Planning and Reconversion of Olympic Heritages: The Montreal Olympic Stadium

Abstract

For hosting cities, the summer Olympic Games (OG) has become an extremely expensive and complex urban project, partly used for urban regeneration. We can also observe that the Olympic stadium's problematic of reconversion is recurring as this infrastructure, the most significant of the Olympic park, needs colossal financing for its construction and its management. However, despite a few planning measures, we notice that after the OG a considerably low percentage of these stadiums are actually utilized. Through an in-depth study and historiography of the planning and reconversion phases of the 1976 Montreal Olympics' heritage, this article aims to demonstrate how such a facility, central to the hosting of the OG, has become a model of post-Olympic failure. Within a few years, although it was initially planned in a modest way and as a means to regenerate the entire neighbourhood, this facility had become a ‘white elephant’, costing triple what was originally planned, while we still wonder to this day what we should or could do with this mega-infrastructure.