Letter from Olympic City: Turin, Italy in 2006

Letter from Olympic City (Archive)

Workers rush to complete a new skating arena–one of six major sports facilities built in Turin for the 2006 winter Olympic Games. Photo: Jon R. Friedman

[We have reposted this article from the Winter 2006 issue]

IN OCTOBER, Turin looked like one immense construction site as it prepared to host February’s Olympic games. Scaffolding hid part of Piazza Castello, the city’s main square, which ordinarily presents an uninterrupted array of baroque palaces. In Piazza San Carlo, known as Turin’s “drawing room,” the seventeenth-century porticos surrounded not the bronze equestrian statue of Duke Emanuele Filiberto of Savoy (who made Turin his capital), but a deep pit that will be an underground parking lot. Elsewhere in the city, battalions of construction workers had torn up tracts of land for six new or completely remodeled stadiums, new or renovated housing for 12,600 journalists and athletes, a restructured railway system, the city’s first subway line—the list of projects goes on. I commented to a friend on the scale of the undertaking; she replied in her temperate Torinese style, “It’s a little excessive.”

Insanely excessive if you consider the human effort (work on Turin’s bid for the games began eight years ago) and the cost ($4.2 billion). Why do cities take this on? The visibility is usually ephemeral (what have you heard lately about Nagano?). They don’t make a profit on the games; they hope to break even. After winter games, local governments are stuck with outsized luge tracks, ski jumps, and multiple ice rinks costing hundreds of thousands of dollars annually to maintain. Yet cities around the world compete ferociously to host the games.
“The Olympics become an opportunity to seize for urban renewal,” said Alessandro Guala, professor of social sciences at the University of Torino. “Not just for building new sports facilities but for improving city services and launching or accelerating the work on major projects like a subway. It’s a moment when you can mobilize political forces and bureaucracies and get everyone to work together.”

Turin’s mythic subway typifies a project that’s mostly irrelevant to the games and yet made possible by them. I never expected to live to see this subway under construction. It’s been on the drawing board for decades. Then Turin’s Olympic organizing committee (TOROC) made it part of the overall plan. Construction on the subway and the Olympic venues began at the same time, but the subway won’t be finished for at least two years after the games. The subway has public financing, whereas the games rely on private funds, mostly from television rights and sponsors.

The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has a name for these urban renewal projects: the Olympic legacy. In recent years, the IOC has favored bids that provide for a tangible legacy. Successful urban renewal projects improve the image of the games by giving them some obvious social value.

“I’m sure that’s why London got the 2012 games instead of Paris,” said Valentino Castellani, president of TOROC. “Their bid included restoring a section of east London.”

According to Professor Guala, “Sydney used the 2000 summer Olympics as the occasion to upgrade the entire public transportation system.” His colleague Sergio Scamuzzi told me that “Vancouver is going to use the winter 2010 games as a chance to resolve the problem of homeless people downtown.”

Guala and Scamuzzi belong to OMERO, the Olympics and Mega-Events Research Observatory. Since 2002 this group of social scientists has done exhaustive polling on the Turin games. They’ve charted attitudes both in the city of Turin, where the ceremonies and events on ice take place, and in seven Alpine towns, where the events on snow take place.

Enthusiasm for hosting the Olympics started out unusually high (in Turin in 2002, 78 percent were very much in favor and 14 percent moderately in favor; the numbers were almost as high in the Alpine region). Since then support has grown (84 percent very much in favor in Turin in 2005 and 9 percent moderately in favor). But expectations for long-term job creation have fallen sharply, from 70 percent in 2002 to 48 percent in 2005. This reflects growing realism. In fact, the games produce short-term jobs, most of them in construction.

A quick look at the cast of thousands who’ve built the Olympic venues is a lesson in European labor demographics. Giorgio Rosental’s architectural firm collaborated in designing the Olympic village, which will house 2,600 athletes and staff. I asked Rosental how many Piemontesi (natives of the Piedmont region, which includes Turin) worked at his construction site.

“Not even one,” he replied. Then he sketched the national division of labor. “The Rumanians and Bulgarians build walls. The Chinese put in floors and staircases. Native Italians do the plumbing and wiring, but they’re from Bologna and the Veneto. That’s where the contractors that hire them are based.”

Almost no permanent job creation explains the pockets of negative opinion about the games among some Fiat workers and some of the unemployed. The city lived on its auto industry for almost one hundred years; that epoch has ended. “The unions are completely demoralized,” Scamuzzi said. “They want secure jobs. They can’t see beyond Fiat.”

TURIN NEEDS a postindustrial identity, which is why the city government decided to bid for the games. But all the money and effort will amount to naught unless Turin does effective “place marketing.” Place marketing means peddling a locale on the international market to attract everything from book fairs to furniture shows, from G-8 meetings to international podiatry conventions, from world cup hockey matches to U2 concerts. It’s an organized, cutthroat global business with its own professional cadre representing hundreds of cities—all of them hunting for postindustrial revenue. The more amenities you can offer—state-of-the-art venues, gourmet eating, old world charm, hot new clubs—the stronger your product.

Some sociologists see place marketing as a prime instance of “glocal”—an especially unlovely neologism that refers to the merged dynamics of localism and economic globalization. National economic systems fragment, localities recombine into new economic regions, and cities of the same nation compete on the international market. Each locale tries to enlarge its nonresident consumer base. Money for place marketing comes out of the local budget. Success depends on local public agencies’ and private commercial interests’ coordinating their strategies.

Have past Olympic hosts leveraged their fifteen days of fame into new feats of place marketing? In the cases of Los Angeles (1984), Calgary (1988), Lillehammer (1994), and Atlanta (1996), no. Everyone agrees that the success stories are Albertville (1992 winter games) and, even more so, Barcelona (1992 summer games).

Tourism in Barcelona actually tripled in the years after the Olympics. Barcelona aficionados agree that the city did a superb job of cleaning and restoring without undermining its urban individuality. But the city also conducted the most effective place marketing campaign seen so far. Two years before the games, a corporation to run all the new facilities was in place, and a sales force was traveling around the world to promote them. The sports venues were designed to have more than one use after the games. (This is also true of the Turin venues.)
“You need to have creativity and not be rigid about anything,” Josep Ejarque, former marketing director of the agency that promotes tourism in Barcelona and Catalonia, told La Stampa. “But you must do it now, immediately.”

In October, Turin’s government was still hassling with provincial and regional authorities over who would sit on the organizing committee. The city has only a few events lined up for 2007; in several months, it will be too late to book for 2008. According to one study, ninety-four major events will barely pay for maintaining the new hockey stadium. Turin desperately needs $60 million from Rome to start up a public-private agency, similar to Barcelona’s corporation, to manage all the facilities and shop them around. But there is a bizarre nonrelationship between the games and Italy’s center-right government.

Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi’s government seems almost unaware that an Italian city is hosting the Olympics. The three public television stations rarely mention the games. The three major private stations, owned by Berlusconi, generally ignore them, as do the major newspapers outside Turin. Only the local media have followed the story. Most people doubt this is a political conspiracy—the center-right national government trying to undermine the center-left governments in Turin, the province, and Piedmont. It looks more like incompetence and preoccupation with national-level political maneuvering. In any case, Turin will probably have to find the $60 million elsewhere; in early November, Berlusconi’s government slashed the money already promised to the city by $36 million.

OF COURSE, no city can live on furniture fairs alone. According to Scamuzzi, “In the future, Fiat will have a modest but solid presence in Turin. We have to add high-tech industries, wireless, more film production, and tourism. But to do this, a city needs a committed, cohesive elite.”

Turin’s elite includes prominent intellectuals usually associated with the universities, local political leaders, and influential business people. To get a sense of the upper echelons of the business world, I spoke to Alberto Tazzetti, president of the organization that represents them, the Industrial Union of Turin. When I asked, “What is the Industrial Union’s relationship to the games and the post-Olympics project,” he answered, “There is no relationship. That has nothing to do with us.” So much for commitment and cohesion within the elite. According to Guala, the Industrial Union pushed hard for the Atlanta model of a privatized Olympics. When the organization realized that Turin wouldn’t privatize the games, it lost interest.

Tazzetti sees the Industrial Union’s current role in terms of the organization’s original purpose. “It was born as a counterweight to the labor unions, to look after the interests of business owners, to lobby government. This country had the largest Communist Party in Europe, and the unions followed the Communists. The tensions were high for many years.” And now that the labor unions no longer pose a problem for Turin’s industrialists? “We have other interests—globalization,” Tazzetti said. “The Italian government has been slow in working with industry to create openings abroad. In other countries, when the prime minister travels, representatives of business go along. Only recently did [Italy’s President] Ciampi invite business leaders on a trip to India.”

I asked Tazzetti how Turin’s citizens benefit when a business invests abroad, for example, in China. “The company is stronger,” he said. “The choice is between going to China or dying. But the ‘intelligent parts’ of production, such as research and development, stay in Turin.”

Expanding research and development always figures in the post-Fiat project of the other two segments of Turin’s elite—intellectuals and political leaders, many of them on the left. Whereas Tazzetti proposes foreign-investment trickle down, the others have thrown themselves into a proactive strategy for making Turin attractive to new kinds of economic activity, including high-tech industry.

Some business leaders, to be sure, helped launch this strategy and are active practitioners. In 1997 they founded ITP (Invest in Turin and Piedmont), a private-public venture to attract businesses from outside the region. Its modest but ongoing successes include Motorola’s European research center, which employs about six hundred engineers, and the Italian research and development center for China’s Jianghuai Automobile Company. JAC has hired only ten designers but is breaking new ground for China by setting up this overseas studio. Meanwhile, three Piedmont clothing companies have shifted production to China; as expected, they’ve kept only design and marketing in the region.

“It will take a generation for Turin to make this transition, but the city has a great capacity for innovation,” Valentino Castellani, president of Turin’s Olympic committee, said. Castellani told me the same thing in 1996 when he was serving his first term as mayor. During his second term, he shepherded the Olympic bid from conception to success. His optimism about the city never flags. “At the turn of the last century, Turin hosted two international expositions—one for automobiles and one for the liberty style [Italy’s art nouveau]. They marked the transition out of a long decline and into a new age. The city can do it again.”

The 2006 winter Olympics are this century’s international show. I’ll watch them on television, worrying the whole time. Is the ice-making equipment working properly? Does Piazza San Carlo look as beautiful as before? Most important, is the press coverage positive enough to boost Turin’s post-Fiat image? This city that I’ve loved for twenty-five years will be under the international spotlight for the first time. I hope it shines.

Joanne Barkan writes frequently for Dissent about Italian politics. She is the author of Visions of Emancipation: The Italian Workers’ Movement Since 1945.