Abstract
In last 20 years, there has been increased interest in China's cities for promoting urban development and transformation through the hosting of mega-events. For one thing, the “state-led” standpoint let mega-events in China become different cases from the Western experience. For another thing, it is controversial to answer whether mega-events in China have achieved their initial “state-led” intentions, as well as obtained positive political, socio-economic and spatial outcomes. It seems that mega-events venues, such as Olympic village and Expos Park, could bring great opportunities to economic growth, public service promotion and urban redevelopment. However, as mega-events can be greatly affected by locally social, political and institutional underpinnings, the influence of mega-events in different cities could perform very differently. This assumption gives us ideas to examine the political, socio-economic and spatial outcomes of different mega-evens in China’s cities. In order to make effective comparison, we choose the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, the 2010 Shanghai World Expo and the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games to study. These three cases were hosted in the top three biggest mega-cities of China, and had similar huge socio-economic influence. To summary, we firstly review the planning and development strategies of these three mega-events, with brief introduction of their development history. Secondly, we use housing price and neighborhood diversity as indicators to evaluate whether these mega-events have brought high-value improvements to their urban surroundings. Real estate development is choose as the main field to compare effects of three mega-events, and about 15 years changes are traced to be analyzed. Thirdly, the role of governments is discussed in the process of land use, financial investment and other decision making. A horizontal comparison of political, socio-economic and spatial difference is critically considered in the study. It is concluded that the impact of mega-events can be divided into two stages, 1) before and during the event; 2) after the event is successfully held. In the first stage, planning and government publicity played important roles on driving housing price. However, the booming change mainly happened in the second stage, as more urban newly-development and redevelopment projects were planned and implemented. It seems that the site selection of all three mega-events were well considered, and they have improved the level of public facilities around event venues. More parks, more transport and cultural facilities all help raise the housing conditions. However, the post-event strategies of Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou differ in terms of land use and financial investment, related to different housing value growth. Simply concluded, Shanghai applied more comprehensive development strategies, compared to Beijing and Guangzhou, and received relatively more positive and long-term development results.
