Mega-Events as Economies of the Imagination

Creating Atmospheres for Rio 2016 and Tokyo 2020

Rodanthi Tzanelli

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367890872
• eBook ISBN: 9781351470445
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Atmosphere, the elusive ambiance of a place, enables or hinders its mobility in global consumption contexts. Atmosphere connects to social imaginaries, utopian representational frames producing the culture of a city or country. But who resolves atmospheric contradictions in a place's social and cultural rhythms, when the eyes of the world are turned on it?

Mega-Events as Economies of the Imagination examines ephemeral and solidified atmospheres in the Rio 2016 Olympic Games and the handover ceremony to Tokyo for the 2020 Games. Indeed, highlighting the various social and cultural implications upon these Olympic Games hosts, Tzanelli argues that the 'Olympic City' is produced by aesthetic "imagineers", mobile groups of architects, artists and entrepreneurs, who aesthetically 'engineer' native cultures as utopias. Thus, it is explored as to how Rio and Tokyo's "imagineers" problematize notions of creativity, cosmopolitan togetherness and belonging.

Mega-Events as Economies of the Imagination will appeal to postgraduate students, postdoctoral researchers and professionals interested in fields such as: Globalization Studies, Mobility Theory, Cultural Sociology, International Political Economy, Conference and Event Management, Tourism Studies and Migration Studies.

1 Staging the mega-event

Militourist imaginaries in an Olympic city

Mega-events: enterprises of time, explosions of spaces, non-spaces

Officially known as the Games of the XXXI Olympiad, the 2016 Summer Olympics (Jogos Olímpicos de Verão de 2016) of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, fit into a form of conduct dictated by the ethical regulators of the internationalised sporting market, the International Olympic Committee (IOC): they should be a major international multi-sport event held in a formally selected host city (Rio de Janeiro), within a designated time frame (5 August to 21 August 2016). The ‘host’ should provide for international guests/athletes, food, drink and a place to stay, train and prepare for the competition (Lashley and Morrison, Eds, 2000). Over 11,000 athletes from 207 National Olympic Committees, including first time entrants Kosovo, South Sudan and the Refugee Olympic Team, took part in Rio 2016 (Rio 2016 Olympic Wiki, undated). A series of other training and event-making venues should be ready to host the actual athletic and ceremonial performances: thus, 33 sporting venues in the host city, and five more in São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, Salvador, Brasília, and Manaus, were made available.

Rio de Janeiro was announced bid winner at the 121st IOC Session in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 2009. Under the leadership of IOC President Jacques Rogge, the thirteenth Olympic Congress would bring together all the constituent parties of the Olympic Movement (IOC members, representatives of National Olympic Committee (NOCs), International Federations (IFs), the Organising Committees of the Olympic Games (OCOGS), athletes, coaches, media, sponsors and other stakeholders) to discuss the current functioning of the Movement and define the main development axes for the future (XIII Olympic Congress – Copenhagen 2009, undated). The ‘future’ of the Movement would figure prominently during the Rio 2016 mega-event, in both ceremonial and architectural formats, which brought to the fore the role of technology in event-making milieus of a solidary, peaceful nature. The thirteenth Olympic Congress had already discussed the implications of the digital revolution for humanity and the Movement itself, thus implicating Rio’s successful Olympic bid in both from the outset. The theme of the digital revolution figured in Rio 2016, as it had in London 2012’s Opening Ceremony and the host city’s statement of contribution to global civilisation (Tzanelli, 2013b, Chapter 2). It was present in the advertising of the brand-new Olympic Channel in Rio’s ceremonies (Olympic.org, 27 July 2016), which inaugurated a new era of global connectivity superseding the achievement of satellite TV that paved the way for post-national, globalising initiatives (Curran, 2011) and the intensification of cultural mobilities (Castells, 2009).

Harsh criticism of Rio’s involvement in such a risky enterprise amidst one of the greatest economic and socio-political crises Brazil suffered was almost inevitable. When Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (in office 1 January 2003 to 1 January 2011) celebrated the successful bid in 2009, the world was not in deep recession, wars in the Middle East were yet to induce vast waves of refugee movement that would destabilise global societies, and Brazil was yet to suffer the worst ever economic dip in its contemporary history. The second decade of the twenty-first century would remove the bliss of celebration, sparking protests across Brazil, but especially in its urban centres, where people suffered most. The dream of ‘hospitable Olympic staging’ came at a steep price, and when the flow of tourists began to dissipate the host city faced the consequences of seven years of intense Olympic preparation (Cavalcanti, 21 August 2016): the state government had now run out of money to keep police vehicles on the roads; the health care system was in a precarious position; Rio’s universities were on strike because, just like the state’s 500,000 public servants, their staff was not paid regularly. Construction work had ceased and unemployment was increasing, prolonging Rio state’s declaration of a state of emergency and regional accusations of incompetence of the federal government, which had handed it ‘almost a billion dollars to prevent chaos during the Olympics’ (Soares, 21 August 2016).

Such controversies exacerbated fears that the instability of the country’s federal government and the subsequent impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff (in office 1 January 2011 to 31 August 2016) would not allow for sufficient administrative coordination and order within Brazil for the mega-event (Segal, 7 August 2015; Flynn and Soto, 14 March 2016); health and safety concerns surrounding the Zika virus and significant pollution in the Guanabara Bay, where sporting events were scheduled (BBC Sports, 29 January 2016; Khazan, 31 March 2016); the usual riots and violence in the city, which became more socially polarised and potentially less safe for visitors, as the day the Olympics would start drew closer; and a doping scandal involving Russia, which affected the participation of its athletes in the Games (Olympic.org, 24 July 2016). But the fear that Rio de Janeiro would not be ready in time, or the suggestion that its preparations were worse than those for Athens 2004 (Gibson, 29 April 2014), were mere symptoms of something more serious. The true anxiety was that the world and its localities were changing in unpleasant ways and someone had to step in and help to rewrite this ‘script’ (Fincher et al., 2002). From a dispassionate perspective, Rio 2016’s mega-event was merely symptomatic of cosmogonic, global events, affecting mobilities of cash, people and ideas, hence national and international connectivities. A mega-event is nothing in the grand scheme of world things, in which the possibility of several systemic failures connected to capitalist mismanagement, consumer excess, terrorist violence, epidemics and environmental destruction come together under the ambit of a true and final ‘mega-event’: the end of human happiness and life.

Chapter 2 examines the identities and roles of its ‘artistic imagineers’ (distinguished architects, ceremonial directors and choreographers) as producers of the host city’s cultural futures and legacies. Thereafter, we proceed to examine specific artistic interventions: Chapter 3 debates the ways the Museum of Tomorrow, the product of an international artistic contingent and Rio 2016’s neo-futurist educational-touristic landmark, debates humanity’s survival in the context of climate change and unrestrained capitalist development. Chapters 4 and 5 examine Rio 2016’s Opening and Closing Ceremonies as artistic statements on Carioca culture. The Olympic directors and choreographers do not work independently from each other in terms of a political, cultural and overall philosophical stance: their artwork crystallises into a uniform narrative of Carioca and global worlds, asserting varied degrees of solidarity and coexistence in the difficult context of recession. Similar analysis is applied in Chapters 6 and 7 with regards to the forthcoming Japanese mega-event context. Chapter 6 outlines Japan and Tokyo’s cultural, political and economic development, to consider its contribution to Olympic culture, whereas Chapter 7 considers the Handover Ceremony to Tokyo 2020 as a dual national and transnational narrative of belonging that supersedes memories of war and imperial domination. The final Chapter considers imagineering as artistic practice of engagement with contemporary national and global concerns to argue that the mega-event’s artistic economy is generative of dark and bright, negative and positive future frames. Such aesthetic frames negotiate the principle and value of hope for human betterment, respect for fellow humans and nature in an enlarged cosmopolitan sense – an Event subsuming all mega-events.

The geopolitical and cultural coordinates of this Event – its aesthetic contextualisation, every four years – are of immense significance. The slow but sure ‘unlocking’ of capitalism from old world centres in Europe and the West (Wallerstein, 1974, 1980) has not necessarily resolved global power hierarchies, it just complexified them further. Mega-event organisation is not dissociated from these new complexities, both because new multidirectional flows of capital influence are influenced by new decentred forms of corporate power (the mega-event’s investors) and because the new imaginations of geopolitical belonging and legal connectivity prioritise the urban over the national-state unit (Sassen, 2006). Today entrepreneurial urban governance, including that of creative content, appears to have replaced the national or even broader regional government with more localised patterns of capitalist urbanisation of potent global connectivity and networking (Sheller, 2008). Thus, spatial reconfigurations of belonging, legislating and acting upon the social have come to favour a peculiar local aesthetic of internationalisation, in line with new communication and transportation technologies, the dismantling of constraints on cross-border financial transactions (Urry, 2014), or the intensification of international labour migration. Brenner (2004, pp. 17–20) discusses this in terms of a qualitative transformation of rescaling that involves crisis-management strategies. Such strategies affect perceptions of time and space – which for Lefebvre (1979, p. 290) bears testimony to a post-industrial ‘explosion of spaces’, and for Augé (2008, p. 65) gives rise to ‘non-spaces’, spaces defined by capitalist signification and not entrenched belonging, a globetrotting rationale rather than rooting (Urry, 2007).

In addition, we must consider how old cultural and aesthetic hierarchies diffuse in global markets, thus leaving the ‘custodians’ of various cultural and aesthetic formations (post-colonial nations) unable to protect their very own populations from indiscriminate commoditisation. The additional toll of safety for mega-event hosts adds to these old hierarchies a shadow of ‘doubt’, suggesting that the designated urban hosts are not quite ‘ready’ to deliver a good and safe spectacle. But as already hinted at, this is symptomatic of the ways more localised (or nationalised) political and economic transformations play out on an interactive ‘glocal’ (Robertson, 1992) template. This results in the intensified urbanisation, industrialisation and transnational connectivity of ‘developing’ nations and urban hosts of the Southern global hemisphere at an unmanageably fast pace (Black and Van der Westhuizen, 2004; Cornelissen, 2010). It therefore helps to situate Rio 2016 chronologically and spatially on a generic mega-event mobilities ‘map’ to understand its significance in terms of capital flows (Girginov, 2016, pp. 147–148): the Global South figured as host to sporting events several times in the twentieth century (Mexico 1968 Summer Olympics and several FIFA World Cup finals, including Uruguay 1930, Brazil 1950, Chile 1968 and 1986, and Argentina 1978). In the twenty-first century, one Summer Olympics was hosted by Beijing (2008) and one Commonwealth Games meeting by India (New Delhi 2010), and two World Cups took place in ‘emerging nations’ (South Africa 2010, Brazil 2014) (Giulianotti and Klauser, 2010, p. 51; Millington and Darnell, 2014, p. 191; Giulianotti et al., 2015). This transnational policy of cultural openness and inclusivity becomes problematic with the implementation of Western technologies to counter terrorist risks, spectator and political violence, poverty, inequality and urban crime.

Although mega-events of a sporting (such as the Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup) and non-sporting (such as international Expos) nature may be seen as exceptional, they now involve organisation ‘unmatched outside of wartime and planning that requires significant alterations to the governance of the host city or country’ (Fussey and Coaffee, 2012, p. 269). The ephemerality of the actual occasion aside, mega-events usually have a long-lasting legacy for the host (Roche, 2000, 2002): in terms of urban renewal (for example, the 1992 Barcelona or Sydney 2000 Olympics); in terms of infrastructural alterations (the 1964 Tokyo Olympics); in terms of cumulative debt (the 1976 Montreal Olympics and 2004 Athens Olympics); or in terms of aspiration for global recognition through distortion of, or accommodation into Olympic values (the 1936 Berlin and 1968 Mexico City Games, respectively, as well as Qatar 2022 – Carter, 2016) and its status as a global media event (Tomlinson and Young, Eds, 2006). These concerns, which mirror the focus of the existing (and rapidly expanding) literature on mega-event management, prioritise traditional ‘critical realist’ and ‘hard policy’ themes, often displacing, with some exceptions, the publication of research on ceremony and cultural activity in the Olympic city to other fields. Few studies attempted to consider the notion of ‘event’ and urban ‘eventisation’ as self-contained queries, with their own cultural idiosyncrasies and representational capabilities (Tzanelli, 2015c; Hannam et al., 2016).

The present study considers the mega-event’s ‘globetrotting’ rationale across two dimensions: the space in which different movements of business, people, ideas and performances are concentrated for the duration of a few weeks; but also the non-spaces of capitalist production of such movements that are not physically located in the host’s territories, but across the world. The idea is that we bring together symptoms and causes of an impending ‘catastrophe’ so as to examine who tries to imagine better futures. This ‘mapping’ of spaces and non-spaces has to be matched with considerations of the experience of space and non-space by mega-event visitors, creative labour and hosts. ‘Official’ conceptions of space would merely superimpose the logic of territorial belonging, authority and security onto experience (Sassen, 2006). Mega-event cities and venues have their own histories and heritages that local game-makers and artists and architects (this study’s focus), use to produce new forward-looking temporal templates (Salazar, 2016, p. 9). The mega-event’s notion of time is peculiarly two-dimensional: its principles obey to the ‘slow’ movement of old Olympic traditions and values – Baron de Coubertin’s heritage to the world (Toohey and Veal, 2000) – and the hyper-speed of globalisation, its systems of mobility, its markets and development demands (Tzanelli, 2013b, Chapter 1). The mega-event’s ‘arrow of time’ is very much a product of Enlightenment notions of ‘progress’ mostly associated with Northern European traditions of modernity and understandings of Heideggerian mechanical clock-time (Heidegger, 1967). Contemporary human societies experience an existential crisis in post-industrial times, connected to a true proliferation (or, for some, intentional production of representations and simulations) of risks, which feed especially the imaginary of environmental catastrophism (Giddens, 2009; Urry, 2010, 2011).

Some may object to the relevance of such observations about mega-events as real festivities: the end of times is more befit for a movie, or should be consigned to the Olympic Ceremony, they may argue. This book suggests that social sciences should make space for an analysis of such imaginaries of the future. Teleological takes on temporality rooted in Western philosophical traditions attribute causes of historical events to abstract transhistorical processes, leading to some future historical state (Sewell, 1990, p. 3). Transhistories of this sort often render themselves as explanatory frameworks in Olympic ceremonial contexts, where memories and events pivotal for the host communities are compressed, so as to weave an overall central scenario of cultural development for the Olympic host (McKee, 1999, pp. 45–46). In ceremonies we discern connections between ‘cosmology’ as the experiential dimensions of social ordering and framing (Herzfeld, 2008; Tzanelli, 2013a, 2013b) and as a branch of astronomy that studies the universe as a whole from its observable parts (Sewell, 1990, pp. 3–6), with a note that the treatment of human action as a component of the universe’s mechanical functioning is valid only as a mythical analogy. Olympic ceremonial texts also render themselves vulnerable to fusions between internal and external (to the event’s narrative) explanations of development – a practice akin to that of ‘freezing time’ to extract and shuffle some of its components (Burawoy, 1989). The artificiality of ‘freezing’ and ‘fracturing’ temporalities does not allow space for an explanation of the ways happenings between significant events affect their outcome or emergence (Sewell, 1990, p. 14).

Yet, it is precisely such potential fusions that reveal alternative paths to the future – ‘pathways’ that may not be ‘scientifically verifiable’ (Popper, 1959), but do provide problem-solvers with a new perspective. Lakatos would have cast this as a ‘positive heuristic’ (Lakatos, 1976): the creation of a new narrative made up by fusions of models that might enable the defence of the hard core of theory (problems faced by host societies) by means of problem-shifting (Burawoy, 1989, p. 761). The practice is not just applicable to the Olympic Games’ artistic ceremony but their performative (in Butler’s (1993) terms) nature: the embodiment of the Olympic principles of solidarity and fairness, which is performed in ceremonies by artists, athletes and public functionaries, provides a different context, every four years, in which, often globally applicable challenges can be addressed within the material constraints and limitations of the era. Still, the thesis is too post-structuralist, like Butler’s, who notes that, although subjects repeatedly perform the teachings of discourse, the experience of repetition ceases to be mechanical: ‘as the appearance of power shifts from the condition of the subject to its effects, the conditions of power (prior and external) assume a present and futural form’ (Butler, 1997, p. 16). For me, no repetition is structurally binding, because humans possess interpretative skills. It is this power to interpret that supports a positive heuristic, allowing ceremonial text and context to transcend constrictive social and economic realities.

Here we can detect how heuristic ‘engineerings’ of the Olympic ceremonial type can produce imaginaries of the future. The whole Olympic enterprise of knowledge has European epistemological roots, which new systems of mobility (technology, professionalisation of athleticism and migration, tourism and hospitality) constantly challenge – a phenomenon transferred onto the mega-event’s double conception of time. The ‘slow’ time of cosmology, to which the Olympic ‘event’ belongs, produces an ontology of labour: this is what Arendt (1958) saw in the Homo Faber, the slow and plodding man, an ideal type of worker, who, in Olympic contexts produces versions of human nature. The idealisation of slow mobility in calibrations of the host’s ‘unique’ ethno-cultures or the display of athletic ability and integrity in Olympic competition, are part of the Olympic heritage. Yet, the suggestion that ‘slow is beautiful’ also informs contemporary leisure rituals originating in Europe, such as the Italian cittaslow, a movement involving the consumption of local food cultures in cities (Fullagar et al., 2012, p. 4). A growing number of authors (Bertman, 1998; Odih, 1999; Honoré, 2005; Urry, 2007; Howard, 2012), implicate modern constructions of time in creating stress and dissatisfaction. We are inundated with suggestions as to how to spend our time and what kind of activities we may perform as fast as possible (Bauman, 1988; Paolucci, 1998). As Bauman (1996, pp. 10–11) explains, contemporary fragmentations of time into ‘episodes’ structure our experience as that of a player, who cannot distinguish accident from necessity.

The onus of constant clockwise labour is relieved by the provision of hospitality to and for us in a different social and cultural context, in which we are cast in the roles of the leisure-seeking human. Thus, against the first impression that notions of hospitality as the provision of food, drink, accommodation and entertainment (Lashley, 2007; Caffyn, 2012; Lynch et al., 2011) are shallow, their genealogies reveal that they are implicated in the production of multi-scalar socialities, beyond the scope of small communal interactions (Lashley and Morrison, Eds, 2000). I do not disregard the importance of hospitality and tourism generation for countries of the Global South as a developmental path or a regional leadership strategy (Beek and Schmidt, 2012), but focus more on how ideas of societal ‘giving’ (the basis of hospitality) can also translate into unconditional generosity to strangers (Tzanelli, 2011, p. 133; Derrida, 1994; Derrida and Dufourmantelle, 2000; Still, 2010). Such traditions are as European as that of the Olympic Games: O’Gorman has argued after Derrida that the proto-Indo-European root ghos-ti refers to ‘stranger, guest, host: someone with whom one has reciprocal duties of hospitality’ (2007, pp. 17–18). He suggests that both terms ‘host’ and ‘guest’ connect to words denoting sacrifice and to the term philoxenia as the love of alienness/strangerhood. Olympic hospitality in particular obeys norms and values of peaceful place-making for guests – whether these are tourists, refugees, business travellers or labour migrants. And that is how hopeful future-making enters our lives.

Much like the Olympic movement, cittaslow bridges the gap between the mythical time of kairós, in which (food) cultures as ethnic properties and heritage emerge, with that of chrónos, the uniform and quantifiable time of everyday life (and consumption) (Heidegger, 1967; Howard, 2012). Much like the Olympic Movement, cittaslow resolves capitalism’s contradictions in a touristified ‘bubble’ (the Olympic city), by turning tourist-visitors from the ‘fast world’ into pilgrims of the host culture (ibid., p. 12). At the same time, the Olympic ‘event’ functions on a speedy temporal plane, where tourism and hospitality services are organised and the mega-event is literally staged in the city. This productive contradiction supports the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Staging the mega-event: Militourist imaginaries in an Olympic city
• 2. Globalising utopias: Imagineering the Olympic event, making the world
• 3. Tomorrow never comes: Rio’s museum of our futures
• 4. Choreomobility and artistic worldmaking: Retrieving Rio’s submerged centre
• 5. The Opening and Closing Ceremonies: Migration, nostalgia and the making of tourism mobilities
• 6. Tokyo 2020: Urban amnesia and the technoromantic spirit of capitalism
• 7. The Handover Ceremony: Digital gift economies in a global city
• 8. Conclusion: Dark journeys and hopeful futures
• References
• Index