Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
ing over $ 300 million is a heritage of sporting venues that can be used by locals
and sports teams as well as attracting many subsequent international events. The
events also fostered a spirit of co-operation through the thousands of volunteers
who gave up their free time to help organize and provide guides and information
services throughout the games. Most of the expenses were paid for by television and
company sponsorship. Similar results have occurred in other winter cities that have
hosted the Olympic Games, but now the events are becoming far bigger and far
more costly. For example, the province of British Columbia spent almost a c$ 1 bil-
lion on the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver and vicinity, three quarters on new
and upgraded venues and transportation. In addition C$ 2.1 billion was needed for
three major transport upgrades, such as the Vancouver airport-downtown rapid tran-
sit, improvements in the sea-to-highway road route to the ski resort of Whistler and
a new Convention Centre. Another billion dollars was probably spent on security
by various levels of governments. Yet a figure of around C$ 4 billion in costs for the
2010 Winter Olympics pales beside the estimated dollar equivalent of $ 51 billion
spent on the Sochi Olympics in south eastern Russia in 2014 (Lally
2013
). Much
of this was spent on new and major transport routes, resorts and housing, as well as
new sports facilities, a figure that surpasses the $ 43 billion that Beijing was esti-
mated to have spent on the 2008 Summer Olympics. It is clear that the hosting the
Winter Games is no longer a minor venture associated with some small alpine town
to highlight a series of winter sports. Hosting the Olympics has become a vehicle
for transforming the city is which it is held, using television income, sponsorship
from major companies as well as significant, even massive government investment
to finance the event which has also become a matter of national pride and prestige
(Hiller
2012
). Yet the costs and disruptions are becoming too much for some cen-
tres, as the citizens of Denver in the 1990s and Krakow in 2014 showed by their
rejection of the opportunity to bid for the games, a trend that is likely to increase.
Despite the success of all these examples it must be admitted that winter cities
still face often challenging climates while they are more expensive to live in, given
the economic costs that were discussed earlier. Governments around the world have
recognized this fact by creating northern allowances for people who live in their
climates, usually by reducing income taxes. However this policy is also designed
to help keep an economically active population in the north for regional equity
and territorial possession reasons. Companies also pay higher wages to workers
to compensate for the harsher conditions and often operate fly in-fly out camps to
house workers in these remote northern locations who often work 12 h days for two
or three weeks and fly back home in the week off. So these settlements are full of
temporary transient workers, rather than being the remote fully-fledged towns cre-
ated in the past.
The Winter City movement's focus on this one season should not lead us to for-
get that there are some physical benefits for winter settlements in northern areas.
One comes from the
long daylight hours in summer
- brief though the summer may
be—which leads to the rapid growth of many vegetables. Also the profusion of
wild berries in summer, responding to the long summer days, also provides an ad-
ditional unique resource in these areas that Scandinavian countries are well known
