The Olympic Games should be reformed to enable more democratic input from the communities they affect the most, argues Parisian journalist Jade Lindgaard in this Olympic Impact interview.
"With the games, there's never enough time," said Lindgaard, author of Paris 2024: A City in the Face of Olympic Violence.
"Every four years, a giant event is organised in a different city, with conditions largely set by an external institution ? the International Olympic Committee," explained the journalist and ecology editor at the French investigative news website Mediapart.
"In order for the host country to meet this unmoveable deadline, a lot of the usual checks and controls are waived," she told Dezeen.
"The result is top-down decision making and an erosion of the democratic process." In her book, Lindgaard sets out to document some of the negative effects of the Paris 2024 Olympics, from the destruction of parkland and allotments to the 1,500 people, many of them poor and vulnerable, displaced from their homes in the interest of games-related development projects.
Projects "imposed on residents from on high"
She is the first to admit that huge progress has been made in comparison to previous Olympiads ? the 70,000 people displaced for the 2016 Rio games, for example, or the 60,000 ancient trees chopped down for the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics.
But she argues that no-one should have to suffer negative effects from the Olympic Gam...