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Assuring a legacy?

March 14, 2012   |   Posted by Shaun McCarthy

Tags: construction, employment, Legacy, standards

It seems a long time since London was announced as the host city for the 2012 Olympic and Paralympic Games and those of us involved in the sustainability aspects of the bid tried to work out what a body to assure the sustainability performance would be like. We started with the rather cynical notion that there is no such thing as a sustainable Games, it is not possible to justify the gross consumption of resources to support a sporting event. We can only call London 2012 sustainable if there is a sustainable legacy. We think of legacy in terms of the environmental, social and economic legacy, primarily for East London but also for the UK as a whole, we also think about the legacy of learning and how this is applied in a wider context. The track record of past Games is patchy, the Olympics helped to put Barcelona on the map as a world city and helped to regenerate the east dock area, the legacy of Athens is almost non-existent and Sydney has done well after a slow start. Beijing is emerging with a legacy of sorts but time will tell. The time has come to consider London 2012 …