spectacularised arts events and the intersectional dimensions of gentrification, displacement, settler colonialism and precarious cultural sector work (Arts and Precarity Collective, 2017;McLean, 2016).…”

Section: Queering the Creative Citymentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Regulating and resisting queer creativity: Community-engaged arts practice in the neoliberal city

McLean

2018

Urban Studies

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article draws from and advances urban studies literature on ‘creative city’ policies by exploring the contradictory role of queer arts practice in contemporary placemarketing strategies. Here I reflect on the fraught politics surrounding Radiodress’s each hand as they are called project, a deeply personal exploration of radical Jewish history programmed within Luminato, a Toronto-based international festival of creativity. Specifically, I explore how Luminato and the Koffler Centre, a Jewish organisation promoting contemporary art, regulated Radiodress’s work in order to stage marketable notions of ethnic and queer diversity. I also examine how and why the Koffler Centre eventually blacklisted Radiodress and her project. However, I also consider the ways Radiodress and Toronto artists creatively and collectively responded to these tensions. I maintain that bringing queer arts practice into discussions about contemporary creative city policies uncovers sites of queer arts activism that scale up to shape broader policies and debates. Such disidentificatory interventions, acts of co-opting and re-working discourses which exclude minoritarian subjects, challenge violent processes of colonisation and commodification on multiple fronts, as well as fostering more collective and relational ways of being.

show abstract

“…The priorities, strategies and consequences of using megaevents as catalysts for 'driving urban change' (Essex and de Groot, 2017) have attracted a large and diverse literature (Roche, 2002;Gold and Gold, 2005;Hiller, 2006;Smith, 2012;Müller, 2015;Dickinson et al, 2016;Horne, 2017). Defined as festivals possessing the scale, impact and media visibility to attract global attention, megaevents are typically ambulatory rather than staged each time at a permanent location.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Land remediation, event spaces and the pursuit of Olympic legacy

Gold

2020

Geography Compass

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper explores the links between remediating land for Olympic event spaces and the pursuit of legacy. In particular, it considers ways in which redevelopment of the sizeable spaces prepared for staging the event take their place in broader strategies intended to bring long-term benefits to the host city and society in order to compensate for the costs and inconvenience originally incurred in hosting the Games. There are six main sections. The first analyses the diverse nature of brownfield land and highlights salient characteristics of its remediation for use in urban regeneration. The second supplies background to Olympic legacy and indicates the importance of the changing climate of ideas in understanding the formulation of legacy over the past two decades. The third section documents the role of remediation as an option employed recently by Games' organisers when needing to find spaces of suitable size to stage the Olympics, noting how choosing remediation ab initio involves commitment to legacy. The fourth and fifth parts analyse approaches to implementing remediation, with respect to the key event spaces for two of the twenty-first century's Summer Games: Homebush Bay, which housed the Olympic Park for Sydney 2000; and the Lower Lea Valley, which served the same function for London 2012. The final section provides commentary on the wider narratives of transformation associated with deployment of remediated sites for Olympic event spaces and indicates the significance of the values that have underpinned those narratives.

show abstract

Mega-event cities: Art/audiences/aftermaths

Abstract: This special issue introduction contextualizes the role of arts and culture in articulating the social agendas of urban mega-events like Olympic Games and World Expos, and also individual contributors’ approaches to this topic.

Cited by 3 publications

References 0 publications

A Contemporary Archaeology of London’s Mega Events: From the Great Exhibition to London 2012

A Contemporary Archaeology of London’s Mega Events: From the Great Exhibition to London 2012

Regulating and resisting queer creativity: Community-engaged arts practice in the neoliberal city

Land remediation, event spaces and the pursuit of Olympic legacy

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About