Should newly reunified Berlin host the 2000 Olympic Games? This question focused the attention of countless Berlin residents between late 1990, when Berlin began its official bid to host the 2000 Olympic Games, and September 1993, when the International Olympic Committee (IOC) chose Sydney as the host city. To Olympic boosters, including the city's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and Social Democratic Party (SPD), who together formed the governing coalition in the city parliament (Berliner Senat), the 2000 Olympic Games constituted the perfect opportunity to reposition Berlin as a global city in the post–Cold War era. The Olympics would attract private sector investment, would expedite the formerly divided city's efforts to unify transportation and communication infrastructure, would upgrade eastern neighborhoods, and would promote positive feelings of unity among the residents of the newly reunified city. However, a diverse array of Berliners from both West and East, numbering 40 percent of the total Berlin population in September of 1993,Footnote 1 joined together to oppose Berlin's bid. They argued that city leaders used looming Olympic deadlines as an excuse to bypass consultation with Berlin's residents about their city's future. Proclaiming that Berlin was the “wrong city at the wrong time” for the Olympic Games,Footnote 2 protesters employed tactics including demonstrations, counter-publicity, and even vandalism to communicate their concerns. A Berlin Olympics, they argued, would bring negative economic and environmental effects, would threaten the livability of the Kieze (neighborhoods)Footnote 3 where Olympic building projects were planned, and would undermine the right of regular residents to participate in the urban planning process.Footnote 4
This article situates the story of Berlin's failed Olympic bid within two broader contexts: first, how cities in the late twentieth century have used mega-events as a focal point of urban planning and, second, how diverse residential coalitions have coalesced around mega-events to form urban-based citizen protest movements claiming the right to codetermine the uses of urban space. Building upon previous scholarship on Berlin's failed Olympic bid that has primarily centered on city leaders’ goals in pursuing the Games,Footnote 5 this article focuses most closely on the spatial dimensions of Berlin's bid, analyzing the ways in which the disagreement over the bid reflected competing visions about how to use Berlin's spaces and who should decide. These debates took place at a critical moment in the city's history, when German reunification played out most intimately in the physical growing together of the formerly divided city, with once neglected borderlands now constituting central locations. This article draws from broad scholarship on the role of mega-events in city planning and on spatial justice and “right to the city” movements, as well as from scholarship specific to reunification-era Berlin from both an urban planning and social movement perspective.
The Olympic Games are one of the most prominent of “mega-events,” which Maurice Roche describes as “large-scale cultural (including commercial and sporting) events which have a dramatic character, mass popular appeal, and international significance.”Footnote 6 Mega-events like the Olympic Games are international and “standardized” in scope, yet are also “spatially locate[d]” in specific host cities.Footnote 7 As such, the Olympic Games, which themselves last just over two weeks, leave a lasting impact on their host cities through construction projects and urban restructuring and are hence “analyzable as urban events.”Footnote 8 Roche writes that city leaders pursue mega-events to unify the population around a common purpose, with leaders expecting residents to welcome the events, contribute taxes, express enthusiasm, and volunteer time.Footnote 9 Host cities also use the Olympics to “project the city to the world” and “re-position the city in the world of global inter-city comparisons and economic competition.”Footnote 10 Even if the IOC does not choose a particular city to host the actual Games, the Olympic bid process gives all bid cities the “status of being potential Olympic cities” and thus generates investment and visibility.Footnote 11 Hartmut Häussermann and Walter Siebel, in what they describe as a “festivalization of city planning,” argue that cities deliberately seek out mega-events such as the Olympics, EXPOs, garden shows, and city birthdays, as “crystallization points for urban development.”Footnote 12 They note that the mega events allow cities to bypass “the rules of democratic consensus building” in order to generate popular enthusiasm for changes and innovations that residents might not otherwise support.Footnote 13
Urban residents have not let the top-down and development-oriented urban planning reflected in mega-events go unchallenged, however. West Berlin experienced significant protest against top-down urban renewal in the early 1980s, and mega-events have emerged as a focus of broader urban social movements in other European and global cities as well.Footnote 14 Social theorist David Harvey describes such urban activism as motivated by the desire to challenge what he calls a “neoliberal ethic” in urban planning, which he defines as driven by the “powers of developers backed by finance, corporate capital, and an increasingly entrepreneurially minded local state apparatus.” Urban activists, Harvey argues, wish to “reshape the city in a different social image.”Footnote 15 In particular, Harvey emphasizes what he calls the “social practice of commoning,” which defines many urban resistance movements. He notes that “At the heart of the practice of commoning lies the principle that the relation between the social group and that aspect of the environment being treated as a common shall be both collective and non-commodified—off-limits to the logic of market exchange and market valuations.”Footnote 16 As he writes, this is not merely a struggle over access to land or municipal resources, but also an articulation of “the right to change and reinvent the city” according to the “hearts' desire.”Footnote 17
Further, Edward Soja's advocacy for “spatial justice” brings the spatial implications and consequences of Berlin's Olympic bid into sharper relief.Footnote 18 Soja focuses on a “triple dialectic,” whereby the “social/societal,” “temporal/historical,” and “spatial/geographical” aspects of a city interact to shape the urban environment. The context of reunification reflects the temporal and historical perspective, with Berlin featuring urban spaces that remained unclaimed not due to postindustrial urban decay, but because of the removal of a wall that had divided residents into two nation-states. Berlin's vulnerable economic position, facing the joint end of West German subsidies and the demise of East Germany's centrally planned economy, reflects the social and societal angle of Soja's triple dialectic. Underpinning both the historical/temporal and societal/social, however, were the explicitly spatial/geographical dimensions of Berlin's bid, with city officials seeking to use the bid as a tool for urban development, while protesters insisted on their right to collectively determine how to use Berlin's spaces in their own best interest. Just as important as resource allocation to protesters’ image of a “livable Berlin” were opportunities for democratic input into urban planning that affected everyday life in local neighborhoods.Footnote 19
Central to the spatial dimenions of Berlin's contested bid and the urban planning implications thereof was the reconfigured geographical layout of the city. Berlin's unique spatial configuration made the implications of the Olympic bid particularly compelling to both its supporters and opponents. Berlin's official bid concept emphasized that the Games would be “in the middle of the city,” with no sites more than eight to ten kilometers from the central Brandenburg Gate.Footnote 20 Underlying this proposal, however, was significant complexity because the contours of the city's “middle” had changed enormously. German reunification led, in the words of Matthias Bernt, Britta Grell, and Andrej Holm, to a “territorial re-ordering of the city,” which “involved the complete renegotiation of the relationship between the center and the periphery.”Footnote 21 As Janet Ward writes, borderland neighborhoods formerly on the periphery of both cities, particularly those in the east, lay now at Berlin's center and drew significant attention.Footnote 22 With the exception of the Olympic village planned for the West Berlin area of Ruhleben, most Olympic construction projects were slated for these newly central eastern neighborhoods located in close proximity to the former border. Yet, as the debates over Berlin's Olympic bid reveal, the fate of these sites was a contested issue. Were these sites simply empty spaces prime for profitable development, or should they remain broadly accessible to the public? Moreover, who had the right to decide?
To explore these questions, this article first delineates the benefits that city leaders believed the Olympic Games would bring to Berlin, showing how Olympic supporters saw the Games as an ideal vehicle to develop the city and to tackle the social and economic challenges of reunification. Promoters argued that hosting the Games would encourage a common Berlin identity for residents of the formerly divided city. The article then examines why so many protesters from both the former East and West believed that the Olympic Games would actually hurt their city. These protesters prioritized the livability and affordability of Berlin's neighborhoods, and they called for Berlin's residents to have meaningful input into plans for the city's former borderlands and neglected eastern neighborhoods. Significantly, then, opposition to the Olympic bid, and not just support of the Olympic bid, emerged as a vehicle through which former East and West Berliners could unite in common cause. The article concludes by highlighting protesters’ creative use of urban space and counter-publicity, particularly in eastern neighborhoods, to argue against the Olympic bid and in support of inclusive, democratic urban planning.
Two issues were central in the Olympic debate in Berlin. What was Berlin: a world city and new national capitalFootnote 23 (as desired by the CDU/SPD coalition and investors), or an “ordinary place” where residents lived and worked (as desired by many opponents)?Footnote 24 Moreover, who had the right to shape the future of Berlin's neighborhoods: the growth-oriented city parliament and investors, or the Berlin residents who lived and worked in the many Kieze of Berlin where Olympic competitions would take place?Footnote 25 Although Berlin's historical and spatial dimensions were unique, many metropolises, especially those aspiring to global stature, face similar questions. Ultimately, then, this story of Berlin's Olympic bid and the opposition against it illuminates broader issues about growth- and development-oriented city planning initiatives, urban social movements, and the control and use of urban space. In particular, that the Olympic Games became the focus of these critical discussions about the future of Berlin illuminates not only the social and political conflicts and spatial reorientations of newly reunified Berlin, but also the power of mega-events worldwide in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries to drive urban planning discussions and to elicit citizen protest.
Olympia 2000 and Berlin's Visions of Growth
On August 17, 1993, just five weeks before the IOC's September 23 decision date, the newspaper Der Tagesspiegel printed a ten-page Olympic supplement. Collectively, the articles demonstrated the broad coalition supporting Berlin's bid, including the CDU/SPD coalition, many industries and corporations, Berlin's leading banks, the media, and a slight majority of Berlin residents. One article emphasized how the Games would serve as a catalyst for regional development; another described how the Games would create jobs, improve transportation and communications infrastructure, and advertise for the region; and yet another celebrated the investment already under way by many Berlin and German firms in support of the bid. The special edition included essays by high-profile public figures including Eberhard Diepgen, Berlin's mayor; Volker Hassemer, senator for Urban Development and Environmental Protection; Axel Nawrocki, chairman of the Olympia GmbH (limited liability corporation) coordinating the bid; and Horst Kramp, president of the Berlin Chamber of Industry and Commerce. It also featured advertisements by Olympic corporate sponsors including Siemens, the Berliner Bank, and Volkswagen.Footnote 26
The themes emphasized in the newspaper supplement reflected the urban planning vision embraced by Berlin's new CDU/SPD coalition, in power since December 1990. Berlin's Olympic quest formally began under the prior SPD/Alternative List (AL) coalition, which voted on October 25, 1990, to support an Olympic bid.Footnote 27 Yet the SPD/AL coalition experienced significant friction over urban planning. The SPD was primarily interested in pursuing investors and prestige projects to raise Berlin's national and international profile, whereas the AL, as the Green Party called itself in West Berlin, strove to protect grassroots democracy and boost environmental responsibility.Footnote 28 By late November, the AL withdrew from the coalition and abandoned its support of Berlin's Olympic bid. New elections on December 2 produced a CDU/SPD coalition, with the CDU's Eberhard Diepgen as mayor. Diepgen and the CDU shared the SPD's vision of a growth-oriented city government, and the formation of the new coalition consequently, according to Claire Colomb, “marked the end of a period of open debates about the possible future trajectories for Berlin.”Footnote 29
The collapse of communism provides a critical context for the Berlin city government's embrace of a growth orientation. In what Philipp Ther described as a “double transformation,” Berlin not only had to transition away from East Berlin's centrally planned economy but also simultaneously adapt to the loss of Cold War–era federal subsidies to the former West Berlin.Footnote 30 The resulting growth-oriented initiatives marked German reunification, in the words of Armin Kuhn, as the “beginning of neoliberal hegemony in Berlin city politics.”Footnote 31 In this context, Berlin's city leaders viewed the Olympic Games as an ideal focal point for promoting growth and encouraging private investment to pay for reunification. As Wolfgang Steinriede, spokesperson of the Berliner Bank, wrote in Der Tagesspiegel, the Olympic Games would attract “external resources—above all private” that would “stimulate growth in employment and income.”Footnote 32 Volker Hassemer, senator for Urban Development and Environmental Protection, emphasized that attracting such private investment would particularly aid in meeting reunified Berlin's infrastructural needs by enabling the city to accomplish “pre-existing essential projects … more quickly, more easily, and more thoroughly.”Footnote 33 Berlin's Olympic supporters took particular inspiration from Barcelona's celebrated urban renewal after its selection to host the 1992 Games.Footnote 34 Hosting the Olympics would also allow Berlin, formerly the symbolic center of the Cold War, to enjoy continued global relevance. Horst Kramp, president of the Berlin Chamber of Commerce and Industry, emphasized that “the successful bid and execution of the Games will bring the world's attention to Berlin and its surroundings. The Olympic Games will strengthen the meaning and status of the city as well as the entire region.”Footnote 35 The authors of one pro-Olympic brochure further emphasized that the Games would have a “promotional effect,” bringing additional investors, trade fairs, and tourists to Berlin.Footnote 36
The National Olympic Committee of Germany chose Berlin as Germany's candidate city on February 17, 1991,Footnote 37 and Berlin's city government continued its bid process, already well under way, with enthusiasm. Reflecting the city government's efforts to cultivate what Elizabeth Strom calls a public-private “growth coalition,”Footnote 38 the Olympia GmbH prepared the Olympic bid, with the Land of Berlin as the majority shareholder in this limited liability corporation. The city parliament also empowered the Berlin 2000 Marketing GmbH with coordinating financial support from the private sector.Footnote 39 The Olympia GmbH and Olympia Marketing GmbH, both able to act independently of the city government while overseeing the expenditure of public as well as private funds, were the source of much scandal surrounding Berlin's Olympia campaign, including later charges of money laundering and corruption.Footnote 40 As of July 1993, Olympia 2000's major corporate sponsors included Berliner Bank, Bertelsmann, Daimler-Benz, Deutsche Bahn, Lufthansa, Hewlett-Packard, Ruhrgas, Siemens, and Telekom, with many smaller companies and enterprises also offering support.Footnote 41
The Olympia publicity campaign, designed to win over the IOC, reflected the pro-business and pro-investment goals of Olympic promoters. The Olympia 2000 mascot was the Olympic Bärchen, a smiling yellow bear face, reproduced for sale as a stuffed animal and also printed on t-shirts, watches, neckties, golfballs, socks, and Christmas tree ornaments.Footnote 42 The monthly promotional publication, Berlin 2000: Das Olympia Magazin, profiled corporate sponsors. One issue featured a photo of an Air Berlin plane emblazoned with the Bärchen Footnote 43 and highlighted Deutsche Bahn's sponsorship of an Olympic art competition for children.Footnote 44 Olympia promoters scheduled regular meetings with journalists,Footnote 45 and major media concerns, including ARD, ZDF, Bertelsmann AG, Axel Springer AG, Kirch-Konzern, Süddeutsche Verlag, SFB, and RIAS, offered financial support to the Olympic campaign through the Marketing GmbH.Footnote 46 Most Berlin newspapers supported the bid and published special Olympic supplements featuring advertisements from Olympic sponsors and pro-Olympic essays.Footnote 47
Critical to Berlin's bid was the spatial imprint the Olympic Games would leave behind, which supporters argued would provide a substantive upgrade to Berlin's physical spaces and neighborhoods, particularly those in the East. “We are not building facilities for the sixteen days of the Olympic Games, but rather for the everyday use of Berlin residents,” stated one promotional brochure, emphasizing the long-term benefits these proposed Olympic building projects would bring to the city.Footnote 48 The lengthy IOC application required detailed plans for the renovation and construction of various athletic facilities; for the adaptation of the public transportation network to accommodate visitors; and for the housing of athletes, media, and support personnel.
Acknowledging Berlin's unusual postreunification spatial reconfiguration, the Olympia GmbH emphasized that there were “countless open spaces in the inner city that are currently unused,” which could support the Olympic Games.Footnote 49 Such newly accessible borderland sites were the focus of what Elizabeth Strom describes as a “gold rush mentality,”Footnote 50 attracting the attention of major corporations such as Daimler-Benz, Debis, and Sony.Footnote 51 With the exception of the Olympic village to be built in the western area of Ruhleben near the existing Olympic Stadium from 1936 (slated for renovation and upgrades), borderland spaces, along with the former eastern neighborhoods close to the former border, stood at the center of Berlin's Olympic bid. One proposed project was the new Olympic Hall in the eastern district of Mitte. A second major project was a new boxing hall in the Friedrich Ludwig Jahn Sportpark, adjacent to the former border in the eastern district of Prenzlauer Berg. Also planned for Prenzlauer Berg were a new swimming hall and a new velodrome. The Rummelsburger Bucht, an area where the eastern districts of Lichtenberg, Friedrichshain, and Treptow met, would host the media and Olympic personnel in new housing.Footnote 52 Both East Germany's World Youth Stadium and Werner Seelenbinder Hall, which the Olympia GmbH emphasized as “primitive,” required demolition to facilitate the new Olympic construction projects.Footnote 53
As the word primitive suggests, Olympic planners saw the Olympic Games as upgrading eastern facilities and neighborhoods. Olympic construction would “comprehensively and gently renovat[e] districts in the eastern part of the city” and improve “neglected areas on the former border.”Footnote 54 In particular, Olympic planners hailed the tangible environmental benefits Olympic construction projects would bring to the Rummelsburger Bucht, a desolate industrial zone in the former East contaminated with heavy metal deposits. Following the Olympic Games, the former Olympic facilities would constitute a pleasant residential neighborhood, transformed from “Cinderella” into the city's newest “beauty.”Footnote 55 Praising this proposed reclamation of industrial landscape for residential use, Volker Hassemer, the senator for Urban Development and Environmental Protection, emphasized that “Olympia heals the city's wounds and makes Berlin attractive once again.”Footnote 56 By the 2000 Olympics opening ceremony, proclaimed Mayor Eberhard Diepgen, all the “good addresses” would no longer be in West Berlin but rather distributed throughout the reunified city.Footnote 57
In addition to uniting the city physically, Diepgen believed that the Games would help build a “cohesive Berlin identity” among newly reunited Berliners. Contrasting the Olympic Games with other possible sources of shared identity, Diepgen emphasized that “Olympia is … something tangible, easy to conceive, and also something associated with pleasure.”Footnote 58 Yet as Maurice Roche notes, mega-events also “create opportunities—through information overload, mixed messages, selective readings, message failures, creative responses by sections of the crowds which gather for the event, and also through some of the divisive and exclusionary dynamics—for the development of ‘popular cultural’ and occasionally ‘resistant’ responses by members of the public.”Footnote 59 Demonstrating Roche's point, a significant minority of around 40 percent of Berlin residents formed a large and diverse movement to oppose the city's Olympic bid. Their opposition combined a broader rejection of Berlin's growth orientation with a specific focus on the many challenges Berlin faced in the transitional period of German reunification. During their two-year fight against Olympia, protesters articulated an alternative vision of Berlin's future focused not on growth and development, but on affordable neighborhoods, quality of life, and citizen participation.
The No Olympia Movement
On July 16, 1993, around sixty Berlin Olympic opponents, wearing black and pretending to wipe away tears, formed a funeral procession. Four men carried a six-foot long coffin, adorned by the pages of a petition featuring the signatures of more than six thousand residents from the eastern district of Prenzlauer Berg. The petition called for a stop to Olympic construction in the district until after the IOC made its host city decision. Thea Köhler of the Grüne Liga Berlin, one of the environmental organizations opposing the Olympic bid, emphasized residents’ anxiety about the possible negative effect of the Olympic Games on neighborhood life and described the desired referendum as an effort to give “Berlin residents a fair chance to participate in planning.” On the morning of July 16, although the time period for citizens to sign the petition was not yet over, groundbreaking began on the new Olympic velodrome. Petition signatories organized the symbolic burial in response. “You were born at the wrong time, and you will always remain in our memory,” stated a man dressed as a pastor, as the pallbearers lowered the petition into the hole in the ground left after the demolition of East Germany's Werner Seelenbinder Hall.Footnote 60
Whereas the CDU/SPD coalition and other Olympic proponents saw the Olympic Games as the answer to Berlin's many challenges, a whole range of Berlin residents, including the organizers of the failed referendum and symbolic burial, believed instead that the Olympic Games would diminish Berlin as a residential city. Although they did not use the language of social theory, their critiques of the Olympic bid fit within the broader context of what David Harvey describes as increasing urban activism in the early 1990s on behalf of the “commons.” In particular, Berlin's Olympic opponents fought to foster a “livable Berlin” for its residents with affordable neighborhoods, accessible green spaces, and opportunities for meaningful citizen input.
Significantly, just as mega-events are attractive to city governments as a focal point to generate enthusiasm and advance municipal goals, so can mega-events simultaneously serve as rallying points for protest movements that often share similar goals yet are typically disunified in focus, membership, and strategy.Footnote 61 The diverse No Olympia coalition encompassed environmental groups, including the Bund für Umwelt und Naturschutz Berlins (BUND), the Berliner Landesarbeitsgemeinschaft Naturschutz (BLN), and the Grüne Liga Berlin. Student groups from the Free University and the Technical University protested, and citizens’ initiatives emerged in neighborhoods such as Ruhleben and Prenzlauer Berg. Members of Berlin's militant left-wing autonomist scene also contested Berlin's bid, and their turn to vandalism caused tensions within the protest coalition.Footnote 62 Also in opposition was the AL/Bündnis 90 party, Berlin's Green Party, a coalition formed out of West Berlin's AL and the various East German citizens’ groups who had formed Bündnis 90 after reunification.Footnote 63 The Party of Democratic Socialism (PDS) in Berlin, the successor to the East German SED (Socialist Unity Party), had a mixed stance on the Games. In September 1991, its Ecology and City Planning Working Group participated in a large anti-Olympia demonstration,Footnote 64 yet some PDS members supported the bid and criticized the group for using the PDS logo too prominently on the demonstration flyer.Footnote 65 Nonetheless, in October 1992, the party decided to take an oppositional position.Footnote 66 By the spring of 1993, however, the PDS had switched again, this time to a position of qualified support, calling for greater transparency, and using its parliamentary position to introduce proposals for rent caps on the newly constructed Olympic apartments and for the postponement of Olympic construction projects until after the IOC decision.Footnote 67
Edward Soja's tripartite model for analyzing urban justice movements, focused on temporal/historical, social, and spatial factors, illuminates the motivations and strategies of Olympic protesters. From a temporal/historical perspective, Berlin and its residents were at a critical juncture due to German reunification. Whereas the CDU/SPD city government saw the Olympic Games as the solution to Berlin's many reunification challenges, the No Olympic protesters from both East and West Berlin believed that the Olympic Games would divert energy and resources away from Berlin's Kieze. The “East-West Alliance Against Olympia,” for example, put out several issues of their newsletter, the “nolympia express.”Footnote 68 Inverting Mayor Diepgen's top-down vision of Berlin's reunification, in which the Olympic Games would foster a collective Berlin identity, such initiatives show how the No Olympic movement could instead constitute a grassroots reunification process of East and West Berliners collectively pursuing their alternative version of a “livable Berlin.” Some protest groups consisted primarily of former East Berliners, such as the PDS. Others, such as the AL/Bündnis 90 Party, brought together former West Berliners and East Berlin dissidents. Sites of activism crossed the formerly divided city, including urban gardeners in the West Berlin neighborhood of Ruhleben who wanted to protect their allotments, and residents of former East Berlin neighborhoods such as Prenzlauer Berg, where protesters buried the petition to delay construction. Some of the autonomists who protested the Olympic bid also bridged East and West. Many had lived in the West Berlin district of Kreuzberg during Berlin's years of division. After reunification, they migrated to the borderland spaces in the former East, where they occupied houses and established caravan communities together with former East Germans.Footnote 69
These groups from both East and West worked together in loose coalition, pursuing their own focused agendas while also collectively participating in large demonstrations. Their description of their newly reunified city was not Berlin as the “Olympic city,” but Berlin as the “No Olympic city.” This construction of Berlin's identity seemingly constituted a negative—what Berlin would not do rather than what Berlin would do—but emerged out of a concrete view of Berlin's future that challenged the growth agenda reflected in the Olympic bid. By avoiding the Olympic Games, Berlin could instead utilize resources to fulfill the needs of its residents, as determined through a shared decision-making process. The opponents’ specific spatial and social critiques of the Olympic bid, to turn to the next two components of Soja's tripartite model, reveal their alternative visions for Berlin.
Reflecting their spatial concerns, No Olympia protesters focused extensively on the open urban spaces that had become newly accessible with the demise of the German–German border infrastructure. In contrast to the CDU/SPD coalition's view of the abandoned and empty central real estate as prime for development, many Olympic opponents wanted to use these spaces to benefit local neighborhoods and their residents, viewing them as best suited for functioning as parks and green spaces open to all. As the authors of one protest brochure worried, we will get “monumental Olympic structures instead of parks and open free spaces.”Footnote 70 A particular focus of concern was the new fifteen-thousand-seat Olympic Hall, slated for an already “densely built up urban area” in the eastern district of Mitte. Protesters bemoaned that the district's minimal green space, which should be available for the enjoyment of all local residents, would be lost to accommodate the construction project.Footnote 71 Opponents of the new facilities slated for Prenzlauer Berg—subject of the buried referendum petition—likewise wanted the city to transform the many desolate and asphalt covered areas into “undeveloped open spaces which can be used for general neighborhood recreation.”Footnote 72 Allotment gardeners in the West Berlin district of Ruhleben displayed a banner proclaiming “This allotment garden will be sacrificed for Olympia. Concrete parking spots instead of green spaces.” They, too, founded an active citizens’ initiative to challenge city leaders’ plans to remove their gardens to facilitate the Olympic village.Footnote 73
Protesters’ concerns about the ecological impact of the Olympic Games reflected Soja's insight that environmental justice is often a key part of spatial justice movements in contemporary cities.Footnote 74 Much of the environmental objection to the Games centered on the Olympic village slated for Ruhleben, the primary western area included in Olympic construction plans. Protesters noted that the village would be “the size of a small city,”Footnote 75 consisting of more than four thousand apartments.Footnote 76 Moreover, the natural areas of Ruhleben, featuring several rare animal species,Footnote 77 warranted designation for ecological protection. Instead, they would become a recreational area for the eleven thousand people who would live in the new apartments after the Games.Footnote 78 Protesters also rejected the city's claim that the Olympic plans for Rummelsburger Bucht, involving the construction of more than three thousand new apartments, would bring environmental benefits. Whereas the city claimed that the removal of industrial contamination at the site would function as a net plus for the environment, protesters rejected the implication that mass construction projects were a prerequisite for such remediation, noting that “there can never be enough Olympic Games to clean up the polluted soil of hundreds of industrial sites.” Protesters, emphasizing that “Residents need green spaces in their immediate proximity to have a livable environment,” advocated for the city to allow the site to revert to its historical function as a popular day trip destination accessible to all Berliners.Footnote 79
Reflecting Soja's tripartite model, protesters also shared concerns about the social distribution of city resources, particularly the opportunity cost of Olympic construction projects. Noting the looming end of subsidies from Bonn, Hans-Jürgen Kuhn, representing the AL/Bündnis 90, wrote that “The bid is coming at a time that could hardly be worse” for the city.Footnote 80 More pressing needs included building 100,000 affordable apartments, widening the social net, restructuring the city administration, expanding affordable child-care options, and creating new playgrounds.Footnote 81 They also disputed the city's assumption that the large Olympic facilities would benefit Berlin's residents after the Games, predicting that the new facilities in Prenzlauer Berg would primarily facilitate elite athletic competitions and not recreational use.Footnote 82 Protesters likewise objected to the proposed east–west Olympia Express that would transport guests and athletes between Olympic facilities, arguing that Berlin instead needed to spend funds on improving the existing public transportation infrastructure and enhancing access lanes for pedestrians and cyclists.Footnote 83
Protesters also feared that the Olympics would accelerate gentrification processes already underway in reunified Berlin. The early 1990s in the former East Berlin featured significant tenant activism, and fear of rising rents motivated many protesters.Footnote 84 Reflecting concerns about gentrification, protesters often subverted the official Olympic slogan “Citius, Altius, Fortius” (“Faster, Higher, Stronger”) with protest banners bearing words such as “Faster, Higher, More Expensive—the Olympic Games raise rents”Footnote 85 and “Faster Displacements, Higher Rents, Further Restructuring.”Footnote 86 Noting that the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona had driven up rents in the city center and displaced public housing and poor residents to the city's margins,Footnote 87 they distributed a German translation of a Spanish publication discussing the negative effects of the Olympics on Barcelona.Footnote 88 Indeed, in Barcelona, the moviment okupa had emerged to challenge the gentrification and neglect of social spending that accompanied preparation for the 1992 Olympic Games.Footnote 89 Gentrification fears were a major factor in protest against the proposed Olympic Hall project, which protesters feared would damage the “social environment” in the neighborhood by driving up rents and replacing small businesses and neighborhood bars with expensive hotels and restaurants. Furthermore, protesters argued that funds targeted for the expansion of the subway station near the proposed stadium could instead support better “improvement[s] to the Kiez” such as affordable apartments, regular sports facilities, and a new neighborhood kindergarten or school.Footnote 90
Critical to all of these concerns, and reflected in the buried petition at the site of the former Werner Seelenbinder Hall, was the inhabitants’ belief that they, as the neighborhood's actual residents, should have input in the fate of these spaces. This belief in the right to offer input into urban planning decisions grew in part out of the activism of the late 1970s and early 1980s in West Berlin, particularly in the district of Kreuzberg, where residents clashed with the city and police over the city's plans for urban renewal. After occupying and renovating numerous buildings, the squatters eventually negotiated legal status for their residences.Footnote 91 Now, with the Olympic bid representing a new threat to their right to democratic input, many residents renewed their commitment to fighting for the right to determine the future of their own neighborhoods. The PDS party criticized the “de-democratization of decision making processes” in Berlin around the Olympic bid.Footnote 92 Several environmental groups likewise argued that the city parliament used the presumed urgency of meeting IOC deadlines “to dismantle democratic co-determination.” According to one protest brochure, “Instead of working together with the districts to settle on particular construction projects,” the parliament “wants to bypass district offices and the interests of residents.”Footnote 93 As the symbolic burial exemplifies, the No Olympic protesters were not willing to abandon their proclaimed democratic right to offer input into urban planning that affected their city and its neighborhoods. Consequently, they actively and creatively engaged with urban public space to make their protest visible and convincing to Berlin's residents, city officials, the media, and the International Olympic Committee.
Contesting the Olympics in Public Space
On Sunday, April 4, 1993, No Olympic protesters astride bicycles met at the Rotes Rathaus, home of Berlin's city parliament. Together, they staged a protest, collectively cycling by five sites that they believed Olympic construction projects would affect negatively. All stops were in the former East, beginning with the site slated for the Olympic Hall and ending at Rummelsburger Bucht. The flyer promoting the protest, prepared by the Critical Olympic Forum Prenzlauer Berg, objected to the expenditure of city funds “for gigantic temples of commercialized elite athletics,” calling instead for investment in projects to serve the everyday needs of neighborhood residents.Footnote 94
Public protests included small-scale actions tied to specific sites such as the cycling protest, large coordinated demonstrations, significant anti-Olympic publicity, and even, in the case of the autonomists, vandalism aimed at the property of Olympic sponsors. The bid's proponents seized upon vandalism to delegitimate the anti-Olympic movement, but the majority of protesters rejected vandalism. Reflecting the situationist tradition, in which play, laughter, and humor function as protest strategies and, as Anja Kanngieser has argued, “create a platform for networks between activists and the public” and “prompt a feeling of reciprocity, of something shared,” protesters orchestrated a variety of creative and largely peaceful measures.Footnote 95 Through these actions, they expressed their commitment to protecting the livability of the Kiez, their desire to preserve accessible green spaces in Berlin, and, above all, their belief in citizens’ rights to democratic input into city planning.
By linking together different affected sites around East Berlin, the cycling protest—widely publicized via flyers—demonstrates how protesters made the actual spaces of Berlin central to their protest actions. Reflecting the concept formulated by Jan-Henrick Friedrichs, the protesters used the cycling protest to “map” the city by creating a “network”Footnote 96 of noncontiguous yet related spaces, all experiencing similar threats due to Berlin's Olympic bid. As Friedrichs writes, processes like mapping help constitute and organize space and lend it meaning and, as is evident here, can create “bonds among like minded people.”Footnote 97 This cycling protest was also inclusive—anybody with access to a bicycle could participate—and thus embodied the democratic process celebrated by protesters. Although the cycling protest involved only sites in the East, most protest brochures also highlighted the western district of Ruhleben proposed for the Olympic village. In the process, they created a counterpoint to Olympic supporters’ claims that the Olympic Games were necessary to reunite Berlin. Instead, protesters’ maps suggested, the anti-Olympic protest movement drew together East and West Berlin and eastern and western Berliners.
Countering the pervasive pro-Olympia publicity facilitated by the political, corporate, and media support for the bid constituted a challenge for Olympic protesters. One protest flyer decried the “saturation of Berlin” with pro-Olympia stickers and branded articles.Footnote 98 Berlin's 205 post offices displayed Olympia posters and flyers,Footnote 99 and from April 14, 1993, onward, the city's district offices also exhibited Olympia 2000 flags.Footnote 100 Even Berlin's police cars bore Olympia 2000 bumper stickers.Footnote 101
To combat this highly coordinated pro-Olympia marketing, protesters developed and spread counter-publicity. Berlin needed “Aufklärung nicht Aufkleber”—enlightenment not bumper stickers.Footnote 102 As Claire Colomb writes, protesters “wanted to imprint their presence visually in order to undermine the projected ‘consensus’ imposed physically onto the city's public spaces.”Footnote 103 The production of counter-publicity had deep roots in divided Berlin's preexisting protest cultures, ranging from squatters and other urban activists in West Berlin to the Environmental Library in East Berlin.Footnote 104 As with the cycling protest, Olympic opponents distributed anti-Olympic flyers and brochures that connected individuals concerned about discrete sites and neighborhoods to a broader network of protesters united by their concern that the Olympic bid was bad for Berlin.Footnote 105 Protesters also experimented with developing an anti-Olympia logo, with “Olympia 2000? No Thank You”—playing off the easily recognizable anti-nuclear motto “Nuclear Power? No Thank You”—as one proposal.Footnote 106 They likewise sought to subvert visually the smiling Olympic Bärchen figure by devising a range of alternative variations. The anti-Olympic Bärchen sometimes frowned, shed tears, stuck out his tongue, struggled while trapped inside Olympic rings, bore a splattered tomato across his forehead, growled, and carried a big stick with the slogan “no foreigners,” or even sported a Hitler mustache.”Footnote 107 Anti-Olympic graffiti, which appeared throughout the city in noncontiguous places, also helped “map” Berlin as the “No Olympic city” and not the “Olympic city.”Footnote 108 One protester crossed out the pro-Olympic message on a billboard, turned the Olympic bear's smile into a frown, and wrote in English “kill the bear.”Footnote 109
In addition to developing counter-publicity, protesters also staged large, coordinated demonstrations, the first of which occurred on September 16, 1991, to coincide with the IOC's visit to Berlin. This relatively modest protest drew one thousand participants and ended in violent clashes between demonstrators and the 950 police who patrolled them.Footnote 110 In contrast, by April 18, 1993, approximately ten thousand individuals participated in the “7, 8, 9, Knockout Olympia” demonstration, timed to coincide with another IOC visit to Berlin. The demo began in a street performance, described by a journalist from die tageszeitung as “peaceful and frolicsome” and reflecting a situationist sensibility, featuring several young men igniting a Mercedes symbol in a washtub as an ersatz Olympic torch, accompanied by loud cheers. The demonstrators paraded from Checkpoint Charlie through Mitte, ending at the Gendarmenmarkt, where a speaker from Amsterdam gave a speech to the crowd describing activists' efforts to oppose Amsterdam's bid to host the 1992 games. Organizers emphasized that demonstration participants represented “a broad spectrum of the Berlin population,” including individuals from many different citizens’ initiatives, environmental groups, youth organizations, and political parties. Although there was significant police presence and a few protesters threw stones, the demonstration was overwhelmingly peaceful, and the “feared orgy of violence” proclaimed by officials failed to manifest.Footnote 111
City officials’ fear of violent clashes attests to the presence in the No-Olympia movement of vandalism, a common protest strategy of the autonomists.Footnote 112 Noting that “the voices of opponents are drowned out, and protest is criminalized and suppressed,”Footnote 113 autonomists proclaimed in their newsletter Interim that vandalism, which they labeled Volxsport, is “citizen participation every day and at any time.” “Anti-Olympia 2000 is no privilege of the few, but rather open to all,” they continued. “With a cobble stone or a tube of superglue you too can participate.”Footnote 114 Pursuing a strategy they called “image smearing,” the autonomists publicly claimed responsibility for vandalism, seeking media coverage that would tarnish Berlin's image in the eyes of the IOC voters.Footnote 115 Autonomists often targeted pro-Olympic publicity for vandalism, encouraging others, “Wherever you see the smiling bear, join in.”Footnote 116 They noted that the many Olympic stickers “resulted in a phenomenal increase in damaged paint finish and flat tires in the city,” reflecting the frequency with which they targeted automobiles bearing Berlin 2000 stickers.Footnote 117
Autonomists also vandalized the offices and facilities of businesses and media organizations that supported the Olympic bid. On one flyer, they claimed responsibility for an “Olympic night at the Berliner Bank” in which “we served up a cocktail [called a] Samaranch special with an artificial aroma of butyric acid”—referring to IOC chairperson Juan Antonio Samaranch. On the same flyer, the Kommando na na Nawrocki (taking the name of Olympia GmbH chairperson Axel Nawrocki) claimed responsibility for using time delay explosives in the KaDeWe and Hertie department stores late one night, resulting in one of the most visible and widely discussed acts of vandalism. The same flyer also celebrated how “the destroyers of the peace” broke windows at three McPaper stores, a subsidiary of Olympic sponsor Herlitz. These acts were simply a “foretaste” for 2000, declared the flyer, if Berlin actually hosted the Olympic Games.Footnote 118
Despite the broad base of peaceful protest against the Olympic bid, city leaders, the mainstream media, and Olympia supporters primarily emphasized the acts of vandalism. Particularly controversial in the eyes of the CDU/SPD coalition was the participation of AL representative Judith Demba in the production of an anti-Olympic film distributed to the IOC in January 1993. The film closed with a masked man clad in black throwing a rock, saying, “We will wait for you.” Berlin's governing coalition accused Demba of inciting violence by participating in the film, demanded her resignation, and eventually filed charges against her.Footnote 119 The issue of vandalism caused tensions within the AL/Bündnis 90 coalition, and several members distanced themselves from Olympia opposition and called for Demba's resignation.Footnote 120 Furthermore, the PDS cited this “escalation of a politics of antiolympic crowbars” to explain their change from blanket opposition to qualified support, although some individual representatives and members remained outspoken opponents.Footnote 121 Most protestors, however, explicitly distanced themselves from vandalism and called for “witty, imaginative” forms of protest.Footnote 122
“Olympia … und tschüss” was the largest and last anti-Olympia demonstration, held on September 18, 1993, just five days before the IOC's decision.Footnote 123 This demonstration, planned by twenty groups,Footnote 124 began at the Rotes Rathaus, wound its way through central Berlin, and ended in Prenzlauer Berg.Footnote 125 Police, concerned about vandalism against automobiles, posted predemonstration flyers warning residents about potential property damage and encouraging them to park on side streets.Footnote 126 Some participants celebrated past acts of vandalism by announcing them with a megaphone during the demonstration, and several Olympic Bärchen suffered symbolic violence, with one hanged from a gallows and another impaled.Footnote 127 Ultimately, however, the demonstration was overwhelmingly peaceful, with only ten arrests for an estimated fifteen to eighteen thousand demonstrators. Demonstration organizers celebrated the march as a “colorful, multi-faceted, and peaceful demonstration” and as a “forceful public display.”Footnote 128
Whether attending a citizens’ initiative meeting in Ruhleben, joining a bike tour to Rummelsburger Bucht, burying a petition in Prenzlauer Berg, or demonstrating with thousands of others at the heart of the city, many Berlin residents embraced direct action to communicate their concerns about Olympia's impact on their neighborhoods and on Berlin. In his work on “guerrilla urbanism,” Jeffrey Hou writes, “The presence and making of insurgent public space serves as barometer of the democratic well-being and inclusiveness of our present society.”Footnote 129 In this sense, Berlin's Olympic protesters were doing so much more than fighting the Olympic Games. Through their dedicated and direct engagement, they were also fighting for their right to help shape the very future of their newly reunited city, especially, to quote David Harvey, its “commons.” Indeed, protesters consistently insisted that Berlin was their city. As the flyer recruiting participants for the cycling protest concluded, “It is our money that is squandered. It is our city, which is planned to death (“zerplant”) … Stop the Olympic delusion now!”Footnote 130 Protesters believed that they, as Berlin's residents, had a democratic right to codetermine their city's future—not just the allocation of resources, but also the very usages of urban space.
Conclusions
On the evening of September 23, 1993, reflecting the interest of both supporters and protesters in the fate of the Olympic bid, many Berliners turned out in the public spaces of the city to hear the IOC announce its decision. Attesting to the dramatically reconfigured spatial layout of the reunified city, the main gathering sites were all associated with the former German–German border. Supporters gathered at the Brandenburg Gate, inaccessible after the Berlin Wall's construction in 1961 and a prominent symbol of German reunification once the border opened in 1989, for a party sponsored by the Olympia Marketing GmbH and several partners. Opponents assembled at the Tränenpalast near the Friedrichstrasse train station, a prominent East/West crossing point during German division, and at the Oberbaumbrücke, a bridge crossing the Spree River and connecting the former West Berlin district of Kreuzberg with the former East Berlin district of Friedrichshain; East Germany restricted access to the bridge during division.Footnote 131
To the disappointment of the many Olympic supporters and the exultation of opponents, the IOC chose Sydney, not Berlin, to host the 2000 Olympic Games. The implications of the failed bid were significant for Olympia's supporters. As Janet Ward writes, the defeat of the bid was “a representative caesura marking the city's dashed hopes.”Footnote 132 The economic downturn that began in 1993 compounded this disappointment, with recession and unemployment leaving empty many of the new office buildings built during the early 1990s boom.Footnote 133
Yet, the city continued to pursue the overall pro-growth vision reflected in the Olympic bid. On May 30, 1994, Berlin's parliament authorized the transformation of the Olympia Marketing GmbH into Partner für Berlin (Partner for Berlin), dedicated to city marketing. Partner für Berlin is still active today and is responsible for the continued use of the Bärchen mascot on items sold to tourists.Footnote 134 Moreover, several Olympic construction projects came to fruition, including the construction of a boxing hall (Max Schmeling Hall), velodrome, and swimming hall in Prenzlauer Berg, and the residential development of the Rummelsburger Bucht. Confirming protesters’ concerns, the new athletic structures in Prenzlauer Berg are, according to Heike Albert, “islands” not integrated into their neighborhoods.Footnote 135
Although protesters celebrated the demise of the Olympic bid, many of their deeper worries, particularly about urban policies encouraging private development and gentrification, persisted, especially as Berlin prepared for the national government's arrival in 1999. As a result, some Berlin residents continue to develop initiatives that protect their right to have input into the use of urban space. Michael A. Lafond writes about the multiple “cooperative, participatory initiatives” in Berlin “that serve to create and maintain urban spaces, further democratic planning and development, and increase local capacities.” Most of these initiatives, which position themselves against gentrification, are local and small scale, often relating to locations along the former border, such as the caravan community Gesamtkunstwerk Lohmühle between Kreuzberg and Treptow.Footnote 136
On a broader scale, and reminiscent of the No Olympic movement, was the citizens’ initiative Mediaspree Versenken (Sink Media Spree), particularly active in Berlin in 2007 and 2008. This initiative fought an ambitious private development project designed to provide facilities for the multimedia, entertainment, and telecommunications industries and focusing on a parcel of land and water along the banks of the Spree River encompassing both the former eastern district of Friedrichshain and former western district of Kreuzberg. Supporters of this initiative considered this former border area, eight times the size of Potsdamer Platz, a “wasteland” ideal for development. Yet, opponents feared the gentrification on both sides of the river that would likely accompany the endeavor.Footnote 137 Similar to the No Olympia protest movement, Sink Media Spree involved both sites and activists from both sides of the former German–German border. In contrast to the No Olympia movement, Sink Media Spree was an entirely grassroots initiative. The Greens and the Left Party (a merger of the PDS Party with a breakaway group of former SPD members) constituted part of Berlin's governing majority and, as such, supported the Media Spree development.Footnote 138 The Sink Media Spree movement won a nonbinding referendum on July 13, 2008, though the project largely continued as planned. Protesters considered their opposition to the Media Spree project a “right to the city” issue, believing that residents, not developers and the city government, should make vital decisions about the neighborhoods where they live.Footnote 139
Though predating the “right to the city” movement with which Sink Media Spree stated its affiliation, the No Olympia protest movement, with its emphasis on resisting a global mega-event and protecting open urban spaces, promoting environmental sustainability, and challenging growth-oriented city planning, can be understood as an early example of this twenty-first-century phenomenon. Both Edward Soja and David Harvey explore how Henri Lefebvre's call for the “right to the city,” first formulated in 1968, has motivated modern urban activitists to make the city a focus point of opposition to neoliberalism.Footnote 140 Activists finalized the World Charter to the Right to the City in 2005 after a series of meetings at the World Social Forum,Footnote 141 and the national Right to the City Alliance formed in the United States in 2007 following the United States Social Forum.Footnote 142 Soja emphasizes that spatial concerns are integral to the global “right to the city” movement, which promotes the “formation of a new spatial consciousness,” with attention to “the spatiality of injustice and the injustice of spatiality.”Footnote 143 Engaging with such spatial justice concerns, the No Olympia movement, like Sink Media Spree, explicitly saw urban spaces, which they believed should benefit neighborhoods and their residents, as threatened by private development. They thus engaged in activism to assert their own claims to the city and its spaces.
Moreover, the concerns of Olympic protesters about the impact of the Games on the city anticipated later developments in the Olympic bid process itself. The IOC began requiring cities to assess environmental consequences in 1994 and to address “legacy,” including impact on infrastructure and urban regeneration, in 2005.Footnote 144 Protest movements against Olympic bids, questioning the benefit to a city of hosting the Olympic Games and focusing on potential long-term negative effects, have also increased in recent years. The cities of St. Moritz and Davos, Munich, Oslo, and Krakow held referenda about hosting the 2022 Games, with the majority of residents in St. Moritz and Davos, Munich, and Krakow voting against their cities’ bids. Only in Oslo did a slight majority of urban residents vote to continue the bidding process, though the city later dropped its bid amid continued protest, as did Stockholm (which held no referendum), leaving only Almaty, Kazakhstan, and Beijing, China, as candidates for the 2022 Winter Games, with the IOC choosing Beijing.Footnote 145
The bidding process for the 2024 Summer Games also unleashed significant resistance in candidate cities. Showing the continued appeal of the mega-event as a vehicle for urban planning and regeneration, particularly for cities struggling economically, Berlin sought to submit a renewed bid to host the 2024 Games, as did the German city of Hamburg. In both cities, resistance movements emerged. In Berlin, Judith Demba, who had opposed the 2000 bid as an elected representative of the Green Party, again took a leading role in the No Olympia movement, now as a member of the Left Party.Footnote 146 The German Olympic Committee, likely considering Berlin's vigorous protest movement from the early 1990s, chose Hamburg as Germany's bid city. Ironically, following protests coordinated by NOlympia Hamburg and Volksinitiative Stop Olympia Hamburg, Hamburg residents voted down Hamburg's bid in a binding referendum, leaving Germany with no city submitting a bid to host the 2024 Games.Footnote 147 Rome, Budapest, and Boston also withdrew their bids for the 2024 Games amid widespread disagreement about whether the Games would benefit the cities.Footnote 148 Ultimately, the IOC worked out a deal with the only remaining candidate cities, Paris and Los Angeles (which the United States Olympic Committee nominated after Boston dropped out), choosing Paris to host the 2024 Games and Los Angeles, which had preexisting facilities and few new building and development needs, to host the 2028 Games.Footnote 149
Urban residents have protested not only Olympic bids and Olympic Games, but also other mega-events such as the World Cup.Footnote 150 In Brazil, which hosted both the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games, some residents formed the Popular Committee of the World Cup and the Olympics to protest the urban restructuring that accompanied both mega-events, which involved the displacement of marginalized urban residents from their neighborhoods. Several million Brazilians demonstrated for two weeks in June 2013, during the high-profile Confederations Cup soccer competition, in protest of public expenditures for the World Cup taking place the next year.Footnote 151 Protesters also published a 190-page dossier, Rio 2016 Olympics: The Exclusion Games, with essays on displacement, exploitation of children, rent increases, environmental damage, and militarization wrought by Rio's hosting of the 2016 Summer Olympic Games.Footnote 152
Although Berlin's Olympic bid and the No Olympia protest against it constituted just a three-year period of engagement in a single European capital city, the contrasting visions embedded in these competing perspectives on Berlin and its future reflect several broader late twentieth and early twenty-first century urban phenomena. First is the continued trajectory of Berlin itself. The city government, faced with a struggling economy, still looks to mega-events and large-scale development projects as vehicles for economic growth, as the effort to bid for the 2024 Games and projects such as Media Spree reveal. Yet, a significant portion of the urban population opposes such initiatives, just as they did in the early 1990s, and engages in grassroots activism intended to keep the city accessible and affordable to its residents. Second is the broader international “right to the city” movement, which the No Olympia movement predated yet resembled. In cities worldwide, coalitions of activists are challenging neoliberal urban policies and championing social and spatial justice initiatives. Finally, the No Olympia movement anticipated the emergence of urban political mobilizations in multiple cities around the globe opposing their cities’ Olympic bids. Many municipal governments continue to believe that hosting mega-events such as the Olympic Games will bring benefits to their cities, yet as recent referenda show, urban residents increasingly reject this premise, seeing instead negative financial, political, and quality of life effects on the cities and their populations. The story of Berlin's Olympic bid, then, is ultimately part of a larger story about the possibilities and limitations of mega-events as vehicles for urban development, the ambitions and frustrations of municipal political bodies, and the energy and engagement of global “right to the city” activists advocating for environmental sustainability, spatial justice, and grassroots democracy.
