Mega-Events, Urban Space, and Social Protest

The Olympia 2000 Bid in Reunified Berlin, 1990–1993

Datos Bibliográficos

ID9644194
AutoresMolly Wilkinson Johnson (0000-0002-3803-6450, University of Alabama in Huntsville, autor de correspondencia)
Año2019
Volumen52
Número4
Páginas689-712
Fecha de publicación2019-12-01
Peer ReviewedSí
Open AccessSí
TipoARTICLE
RevistaCentral European History (JOURNAL)
Identificadores de la revistaISSN: 0008-9389 • E-ISSN: 1569-1616
EditorialCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s000893891900089x
OpenAlexW2998837447
IdiomaEN
Citas recibidas4
Referencias citadas24

This article explores the competing visions of urban planning that influenced newly reunified Berlin's highly contested bid, undertaken between 1990 and 1993, to host the 2000 Olympic Games. The governing city parliament coalition, mainstream media, and private corporations embraced the Games as the key to Berlin's future. The Olympics would draw investors, reunify infrastructure, foster a common “Berlin” identity among newly reunited Berlin's residents, upgrade borderland spaces and eastern neighborhoods, and boost Berlin's prominence as a global city. Alternatively, numerous protesters from both East and West, proclaiming their right to provide meaningful input into the uses of urban space, staged creative protest actions highlighting the negative social, political, and environmental effects of the proposed Games on Berlin and its neighborhoods. Ultimately, supporters and opponents diverged on the matter of who had the right to determine the use of urban space: the city government and private corporations or city residents who believed they knew best what benefited their own neighborhoods. In the end, Berlin lost its bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games. Nonetheless, creative resistance efforts designed to offer democratic alternatives to growth- and investment-oriented urban planning and to protect residents’ rights to codetermine urban space, often emerging in response to planned mega-events and large development projects, persist more than two decades later, not only in Berlin but in other major metropolises around the globe

Democracy · Economics · Economy · Global city · Globe · Government (linguistics · Mainstream · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Right to the city · Sociology · Urban planning · Vision · Engineering · Law · Public Administration · Sport and Mega-Event Impacts · Sports, Gender, and Society