FFJ de l'EHESS Conference: ‘Olympic Games and Global Cities’
Fondation France-Japon de l'EHESS International Conference: Olympic Games and Global Cities
30 November, 7-8 December 2021
The decision to postpone the Tokyo Games in the spring of 2020 marks a significant change in the Olympic dynamics. Tokyo has become the very first city to adjourn the Games, after prior experiences of their cancellation in 1940 and their resounding success in 1964. Through its history, Tokyo thus embodies the failure, success of and uncertainty around the preparation of the Olympic and Paralympic Games. But Tokyo 2021 should not merely be viewed as the “postponed Games”. It is also a mega-event whose urban inscription denotes a radical transformation of the transformation of the Olympic urban project. In Tokyo, and even more so in Paris in 2024, the organisers are putting the emphasis on renovations, requalifications and temporary facilities, in order to avoid building new infrastructures and to make the best of the already existing functions of the global city.
This conference proposes to investigate this change, which has unfolded within the Olympic movement since the 2000s; a trend that tends to favour bids from cities that already possess all the necessary facilities, to the detriment of regional metropolises. The aim of this scientific event is to examine the realignments in the International Olympic Committee, its expectations of candidate and host cities, and the evolutions in the types of applications and applicant cities. The Olympic governance, urban governance, as well as the strategies of global cities and their Olympic urban project will be particularly under scrutiny.
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Session 2
Mega-events and long term strategy
Sustainability and celebration in the city
30 November, 2021
‘Iconic Architects, Urban Spectacles and Global Brands in the context of the 2020+1 Tokyo Olympics’
Tomoko Tamari
Abstract
Iconic architecture can be seen as a contested field reflecting architects’ philosophy, site-specific historical narratives, global and local politics, nation-branding, and citizen’s everyday lives. Architects, therefore, play a key role in realizing such complicated and contested interests and conditions in the materiality of the building design. In the wake of the success of highly artistic spectacular buildings, such as Frank Gehry’s Bilbao Guggenheim Museum, iconic architecture has come to be acknowledged as a global cultural form. Hence, architects could be seen as identifying themselves as not just social engineers, but also as iconic artists. Such star architects as ‘global brands’ are often in demand to produce ‘signature’ buildings for global mega event – such as the Olympics. By examining the 2020+1 Tokyo Olympics main stadium as a case study, the paper focuses on the problematic socio-cultural implications of Zaha Hadid’s plan in relation to the Japanese national branding initiative. The paper discusses the ambivalent nature of global branding with its tension between exclusiveness and banality. This makes it difficult for them to work across the different regimes of global and local culture and politics. Hence, Hadid’s avant-garde national stadium design became controversial. The paper concludes with an introduction to Kengo Kuma’s architectural vision in his 2020+1 Tokyo Olympics stadium design.