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Wukesong used to be an old and non-descript neighborhood in Western Beijing until a new Olympic basketball stadium with a seating capacity of 18,000 spectators broke ground there in March 2005.

 

The community, which had not seen any major urban project for decades, has since undergone a major makeover. The Wukesong Indoor Stadium will become a center-piece of a sprawling culture and sports complex for cultural, sports, leisure and commercial activities after 2008.

 

The project is owned and managed by Beijing Wukesong Culture and Sports Center Co Ltd, which was the first proprietor to sign a contract with the Beijing Olympic Organizing Committee.

 

The most immediate benefit for the community residents may be that their properties are now much more valuable. Prices for new homes being built near the huge construction site have been going up since the Olympic project began. "Wukesong was not a very dynamic area in the past. We've been waiting 50 years for an exciting project like this," a local official admitted to the media.

 

The Wukesong venue is worth special mention here because it has been designed as part of an Olympic legacy to the Chinese capital as well as for 100 years of service as the largest leisure centre in Western Beijing. The venue also contributes to the metropolitan development and regeneration of the ancient city.

 

Another example of such sustained development is the National Indoor Stadium. One of the three main venues of the Beijing Olympic Games, it will have a more modest look when it is completed in 2007 than when originally planned, to achieve cost effectiveness.

 

Like Wukesong, the National Indoor Stadium is also to be run by a local proprietor after the Games and it has been intended to be self-financing from the very beginning. Under cost control, the new Olympic stadium will meet all required technical specifications to stage events such as gymnastics and handball. It will hold commercial activities after 2008 as a way to support itself.

 

The concept of sustainability is all the more important as Beijing has just announced a massive investment of an estimated 470 billion yuan (US$59.5 billion) in infrastructure on thousands of local projects that would go far beyond constructing or renovating new sporting facilities. According to the city's new master plan, projects to ease city traffic, improve energy and water supply and better the city environment will be completed before the Games. By 2008, Beijing will also have a hyper-modern international air service hub.

 

As the city uses the Olympics to introduce large-scale urban development, long-term economic and environmental impact will deserve closer scrutiny. It might be helpful to heed advice from some Nobel laureates during a forum in Beijing in 2005 that whether a host city turns a profit with the Games depends ultimately on how it makes use of its infrastructure and sports venues 10-20 years after the Games.

 

(China Daily October 13, 2006)