The Hiding Hand controversy as an analytical approach in the study of urban megaevents

Despite growing public opposition, megaevents such as the Summer Olympics continue to proliferate both in the Global North and South, thus reshaping the built environment of cities and the living conditions of their inhabitants. This paper presents a novel analytical tool that expands the perspectives from which to explore urban megaevents. Building on the controversy among megaproject scholars around Albert Hirschman's Hiding Hand principle, we study the diverse roles that optimism can play in the justification, planning, implementation, and evaluation of megaevents. This approach has the potential to unveil key urban policy agendas underpinning the hosting of megaevents. It does so by focusing on two key aspects: first, the various types and degrees of power exercised by the involved stakeholders in their attempts to justify and support or oppose an event during the planning phase, and second, the coping mechanisms deployed by the promoters as they face unexpected constraints during the implementation phase. In doing so, the approach can help to develop more nuanced and context-specific criteria for evaluating the success of megaevents. We exemplify the approach by using the 1992 Barcelona Olympics as an illustrative case study.