Search

Researchers primarily focus on the formal practices used by event organizers to establish temporary spaces like Host Event Zones, characterized as a unilateral process that ignores community interests. Yet little research investigates both the formal and informal interactions between stakeholders. Interviews with London 2012 senior organizers after the "fog of organizing" has lifted–and without political pressure to toe‐the‐line–reveals how two‐way dialogue was facilitated through various communicative mechanisms, from "road shows" to more inclusive Olympic Organizing Committee meetings. This counters previous arguments and contributes new knowledge by revealing–and more accurately representing–how event zones are cocreated through negotiation between the event and community. Consequently, scholars should be wary of extrapolating from formal practices on paper and interrogate the more complex and messy informalities of planning to improve veracity of claim(s). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research question: Major sports events promises are often unrealised, despite locals facing protracted periods of socio-economic disruption. This is a pervasive and empirically verified trend, but little work theorises how and why host community interests become deprioritised. We look at one prominent host community stakeholder group, small businesses, and use a stakeholder salience lens and power-legitimacy-urgency attributes to discern how actual and perceived salience shifted between bidding and live staging, whilst juxtaposing promised outcomes versus realised outcomes. Research methods: 38 interviews with businesses dis/affected by 2018 Commonwealth Games planning alongside documentary analysis. Results and findings: (1) significant differences between actual and perceived salience, with perceived salience seemingly playing a more instrumental role when explaining stakeholder actions and outcomes; (2) perceived salience appeared lower than actual salience. Therefore, businesses felt a) they had little power to leverage opportunities, b) delegitimised with interests' counter to the event's objectives, c) unlistened-to with no claim urgency and limited access to support to have interests addressed. Implications: Although initially positioned as a definitive stakeholder, come Games-time, businesses possessed no attributes, questioning whether they were a stakeholder at all. This is a key contribution, alongside demonstrating how salience shifts over time, and distinctions between actual and perceived salience. Researchers can apply this theoretical lens to study stakeholder deprioritisation in the maelstrom of event planning, including businesses, residents, to vulnerable social groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This consensus statement is the outcome of comprehensive collaboration through an international working group on the disparities in the legacies of major sporting events, specifically for communities and individuals from disadvantaged backgrounds (CIDBs). The workshop brought together scholars to discuss current challenges and develop four propositions and recommendations for event leveraging, policy stakeholders, and researchers. The propositions included (1) the nature of "disadvantage" needs to be recognized and the specific targeted CIDBs in each event context must be carefully identified or clearly defined; (2) CIDBs should be considered as an integral part of the whole event hosting cycle to ensure legacy inclusivity; (3) dedicated event leverage, sufficient financial backing, and resource commitments for CIDBs are needed; and (4) it is critical to establish a system of legacy governance for CIDBs. The recommendations aim to inform change in practice and ensure lasting positive legacies for the communities that need them most. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This scoping review integrates literature from diverse perspectives to better understand when and how management of major sport events promotes or harms human rights. The authors critically review 130 peer-reviewed English language articles to identify conceptual contributions to research and practice. The findings reveal that politics and political reform, legal frameworks, and organizational actions are crucial influences in when and how management of events promotes or harms human rights. The most frequently considered rights in the literature are: equality, human trafficking related, sport as a human right, worker rights, and freedom of residence. Activism for human rights stimulates change within relevant stakeholders via collaboration, naming and shaming, in-public debates, and media coverage. The committed, transparent, and inclusive consideration of human rights in all stages of managing sport events (from bid preparation, bidding, planning, and hosting to postevent leverage) may increase the likelihood that the event has social benefits. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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 organized, 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-securitized 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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We demonstrate the fabrication of binary, multilevel, and blazed diffractive structures by a fast and flexible direct-write process by using an excimer-laser-based tabletop micromachining workstation with an integrated optical surface profiler. Key words: Diffractive optical elements, excimer lasers, laser ablation, micromachining, direct write.

Optical phase conjugation through stimulated Brillouin scattering was used to correct phase aberrations on a beam that was double passed through a pulsed hydrogen fluoride laser amplifier. Key words: Aberration correction, hydrogen fluoride laser, laser amplifier, phase conjugation, stimulated Brillouin scattering.