In advance of last Saturday’s announcement that Tokyo will host the 2020 Summer Olympic Games, public policy professor John Rennie Short offered a fresh take on how to make the games more sustainable: keep them in the same place.
Short suggested to writer Nate Berg, in an article for The Atlantic Cities, that instead of asking cities to invest billions of dollars in new Olympic venues the OIC should create a single site that would function more or less as an international city-state, overseen by the United Nations, to host the Olympics and its training in perpetuity.
“There would be maybe big infrastructure costs, but there’s huge infrastructure costs being borne every year. How much did the Chinese pay? We’ll never know,” said Short, who’s written extensively on globalization and urban affairs. “We know the real costs are always underestimated. It’s billions upon billions.”
Having a stationary summer Olympics host site could also provide opportunities for more accurately measuring athletic performance over time, enable ongoing experimentation in sustainable development and architecture, and help to avoid the regular displacement of poor populations that often happens with new Olympics construction. Short shared, “Up to half a million people were displaced for the Beijing Olympics. Why do we keep doing that when we could find a place that doesn’t require any displacement?”
Read the full article at The Atlantic Cities and preview Short’s recent book, Stress Testing the USA, in this video:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DcUEyXn28hI&w=560&h=315]
Tags: CAHSS, PublicPolicy
