'The East End is the new West End': London 2012 and resident experiences of the urban changes in a post-Olympic landscape.

Abstract

Sociological inquiry into the management, hosting and subsequent legacies of the Olympic Games has provided a useful lens through which to examine the staging of sporting mega-events and their impact upon both tangible and intangible outcomes (Gratton and Preuss 2008; Preuss 2010). Whilst broad reviews of legacy provide an overarching insight into the socio-economic impacts of the Olympic Games (Minnaert 2012), it is to issues of urban regeneration, transformation, community engagement, and the (re)creation of space and place that was used as the foci of this study. The aim of this study was to understand how the urban regeneration from the Olympic Games in London influenced the daily lived experience of residents within this post-Olympic space. By exploring resident interactions and experiences with the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park (QEOP) and its surrounding urban and infrastructural developments; a greater understanding of the convergence across local communities and their ‘lived’ experience was developed. By using an integrated methodological approach consisting of: walking ethnography (Pink et al. 2010; Yi’En 2014); an adapted version of Wang and Burris’ (1997) Photovoice methodology using the photo-sharing social media platform Instagram; and follow up semi-structured interviews to discuss the collated digital data, I could comprehensively understand material regeneration and lived experience and evaluate community development in the QEOP. This study revealed how, through modes of gentrification and marginalisation, an authoritative government-corporate elite used urban mega-event policy to (re)shape the social and urban fabric to consolidate the creation of a neoliberal, productive and attractive space. By engaging with middle class bodies whom live within this space, this study was able to highlight the complexities of citizenry and everyday experiences in a post-Olympic landscape: unearthing the varied ascriptions of lived experiences formed by certain citizens and capturing how Olympic urbanism influences these daily negotiations.