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If the urban condition, its architecture, landscape and design, can offer a text to examine, the text of cities is in constant flux. The staging of a sport mega-event will exacerbate this state in the construction of new, ultramodern sporting facilities. More often than not, as the literature will attest, event-related construction will demand the removal of infrastructure (whether natural or woman/man-made) from host cities. The site of a new stadium will be forced to become what McKee in his article on the local restoration of New Orleans, post-hurricane Katrina, would describe as an "ecological tabula rasa", a return to the backside of heavily designed, controlled and scripted spaces of everyday life. Even the soil, the mineral foundation of the site, is often in need of careful bioremediation to erase the (so-called) impurities of the past. In their piece entitled, "1440: The smooth and the striated"; Deleuze and Guattari describe striated space as that which is typical of the highly organized urban environment we (in)voluntary navigate daily—composed of orderly, grid-like patterns of rectilinear, tall and grey buildings, networks of closed-circuit cameras, police patrols and private security guards. Nevertheless, as Deleuze and Guattari indicate, even the most striated of urban space can create opportunities for smoothness. Graffiti-writing, skateboarding, parkour, littering, pollution and decay: All constitute a rupture, a moment in which we bear witness to the fanatical maintenance of social order and realize our existence as both the steward and cotenant. Mega-event-led urban renewal—and the barren, derelict and un(der)developed space it will (re)territorialize within our cities—can offer us a moment to envision the world outside the homogeneous and prescriptive nature of our urban environment. And within our current political economic state, it is this moment/space, we need.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-9404-6_28

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