Ksenia Mokrushina Thesis

In the strategic planning phase, the City made a plan of infrastructure and venues delivery in accordance with the guiding principles and strategic objectives established at the foundation planning stage. During the on-going monitoring phase, while developing the needed infrastructure and venues, the City measured sustainability performance and progress. Finally, after the Games, the City engaged in the Olympic legacy management (The City of Vancouver, 2006).

Thus, the City had a comprehensive system of sustainability and legacy management in place throughout the seven years of the preparation for the Games, which enabled it to have control over a protracted and incredibly complex Olympic planning process and steer it towards more sustainable outcomes.

4.2.4 Integrating the Olympics into Longer-term Urban Development Strategy Already at the bid development stage, the City viewed the Olympics as a means “to move forward with the urban agenda it had in mind and get the provincial and federal dollars to finance it.” (VanWynsberghe, personal communication, February 16, 2012). This was critically important from the point of view of sustainability, which had been high on the City’s urban development agenda for decades before its decision to compete for the Olympics. In this connection, Judy Rogers, Vancouver City Manager in 1999-2008 and a key person representing the City in the Olympic bid development says: We strategically viewed the Olympics as an opportunity to get infrastructure and venues built or upgraded at a level that was more sustainable […] In everything, from the building of the Olympic Village to the retrofit of our arenas, we were able to step back for a number of years and built that into the capital campaign.”

(Rogers, personal communication, February 15, 2012) Vancouver’s strategy to further sustainability agenda taking advantage of the Olympic momentum is an example of VanWynsberghe’s theory (2012) of leveraging the Games to achieve desired outcomes and create legacies that speak back to the challenges the City was faced with before the Games. As Chapter 3 has shown, not only did Vancouver construct or rehabilitate the needed infrastructure and venues according to the highest environmental sustainability standards – it also managed to leverage important sustainability policies that defined its urban sustainability future for years to come.

4.2.5 Political Leadership The City’s Olympic sustainability vision was a result of the convergence of politics and leadership at the city and provincial level and the confluence of visions of like-minded individuals (Rogers, personal communication, February 15, 2012).

The B.C. leaders at the time of the bid, Premier Gordon Campbell and his deputy Ken Dobell, were both “policy wonks, who understood the process of the City and its 56