Ilaria Pappalepore

Rio 2016 sought to connect Olympic-tourists with the city's local-Cariocan community and culture. Yet the way mega-events are spatially and regulatorily organised, alongside the behavioural tendencies of Olympic-tourists, constrain such ambitions. Using Rio 2016 as a case-study, we offer in-depth, qualitative insights through the lens of 35 individual Olympic-tourists to examine how and why these factors determine behaviour, and thus experiences across host-environments. We detail how concerns over tourists' safety result in managers designing risk averse experiences, produced by overlaying hyper-securitised and regulatory enforcements inside existing tourist bubbles, creating what we refer to as a 'double bubble'-reducing the likelihood of visitors venturing 'off-the-beaten-track'. Whilst Olympic-bubbles protect tourists from outside threats, they restrict cultural engagement with the wider city, neighbourhoods and locals-side-lining other sides to Rio. We suggest managers adopt a dual-strategy of 'local infusion' in and 'tourist diffusion' beyond official zones to achieve intended goals.

Olympic cities increasingly draw on New Urban Tourism (NUT) principles as part of a host's strategic tourism development objectives. By doing so, governments and event organisers seek to entangle visitors with local urban, cultural and everyday life. Yet, empirical evidence generated across previous Olympic cities illustrates how hosts often fail to encourage such host-guest interactivity. This is a critical tourism geography and consumption issue repeatedly identified across host city contexts. To address the disconnect between inbound urban tourists and host communities, Tokyo 2020 explicitly placed NUT objectives at the heart of official bid and policy promises. On the basis of a 33-day walking ethnography in Tokyo as well as 26 interviews and documentary analysis, our work details a set of strategically planned and creative NUT initiatives deployed by the public, private sector, and host community in the lead up to the Tokyo 2020 Games. Some of these include state-funded walking tours and city volunteer guide networks; tourist boards promoting local-grassroots festivals; through to joint collaborations between local tourist boards and 'Timeout' to produce local guides-constituting a productive step forward for showcasing the local culture outside tourist bubbles. Furthermore, we illustrate how Tokyo's urban landscape closely intertwines tourist bubbles with local neighbourhoods affording a potential balance between staged and spontaneous host-guest interaction. Our conclusions emphasise the conceptual, social, and economic implications for strategic planning and implementation of NUT in Olympic cities and its potential contribution to inclusive and sustainable development.

Focusing on the London 2012 Olympic Games, we investigate the impact of mega-sport events’ spatial transformations on visitor mobility, local leisure consumption and resulting small business trade. Olympic territorialisation, we argue, is a highly contentious and vitally important aspect of leisure studies warranting on-going and further examination. Our case study draws on 43 in-depth interviews with local authorities, governmental and non-governmental project actors, and small-local leisure and visitor economy businesses (retail and hospitality) located at the heart of a ‘Host Event Zone’ in Greenwich, London. We supplement and triangulate subjective accounts with a documentary analysis of 35 policy reports, media, and archival material as the basis for our empirical analysis. Our findings reveal a major dichotomy between the ‘rhetoric’ of inclusion and local ‘realities’ of exclusion as security planning and spatial controls served to close off public spaces and local attractions: diverting visitor flows and leisure consumption toward official event sites, away from local businesses. We illustrate how such urban processes effectively render a vibrant business community invisible and visitors immobile to explore local community spaces during the live staging periods. We close with implications for event organisers, managers and policy makers focused on re-configuring the socio-spatial elements of Olympic organisation and re-direct and mobilise visitor economy flows toward more open civic and leisure spaces in the hope of better (re)distributing consumption into host communities.

London 2012 promised local small businesses access to lucrative Olympic event-tourism and visitor trading opportunities. However, as urban spaces were transformed to stage live Games, many local stakeholders found themselves locked out. We focus on one ‘host’ community, Central Greenwich, who emerged negatively impacted by such conditions. 43 in-depth interviews and secondary evidence reveal that this was a community determined to resist. Few papers have extended the concept of resistance to the context of mega-events so we examine why communities resisted, and how physical tactics and creative resistance were deployed. Although efforts afforded some access for local businesses - they proved too little, too late. We present the ‘tactics for resistance’, a series of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ tactics businesses could use to encourage proactive, as opposed to reactive, communal resistance required to protect local interests and afford access to opportunities generated by temporary mega-event visitor economies.

This study investigates the impacts of the London 2012 Olympic Games and their related cultural programme on local small creative organisations in East London. It contributes to unpacking the elusive concept of legacy thorough an in-depth analysis of creative organisations’ stories and experiences, combined with an analysis of policy documents and interviews with key informants, over a four-year period (2010-2014). A range of potential impacts of mega-events for creative organisations are identified and systematically discussed. The results highlight a gap between Olympic rhetoric and local reality. Problems include inadequate local consultation, barriers to accessing opportunities and inability to leverage effectively. The study also explores the role of cultural tourism in delivering an Olympic legacy for the local creative industry. It finds that opportunities to showcase deprived – but creative – areas in East London, and foster the development of creative forms of tourism, were missed.

The role of tourists and tourism in urban development is not fully understood. Research has focused on tourism districts within city centres, but less is known about tourism in peripheral, less affluent urban districts. These areas can appeal to visitors as edgy alternatives to mainstream destinations. This study establishes who is interested in visiting and why, and it explores the underlying rationale for negative attitudes. The aims are addressed by an in-depth analysis of Deptford in South East London. This area is a relatively deprived part of a world city, albeit one that has long been earmarked as London's next cool district. The study uses a mix of different sources to analyse the case. Responses to a New York Times article on Deptford are analysed and the attitudes of actual visitors and key stakeholders are explored. The discussion includes an examination of different interpretations and attitudes towards the notion of edginess. Edginess is deemed attractive by certain audiences; something linked to a reverence for working-class life in the arts. The study concludes that, whilst edginess is a noted characteristic, what people appreciate about Deptford is its ‘distinctive ordinariness’ – its contrast with more polished and contrived urban districts.

Visitors want to learn and exercise creativity; many are employed in creative professions.Creative areas display objectified, embodied and institutionalised cultural capital.Visitors’ varieties of practice generate five new typologies.Coolness and atmosphere are central to appeal.Tourism development policy must be unobtrusive.This research explores the role creative clusters play in the development of tourism. It involves an in-depth study of characteristics, motivations and experiences of visitors to creative urban areas using qualitative analysis of 142 interviews in creative, non-central locations in East London. The data show that the concentration of creative industries affords opportunities for consumption and for the accumulation of cultural capital, leveraging the presence of creative producers and other creative visitors, who are themselves perceived as an attraction. These factors, combined with a particular urban morphology and the presence of everyday activities, contribute to the areas’ perceived authenticity, bohemian atmosphere and cool image. The paper develops typologies of visitors to creative areas and concludes with a discussion of Bourdieu’s notion of cultural capital applied to a contemporary urban context.