Celebrating Olympic-scale regeneration
Twelve years on from London 2012, the most useful lesson for today's regeneration leaders isn't about venues - it's about narrative discipline held over decades.
As Paris opens its Games, it's worth pausing on what large-scale regeneration actually requires of the people communicating it. London 2012 wasn't won by a single campaign - it was won by a coalition of institutions, boroughs, operators and investors holding the same story for more than a decade, through three Mayors, two Prime Ministers and a financial crisis.
That kind of narrative discipline is the part of regeneration that gets least credit and produces most value. The masterplans and the cranes are visible; the years of patient stakeholder communications, investor narrative and community trust-building are not.
For the next generation of Olympic-scale schemes - Stratford's continued evolution, the Thames Estuary, Manchester's Mayfield, the regeneration corridors emerging in Saudi Arabia and the Gulf - the lesson is the same. Build the institutional narrative early, repeat it without flinching, and treat communications as part of the infrastructure, not part of the marketing budget.