LAUSR

Olympic legacies are the subject of grand promises made within the timeframe of competitive bids and in the run-up to the Games. But afterwards, they often melt into the background to be supplanted by disappointment and regret. At the time of London’s bid for the 2012 Games, legacy was characterized by a promise of regeneration ‘of an entire community for the direct benefit of everyone who lives there’. This fascinating book is about the relationship between this promise and its aftermath. The editors and contributing authors are long-standing scholars of East London and the Olympics, and bring different conceptual resources and concepts to the task of interpreting legacy, from Gramsci’s theory of ‘hegemony’ to Rancière’s ‘dissensus’, and Agamben’s ‘state of exception’, all of which add to the richness of the book. Their accounts are essential reading for anyone interested in the history, making and politics of mega event legacies, and also in the history and transformation of East London. While the book may seem to dwell on struggles rather than optimistic perspectives, it offers a salutary corrective to official claims of unbridled success, painting a far more complex picture of legacy as an uneven, privatized development process, and of regeneration as far from being for ‘everyone’. Cohen and Watt set out with an ambitious aim: to change the field of Olympic studies. They identify three key issues within existing scholarship, relating in different ways to the temporality of change, promises, events, and legacies. First, they argue that there is a problematic disjuncture between the times of preOlympic and post-Olympic legacy which also informs the evaluation of legacy. In the early years when promises are proliferating attention is concentrated on what the future might hold. But interest in the Games often drops off afterwards, leading to blind spots in the interrogation of how it unfolds. Second, the authors argue the need for longitudinal studies to explore the dynamic processes through which legacy materializes over time in contexts of planning, governance, and everyday life. Third, they argue that the tendency to adopt a comparative approach between cities to analyse Olympic legacies fails to acknowledge the contextual specificity of ‘the political economy, social history, cultural geography and physical fabric of each host city’ (p. 9). The first three parts of the book focus on the legacy of the London Olympics, while the final section includes chapters on Rio, host to the 2016 Games, and Tokyo, the forthcoming 2020 host city. Issues of contextualization are addressed in the first part. Gavin Poynter explores how London’s Olympic legacy is being ‘shaped by the underlying trends evident within the wider city economy’ and reveals the challenges of delivering a local legacy in this context (p. 47), while Pete Fussey and Jon Coaffee focus on London’s Olympic security strategy, arguing for the need to understand these processes as far more than ‘simple colonial impositions of external defined practice’ but as also rooted in locally situated practices of security