Securing and Sustaining the Olympic City

Pete Fussey, Senior Lecturer in Criminology, Department of Sociology, University of Essex, UK, Jon Coaffee, University of Birmingham UK, Gary Armstrong, Brunel University, UK and Dick Hobbs, University of Essex, UK

• Securing and Sustaining the Olympic City

'Mega-events such as the Olympics have become vehicles for different forms of transformation. To date, however, such events have largely escaped mainstream academic scrutiny. With the Olympics arriving at the heart of London this situation is apt to change, and Securing and Sustaining the Olympic City is a crucial resource for helping us to understand how these Games will shape the vital issues of urban securitization and sustainability for decades to come in one of the great cities of the world.' Kevin Haggerty, University of Alberta, Canada 'This is a very interesting interdisciplinary study of the security construction for the London 2012 Olympic Games, which enriches the nascent field of Olympic Security. Its documented analysis of the serious "glocal" security processes and their social impacts are very important and useful not only for the London Olympic City's specific case, but for all future Olympics and sporting mega-events.' Minas Samatas, University of Crete, Greece '... a significant contribution to contemporary debates on the militarization and securitization of public spaces... represents a brilliantly written account of the inseparability between humans and technology. Technological surveillance is presented not only as punitive, but also integrative, aspiring to incorporate organizations, agencies and actors. Surveillance is presented as socially constructed and strongly influenced by human biases. ... the book offers a well-documented account of previous Olympic related security practices, as well as situating London 2012 into a broader context of militarization of socio-economic marginalized neighborhoods. By contrasting past and the future Olympic security in a matrix of the global standardization of security practices the book thus represents an important contribution to literature on the subject of urban securitization.' Urban Geography Research Group 'Overall, it is an informative, stimulating and significant contribution to the inter