Sport mega event planning in Toronto: From a democratic demand to a democratic demise

Abstract

Key Messages Urban geographers need to consider how even bidding for a mega event has the potential to configure/reconfigure the politics of local economic development. Provincially‐led rescaling challenges the role of the public in Toronto's mega event development process. The continued depoliticization of urban governance in Toronto is disconcerting.

Playing in the Shadow of Event Urbanism: Newcomer Youth, Neighborhood Change, and TO2015

“…Often regarded as a commercially-viable and socially-pacifying institution, sport is resourced in the (re)development of postindustrial world-class cities, promising the injection of global-tourism capital, increased access to sport, recreation, and leisure facilities as well as the realization of (supposedly) more environmentally-sustainable transit opportunities (see, for example, Veal et al 2012;Nitsch and Wendland 2017). As a facilitator of public-private collaboration, sport has catalyzed entrepreneurial strategies that work to decentralize state-funded activities via privately-run and contractuallydelivered processes (Oliver 2017). Indeed, throughout the literature, sport is repeatedly implicated in the Bcompetitive city model^ (Boudreau et al 2009;Kipfer and Keil 2002;Silk and Andrews 2012a) wherein postindustrial cities harness event enthusiasm as an added chance to realize neoliberal itineraries, i.e., accelerate processes of state-led securitization/militarization, marketization, and privatization through regulatory capitalism (see also Raco 2014).…”

“…Recent research on the sport mega-event has examined development priorities and realities in the midst of time-sensitive construction processes. This work has interrogated the impact of the event on social legacies (Kidd 2013;Lenskyj 2012;Vanwynsberghe 2015), national identities (Broudehoux 2017;Silk 2018), urban geographies (Gaffney 2010;Oliver 2017), recreation and leisure opportunities (Potwarka and Leatherdale 2016), political dissidence (Boykoff 2014), and environmental collapse (Geeraert and Gauthier 2018). As a microcosm of broader societal trajectories and itineraries, the sport mega-event is not removed from the cultural preoccupation with terrorism; the fear from which has worked to legitimate and indeed necessitate the militarization of urban space.…”