The authentic city: uses of industrial heritage in large-scale regeneration projects, a comparative analysis

The Beijing 2022 Winter Olympic Games reimagined a fragment of the city's industrial heritage, showcasing it as a stage and a landscape for one of the most mediatised mega-events worldwide. Despite the contentious reactions to the use of the Shougang former steel factory as a hosting site for winter sports, this choice reveals the potential for adaptive reuse practices within contemporary urban development. In an era where regeneration strategies aim to reshape cities spatial organisation to improve the quality of life, the revalorisation of industrial heritage has acquired new strategic significance at the global level. Therefore, the thesis introduces the concept of the authentic city as a planning paradigm that uses the urban heritage as a tool to enhance the residential and presential economy. Far from being limited to questions of heritage management, local stakeholders use authenticity as a key tool for city branding to navigate the heightened inter-urban competitiveness. This research seeks to uncover the extent to which urban policies mobilised and instrumentalised this industrial past, using authenticity as a cultural narrative, and a mechanism for generating value in large-scale urban regeneration projects. Through a comparative analysis of two Olympic-driven regeneration projects, London 2012 Summer Games and Beijing 2022 Winter Games, this study examines the role of industrial sites in the urban logic of mega-events in two emblematic cities. The global trend of industrial heritage regeneration reflects a convergence of international policies for heritage interpretation, with very local adaptations according to the specific needs and planning strategies of each city. Using qualitative methods such as site observations, interviews and the analysis of planning documents analysis, I explored the urban redevelopment of two key sites: London's Lower Lea Valley and Beijin's Shougang steel factory. This research first examines the growing alignment between strategies for regenerating industrial sites and Olympic legacy planning, as a phenomenon that positions these sites as integral to urban agendas rather than peripheral to them. Once symbols of past productivity, industrial sites are now reconfigured within the framework of legacy planning, embedding them with narratives of economic growth and urban transformation. In this respect, we interrogate the role given to industrial heritage in each of our case studies, revealing two very different relationship London and Beijing have with their industrial past. The heritage recognition and interpretation processes unveil the dominant discourses in each regeneration projects, building a normative interpretation of the authentic city, to promote an attractive urban environment for people to live and consume there. The thesis finally details the mechanisms put in place to implement this authenticity narrative onsite according to each specific local context.