Hosting the Olympics and Paralympics does bring change, but that transformation comes at a cost
, as the curtain finally came down on the vivid summer panorama that was Paris 2024. In the circumstances, then, the chequered fate of the ArcelorMittal Orbit – the Anish Kapoor sculpture in east London that like all the best art was named after a global steel conglomerate and fitted with a giant slide against its creator’s wishes – stands as a kind of totemic, even cautionary Olympic tale.
Promises upon promises; visions upon visions; numbers plucked out of thin air; the corporate bullshit dial turned up to 25. As Paris begins to sketch out its own Olympic afterlife, the transformation of east London by the 2012 Games is often held up as a kind of shining exemplar. Leaf through the financial pages and the investor press and you will be left with the idea that London’s Games legacy has been a dazzling success story, and in many ways it has.
Not really the residents of Newham, Hackney and Waltham Forest, thousands of whom have been waiting years for social housing while luxury developments stud the skyline. Of the 33,000 new homes that will be built on or near the Olympic site by 2036, just over a third will be affordable, against the original bid pledge of 50%.
Paris, like London, has embarked on its legacy project with noble ideals and eloquent promises. Two extended metro lines, opened just before the start of the Games, are a downpayment on the generational task of bridging the historical divide between the chocolate-boxand the poorer suburbs. The hasty cleaning of the River Seine for the triathlon events is part of a longer-term project to reclaim the river for public use.
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