Olympic regeneration vs. social (in)justice: Value capture as a referee

Abstract

The Olympics are powerful tools to catalyse development, many times through “starchitecture” or “Olympic urbanism” strategies regenerating degraded urban areas in prime city zones. However, that often brings adverse social effects, namely displacement and gentrification. Hosts have been pressured to mitigate such effects, but the strict Olympic Games financial model severely constrains hosts' opportunities. Moreover, resorting to private sector funding is a difficult task, except for the construction of accommodation facilities as, in the context of the Games, land and property values tend to be highly speculative. Implementing value capture mechanisms can prove valuable to mitigate the event's social impacts, but this solution is difficult to implement and reduces the Games' economic value. The application of value capture in the Games' context seems to be a gap in the literature and, thus, this research introduces such a concept to Olympic studies, highlighting how it can be particularly valuable given the unique characteristics of Olympic projects. Resorting to a literature review, the argument is built around three lines of thought evidencing the paradoxes of combining social responsibility with the mega-event strategy to draw a pathway for possible applications of value capture that account for such paradox when mitigating Games-related social injustices.