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Centennial Olympic Park: A Multidimensional Space

2022; University of North Carolina Press; Volume: 62; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sgo.2022.0031

1549-6929

Eric Spears, Jordan P. Brasher,

Sport and Mega-Event Impacts

Centennial Olympic Park: A Multidimensional Space Eric Spears (bio) and Jordan Brasher (bio) Centennial Olympic Park (also known as Centennial Park) in downtown Atlanta is considered by many to be the city’s premier public space. The home of the 1996 summer Olympics, present-day Centennial Park is framed by tourist attractions, telecommunications giants like CNN, and international corporate office towers. There is also an iconic Southern landmark facing the park: the Waffle House. In 2016, Centennial Olympic Park received Atlanta’s Downtown Economic Impact Award for attracting more than $2.4 billion in investment since opening in 1996 (Layman 2016). The park’s landscape is a reflection of contemporary capitalism: CNN transmits news 24/7 from different geographic scales throughout the world while below people enjoy the park’s tourist attractions, including the Georgia Aquarium (the world’s fourth largest), the World of Coca-Cola, and the College Football Hall of Fame. Centennial Park also sheds light on social injustice through its National Center for Civil and Human Rights and the memorial to those who died during the 1996 bombing at the summer games. The park itself has been the site of social struggle, as most recently demonstrated by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in 2020. The park is also located near the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park, an important site of southern and US cultural memory and commemoration of the Civil Rights Movement. Centennial Park is also indicative of Atlanta’s wider processes of spatial inequality, including gentrification and displacement. The 1996 Olympic Games, along with its temporary infrastructure and the enduring geographic legacy of the park, have been part of larger public-private partnerships and processes of capital accumulation and dispossession with detrimental and devastating effects on the city’s poorest residents (Rutheiser 1997). The park’s history begins in a 35.6-hectare (88-acre) plot of land that was composed of abandoned industrial buildings and empty lots on the edge of downtown Atlanta. Once known as the “city too busy to hate,” one study found Atlanta to be the second-most segregated city in the United States (Silver 2015), making Atlanta a unique laboratory for urban geographers studying and challenging racial and social inequality. [End Page 171] The cover photograph of Centennial Park, which was taken in early March 2022, demonstrates the spatial complexities of downtown Atlanta. At the surface, one can analyze the layers of spatial relations found in this photograph. Is Centennial Park a space of leisure? If so, for whom? Is it a space of commerce? Is it a space of social struggle? Geography offers a critical lens for investigating Centennial Park’s past, present, and future. Like any urban space, Centennial Park is a result of the production of space (Lefebvre 1991) and can be explained through a set of spatial practices rooted in social struggle (Harvey 1989). It is impossible to designate Centennial Park as a static space because doing so denies its multidimensional geographic qualities. While Lefebvre and Harvey’s theoretical insights seem dated, they nonetheless provide a powerful framework for understanding Atlanta’s social practice embedded in different power structures. First, Centennial Park is a space of experience (Harvey’s material spatial practice) that is embedded in the flows of money, goods, communications, and people (class, race, and identity, to name a few). Second, the park’s “appropriation and use of space” (Harvey 1989) is designated by its urban planning, the large museums and hotels that front it, and the corporate headquarters that anchor it and Atlanta to the global economy. Third, Harvey would argue that this use of urban space is also dominated and controlled by corporate interests and policing protests (Harvey 1989). Centennial Park is also a space of social dissent. The BLM protests of 2020 and the subsequent clash between the police and protestors at the CNN headquarters suggest Harvey has a valid argument. The BLM protests at the park and the doors of CNN also indicate Centennial Park is embedded in a set of scalar relations with regional, national, and global processes. The BLM movement is local, national, and global. The fact that the protests took place in front of the...