Olympic Challenge: Designing Equity into Mega-Events

Abstract

In 2028, the City of Los Angeles will host the Olympic Games for the third time since the start of the last century; the first and second times being 1932 and 1984. While hosting the Olympics is regarded as a high honor with the potential to bring about significant and lasting benefits, it also presents challenges to the host municipality. Studies of mega-events like the Olympics Games cite place-based challenges such as displacement, gentrification, environmental damage, and lost opportunities to advance equitable development that outlasts the Olympics’ duration. One driver of these place-based challenges - and a manifestation of how communities of color have been left behind during mega-event planning - is the inequitable allocation of opportunities to build wealth, such as through diverse contracting. As such, more explicitly just contracting processes have been identified as one of many avenues that can help address the entrenched racial wealth gap in the United States and better forward equitable economic development through mega-event-induced business.

This thesis investigates the potential processes and operations entailed in operationalizing equity through diverse procurement as Los Angeles prepares for the 2028 Olympics. Interviews with leaders of the small business community in Los Angeles, a former leader of Exposition Park (one site of the 2028 Olympics), the 2028 Los Angeles Olympic and Paralympic Organizing Committee, and the City of Los Angeles employees confirm that procurement is a major opportunity to forward equity during the 2028 Games. In part, this is because the 2028 Games are billed as a “no-build Olympics,” meaning that the construction of new developments will not apply because Los Angeles already has a wealth of infrastructure.

Borrowing the language of hazard mitigation from environmental planning and a framework for operationalizing equity in planning, this thesis evaluates the potentiality of diverse procurement and contracting in mega-events as a tool to minimize known vulnerabilities, particularly for traditionally marginalized communities, of hosting mega-events like the Olympic Games. The thesis leverages a prime, though imperfect, example of a more inclusive procurement program of the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta to explore lessons learned about diverse procurement and contracting in that city. It concludes with an analysis on what a transfer of best practices by Atlanta could look like in Los Angeles in pursuit of more equitable economic development and what is here termed “economic hazard mitigation” in the planning of mega-events in cities with histories of inequitable urban development.