Olympic cities

This book provides the first full overview of the changing relationship between cities and the Olympic events from 1896 to the present day. It contains 20 specially commissioned and original essays written by a team of distinguished authors from the UK and overseas. Blending critical conceptual insight with grounded case study, "Olympic Cities "explores the historical experience of staging the Olympics from the point of view of the host city. Its contents are divided into three parts. The first provides overviews of the Olympic events from the inception of the modern Games to the present, with parallel but complementary chapters on the progress of the Summer Olympics, the Winter Games, and the cultural and artistic festivals. The second part comprises systematic surveys of five key aspects of activity involved in staging the Olympics: financing the Games; place promotion; accommodating spectacle; tourism; urban regeneration. The final part consists of chronologically-arranged portraits of host cities: St Louis (1904); London (1908); Berlin (1936); Montreal (1976); Los Angeles (1984); Barcelona (1992); Sydney (2000); Salt Lake City (2002), Athens (2004). A substantive introduction and afterword by the editors supply the context for the different chapters and draw out the key lessons to be learned.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.