The LDA and consultants assert a re-imaging of locality via increased media exposure, and ascribe to major sporting events the power to redefine inhabitants' perception of place (LDA, 2004). They assert that sports facilities will catalyse development and attract business location after the Games. Cultural critics might disagree. Fredric Jameson (1991) points to the "induced disorientation" of much postmodern architecture and a "depthlessness based on the culture of the TV image". Jameson also argues a change in lived experience of the built environment via postmodern architecture: domination and disorientation being major intended effects. He highlights the aggressive passivity of saturation CCTV, a lack of self determination in movement, and a lack of congruence between actual landscape and its representation, something particularly noticeable with the Olympic masterplan illustrations which turned the whole site upside down (a view from the north), excluded the car park replacing East Marsh (i.e. presented it as open space), and included trees that will in fact be removed. Fabian Tompsett (1996), writing on the Isle of Dogs, argues that "capitalist TV and film [...] interact with the architecture of redevelopment in new strategies of class control and repression", adding "class struggle has always manifested itself around the construction of symbolic landscape". For the Olympic developments, such antagonism is prohibited on the site itself under IOC Rule 53, enforcing a dispersion of protest and annihilation of effect.

The monumental scale of the stadia and walkways, and the masterplan itself, confirms the central morality of health and a militarised sports regimen in biopolitical governance. The Olympic event and legacy of infrastructure will produce intensively-policed, prohibitive, and fortified enclosures (much like Canary Wharf); a disciplinary space, defined by its internal barriers and poised for anti-terrorist alert. One notes the stadia themselves as acutely regulative, spatially-differentiating institutions; hyperspace and overconsumption are juxtaposed with the flexibly-employed, the precarious poor (or 'precariat'), producing a "new degraded urbanity", a far cry from the re-imaging of place or enhancement of "civic pride" floated by the developing agencies.
Carolyn Smith, Project Mimique

"No longer concerned narrowly with the mobilisation and extension of markets (and market logics), neo liberalism is increasingly associated with the political foregrounding of new modes of 'social' and penal policy making, concerned specifically with the aggressive re regulation, disciplining, and containment of those marginalised or dispossessed by the neo liberalisation of the 1980s" (Peck & Tickell, 2002, p 389), a manifestation of crisis and legitimation of the neo liberal project as much as an extension of its hegemony. Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore (2002) comment that "cities have become a key arena in which the everyday violence of neo liberalism has been unleashed"; neo liberal projects of political economic restructuring collide with pre existing socio spatial cleavages and, in turn, create new forms of inequality, political disenfranchisement, and economic immiseration" (ibid, p 345).

While areas of deep poverty may have been pariah during the 1980s, in its current 'roll out' guise, neo liberalism is increasingly penetrating the urban, under the advance guard of a pathologisation of marginal social subjectivities, the normalisation of contingent labour (see Section 2.2), and an intensive stigmatisation of youth (Peck and Tickell, pp 394 395). The Olympics are being promoted within the context of what Gordon MacLeod (2002) has called a "revanchist" political mobilisation (see Sections 1.2 and 3.3). Peck and Tickell point to the city as the front line of neo liberal re territorialisation. Policy discussion and political rhetoric around the Olympic developments is a paradigmatic instance:

As key sites of economic contradiction, governance failure, and social fall out, cities find themselves in the front line of both hypertrophied after welfarist statecraft and organised resistance to neo liberalisation. Regressive welfare reforms and labour market polarisation, for example, are leading to the (re)urbanisation of (working and non working) poverty, positioning cities at the bleeding edge of processes of punitive institution building, social surveillance, and authoritarian governance [...] 'Entrepreneurial' regimes of urban governance are [...] not simply local manifestations of neo liberalism; their simultaneous rise across a wide range of national, political, and institutional contexts suggests
a systemic connection with neo liberalisation as a macro process. In other words, the remaking of the rules on inter local competition and extra local resource allocation - or the deep neo liberalisation of spatial and scalar relations - fundamentally reflects the far reaching macro political alignment that has taken place since the 1970s (ibid, pp 395 396).

Starkly, the Olympics are an interpellation of post Fascist regularity, the disciplinary subject imposed through the tryptic methods of state violence, corporate sponsorship, and gender enhancement; and re mediated (and expanded) via neo liberal experiments in labour market and welfare state regulation, an acutely spatial phenomenon. As with economic impact, the Olympic event provides a focal instance for the intensification of existing trends.
Carolyn Smith, Project Mimique

Urban policies - and one might include here the Olympic bidding process and the replacement of planning here by project management - "anticipate, complement, and in some cases, mimic the operation of competitive markets" (Peck & Tickell, ibid, p 394). Competitive regimes of resource allocation, barriers to local government finance, and centralised political mandate foreclose economic development strategies based on social redistribution, workers control, or public investment. A public sector saturated by performance based target setting, and fighting its own austerity, becomes compelled to collude with growth chasing (and mobile) proposals (See Section 3.1).

Eric Swyngedouw, Frank Moulaert and Arantxa Rodriguez (2002) point to large scale urban development projects, (such as the Olympic precinct developments), bolstered by 'exceptionality' measures such as the by passing of statutory regulations and institutional bodies (i.e. a deregulation of planning requirements), exceptional powers of intervention and decision making (the centralisation of London planning decision making in the London Mayor is considered in Section 3.1; economic development strategy in Section 2.2), and changes in national legislation, as "emblematic" of neo liberal urban governance. They charge that projects, such as the Olympic regeneration proposals, accentuate economic polarisation via property markets (price rises and displacement of social or low income housing), changes in public budget priorities (redirected from social objectives to investments in the built environment) and the restructuring of the labour market (ibid, pp 542 543).

The authors highlight "the ascent of a more assertive, dynamic and entrepreneurial style of urban governance" as "planners and local authorities adopt a more proactive [...] approach aimed at identifying market opportunities and assisting private investors to take advantage of them" (ibid, pp 548 551), and note the instrumentality of a city's economic and political elites in the definitions of social and economic value of particular developments. They also point to appropriation of land rent value increases (improvements funded by public investment) by private operators, and comment: "The role of local growth coalitions is critical in framing a discourse of renewal, innovation, achievement and success" (ibid, p 562).

This essay is part of the Games Monitor briefing papers available for download from our Media Centre page.