Selling Places: Hallmark Events and the Reimaging of Sydney and Toronto

Abstract

Image is a key concept of the twenty-first century. Whether one is restructuring, reimaging, deconstructing, reconstructing, promoting, advertising or just being a dedicated follower of fashion, the role of image is highly important. Sports, tourism and urban development are three areas of human endeavour in which the image has assumed vital importance. With all three we are concerned with issues of commodification, identity and the development of products to be sold in the marketplace. All three are also intimately interrelated. This chapter examines the nature of these relationships and the implications for urban regeneration, communities and the hosting of sports events, with special reference to the hosting of large-scale sports events such as the Olympic Games, especially the Sydney 2000 Games. However the chapter notes that, while mega sports events may be glamorous to cities and spectators, their hosting may not come without a price.

Whether it is to attract a new car factory or the Olympic Games, they go as supplicants. And, even as supplicants, they go in competition with each other: cities and localities are now fiercely struggling against each other to attract footloose and predatory investors to their particular patch. Of course, some localities are able successfully to ‘switch’ themselves in to the global networks, but others will remain ‘unswitched’ or even ‘plugged’. And, in a world characterized by the increasing mobility of capital and the rapid recycling of space, even those that manage to become connected in to the global system are always vulnerable to the abrupt withdrawal of investment and to [partial] disconnection from the global system. (Robins, 1991: 35–6).