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01 March 2011: Pete Fussey's new book 'Securing and Sustaining the Olympic City' published

UPDATED:

Often seen as the host nation's largest ever logistical undertaking, accommodating the Olympics and its attendant security infrastructure brings seismic changes to both the physical and social geography of its destination.

In their new book 'Securing and Sustaining the Olympic City: Reconfiguring London for 2012 and Beyond' Pete Fussey, Jon Coaffee, Gary Armstrong and Dick Hobbs analyse the extent to which utopian visions of legacy are sustainable given the demands of providing a global securitized event of the magnitude of the modern Olympics.

As they point out in recent years the 'defence of the spectacle' has assumed even greater importance as the quintupled cost of securing the first post-9/11 summer Games in Athens demonstrated. However in addition to securing the Olympic Park from perceived threats, 2012 operations have also used the levers of 'community safety' and 'crime reduction' to try to generate an ordered space in the surrounding areas. As the book points out this is rather radically challenging local patterns of access, engagement and indeed citizenship in a way that may present problems for the future sustainability of the utopian visions of the legacy of London 2012.

Reviews:

"Securing and Sustaining the Olympic City is a crucial resource for helping us to understand how these Games will shape the vital issues of urban securitization and sustainability for decades to come in one of the great cities of the world."

Kevin Haggerty, University of Alberta, Canada