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Relational Comparisons: The Assembling of Cleveland's Waterfront Plan

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Urban Geography
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This study uses the ongoing attempts to redevelop Cleveland's waterfront to reveal the relational comparative geographies that are present in a number of contemporary urban revalorization strategies. It draws on archival documents, semi-structured interviews, and the local gray literature to make three contributions to the existing urban-global studies literature. First, the article argues that many contemporary waterfront and other similar redevelopment schemes are inherently comparative, with a significant proportion of seemingly territorial politics and urban policy-making characterized by actors' engagements with places elsewhere. Second, it shows that the framing of urban policy through relational comparisons is an established practice in many cities, and that current redevelopment plans should be understood as informed by previous rounds of relational and territorial policy-making. And third, it points to the importance of consultants in the current era—as examples of actors of transference—in shaping not only redevelopment plans but also the framing of the city in relation to other cities.
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Relational comparisons: The assembling of Cleveland’s
waterfront plan
Published in 2012 in Urban Geography 33 (6), pp. 774-795
Ian R. Cook a and Kevin Ward b
a Department of Social Sciences, Northumbria University
ian.cook@northumbria.ac.uk
b Geography, School of Environment and Development, University of Manchester
kevin.ward@manchester.ac.uk
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Abstract: This paper uses the ongoing attempts to redevelop the Cleveland waterfront to
reveal the relational comparative geographies that are present in a number of
contemporary urban revalorization strategies. It draws on archival papers, semi-
structured interviews, and the local grey literature to make three contributions to the
existing urban-global studies literature. First, the paper argues that many contemporary
waterfront and other similar redevelopment schemes are inherently comparative, with a
significant amount of seemingly territorial politics and urban policy making characterized
by actors’ engagements with places elsewhere. Second, it shows that the framing of
urban policy through relational comparisons is an established practice in many cities and
that current redevelopment plans should be understood as informed by previous rounds
of relational and territorial policy making. Third, it points to the importance of
consultants in the current era – as examples of actors of transference – in shaping not
only redevelopment plans but also the framing of the city in relation to other cities.
- - -
No one public improvement is more important to the City of Cleveland than the
development of her lake front in accordance with the best possible plan
(Hopkins, 1927, p. 21)
What we do with our great assets … will reshape Cleveland for decades to come
(Jackson, 2010, quoted in Breckenridge, 2010, n.p.)
The regeneration of urban waterfronts is one of the key urban design and
planning stories of the late twentieth century (Dovey, 2005, p. 9)
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INTRODUCTION
Dan Moulthrop hosts the Cleveland Ideas show on WCPN, Cleveland’s largest public radio
station. In July 2009 he chaired an on-air roundtable discussion on the subject of the
city’s redevelopment of the waterfront. Four guests – Jill Akins (Van Auken Akins
architects), Eric Johnson (Port of Cleveland), Bob Brown (City of Cleveland) and
Christopher Diehl (Kent State University) – discussed Cleveland’s past, present and
future relationship with its port and waterfront. Much of the discussion was positive,
and much of it was territorial. Issues such as the role of different city and regional
stakeholders, the costing of the different aspects of the strategy, the role of public and
green space in the proposals, and connectivity between the downtown and the waterfront
were discussed, both by panelists and by those who phoned into the show. This was to
be expected. However, much of the discussion was also about other cities and other
waterfronts, some not too far geographically from Cleveland, others considerably further
away. A range of examples were invoked by the panelists. Cleveland was compared with
other cities, favorably at times, unfavorably more often than not. Reference was made to
learning from the successes and failures of other cities. All kinds of experiences,
expertise and knowledge were marshaled to reinforce, justify and substantiate the
particular envisioning process indulged in by those leading the Cleveland waterfront
strategy. There was talk of various technologies of comparison, such as city audits,
league tables, and key performance indicators as comparison and learning became
intertwined in a discussion over the future of Cleveland and its waterfront.
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Of course, the territorial component to ‘urban’ politics and policy has been the
intellectual cornerstone of work in the social sciences over the last thirty years (Harvey,
1985, 1989; Logan and Molotch, 1987; Cox and Mair, 1988). Accounts have tended to
focus on the territorial nature of politics and on issues such as consumption,
development, infrastructure, investment, marketing, and production. This work has
been hugely insightful and influential, and quite rightly so, producing a long lineage of
important works. While at times there has been some acknowledgement of the
problematic and temporarily ‘fixed’ nature of the ‘urban’ (Harvey, 1982; Cox, 2001),
nevertheless, by and large this work has emphasized the territorial nature of ‘urban’
politics and policy. More recently a series of alternative contributions have sought
theoretically, methodologically and empirically to extend this earlier work through
considering the relational geographies that often underpin territorial political expressions
(K. Ward, 2006, 2007; Cook, 2008; Cook and Ward 2011, 2012; McCann, 2008, 2011;
McCann and K. Ward, 2010; 2011; Peck 2011; Peck and Theodore, 2010a, 2010b;
Robinson, 2011). One way this has been done is through attending to the ‘interlocal
policy networks, facilitated by a sprawling complex of conferences, websites, consultants
and advocates, policy intermediaries and centers of technocratic translation, the
combined function of which is to establish new venues and lubricate new channels for
rapid [urban] ‘policy learning’’ (Peck, 2005, p. 767-768).
Taking its lead from this recent set of intellectual endeavors, the focus in this
paper is on Cleveland’s waterfront development and the way other cities were drawn
upon comparatively and relationally in the designing and the legitimizing of the 2009
plan. The city of Cleveland exemplifies the challenges faced by many former industrial
cities. How to respond to changing economic circumstances? How to make best use of
its port and its waterfront? We don’t argue that Cleveland is either unique or exemplary.
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Rather, we present an approach to studying this city that points to how other cities might
usefully be studied in the future. Of course, there is already quite a bit known about
Cleveland qua Cleveland (Krumholz, 1982; Keating, 1996; Warf and Holly, 1997;
Chakalis et al., 2002; Wilson and Wouters, 2003; Hirt, 2005; Keating et al., 2005; Lowe,
2008). We draw upon this illuminating and important work. This paper does though
take a different approach; it is less concerned with either the specifics of the plans or the
territorial politics around them, both of which are, of course, not unimportant. Rather,
the paper is particularly interested in the reference points and comparisons embodied in
recent plans to redevelop Cleveland’s waterfront. It considers the different ways in
which the redevelopment of the waterfront makes reference to places elsewhere. Of
course, there are a number of histories of trans-urban exchange and learning, particularly
around the notion of ‘best practice’ (see, for instance, S. Ward, 2008). The paper argues
that the current era differs from its predecessors not only in terms of the range and type
of actors involved in ‘moving’ and ‘fixing’ policies, but also in terms of the nature of the
relationships between cities and the context in which they operate.
As this paper will explain, this learning – ‘that is the acquisition of knowledge
which is then tested, converted and used to make change, and stored for future use’
(Campbell, 2008, n.p.) – has occurred in two ways. First, incoming members of the
‘global policy consultocracy’, to use the words of McCann (2011, p. 114), have been
involved in the production, dissemination and legitimization of the waterfront plans.
Some have written supporting documents; other have simply turned up and presented
their ‘truths’. They have worked alongside ‘local’ policy actors to shape the city’s
redevelopment trajectory. Second, various ‘local’ and ‘extra-local’ urban actors –
consultants, planners, politicians, and practitioners – have used comparison as a strategy
to underscore the importance to Cleveland of redeveloping the waterfront in a particular
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way. The city has been positioned, across space – against other cities – and across time –
against what other cities have already achieved (Nijman, 2007).
To address these issues, the paper draws on semi-structured interviews with a
range of stakeholders in the public and private sectors in and beyond the city of
Cleveland. These interviews explored territorial issues of consultation, governance, and
ownership, but also asked interviewees about comparisons, policy models, reference
points and study tours. These were supplemented by the use of extensive archives from
local libraries and secondary grey materials such as city plans, consultancy presentations,
and city newspaper articles. The paper is organized into three sections. First, the paper
provides a necessarily brief overview of the literatures on comparative urban studies, on
the one hand, and on policy transfer, on the other. It argues that many contemporary
waterfront and other similar redevelopment schemes are inherently comparative, with a
significant amount of urban politics and urban policy-making characterized by actors’
engagements with places elsewhere. Second, the paper analyses past attempts to
redevelop Cleveland’s waterfront as a means of setting the context for the production
and circulation of the 2009 plan. In the third section the paper turns to the assembling
of this document and the various ‘local’ and ‘extra-local’ actors whose movements in and
out of the city were important in shaping the debates and discussions. In the conclusion
the paper argues for a careful tracing of the pathways taken by mutating ‘models’, the
circuits, networks and webs in and through which the ‘models’ travel and of the actors
involved in both their mobilization and territorialization.
WATERFRONT REDEVELOPMENT AND RELATIONAL COMPARISONS:
MOBILE POLICIES, MOBILE PEOPLE
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Since the late 1970s a large and intellectually diverse body of work has been produced on
the changing political economies of North American and Western European cities.
Specific attention has been focused on the ways in which capital and the state have
worked together in different types of institutional arrangements to oversee a
transformation in the ways in which cities are governed (Cox and Mair, 1988; Jessop et
al., 1999; Valler and Wood, 2004). Writing over two decades ago, Harvey (1989, p. 4)
stated that we had witnessed the emergence of ‘a general consensus… throughout the
advanced capitalist world that positive benefits are to be had by cities taking an
entrepreneurial stance to economic development’. For Brenner and Theodore (2002, p.
368) this consensus constituted the urbanization of neo-liberalism, as urban space was
mobilized ‘both for market-oriented economic growth and for elite consumption
practices’.
Within this wider field there is a voluminous literature on waterfront
redevelopment (Breen and Rigby, 1994; Malone, 1996; Marshall, 2001; Dovey, 2005;
Wakefield, 2007). On the one hand, such developments are presented as yet more high-
profile attempts to kick start urban economies through the reclaiming and repackaging of
‘dead’ zones (Doron, 2000) and ‘left over spaces in the city’ (Marshall, 2001). They are
one of a suite of strategies, often partnership-based, aiming to revalorize areas of urban
space through residential and consumption-led redevelopment, hopefully integrating the
city ‘into … international property and financial market[s] and/or global socio-cultural
networks’ (Lehrer and Laidley 2009, p. 798). On the other hand, studies have shown that
contemporary waterfront and port development is wrapped up in a number of distinctive
cultural, ecological, economic, political and social processes. These processes that have
not only altered the post-war workings of commercial and naval ports but have ‘opened
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up’ redundant port spaces, as well as undermining the traditional employment and
economic opportunities that ports seemed to offer to their surrounding city-regions.
Major changes have included: the standardization of ‘roll on, roll off’ containerization
and the increasing size of shipping vessels, the switching of capital to commercial ports
downstream, the contraction of port employment, and the influence of national military
strategies and cut-backs on naval port cities (Baird, 1996; Smith and Pinder, 1997).
Dovey (2005), meanwhile, points to the socially constructed iconography of water and
the post-industrial waterfront, which is shaped in part by the city marketing campaigns
that stress the aesthetic and physiological qualities of living, playing and working ‘by the
sea’. This socio-cultural aspect is particularly important as cities seek to capitalize on the
symbolic value of the waterfront.
Although it has its intellectual home in planning, this waterfront literature
increasingly transcends disciplinary boundaries and has interrogated a wide range of
issues bound up in the redevelopment of ‘disused industrial land related to former port
uses’ (Dovey, 2005, p. 9). These issues range from planning procedures (Dovey 2005;
Cowan and Bunce, 2006) to sustainable design and political-ecological consequences
(Bunce and Desfor, 2007; Laidley 2007; Bunce, 2009), from land reclamation (Norcliffe et
al., 1996) to governance and management (Bassett et al., 2002; Desfor and Jørgenson,
2004), from leisure and gentrified residential developments (Wakefield, 2007) to struggles
and resistance over future development (Lehrer and Laidley 2009; Scharenberg and
Bader, 2009). A rich range of empirical cases from Barcelona to Toronto, Shanghai to
Baltimore have shown quite how widespread urban waterfront redevelopment has
become.
This work is clearly not without its insights. Nevertheless, a number of
important theoretical questions are raised by the pursuing of waterfront redevelopment
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strategies in so many different localities around the world over the last thirty-five years or
so. These are questions about relations beyond cities, ‘on the ‘external’ linkages among
cities – nationally, regionally, and globally – and between urban policy actors and global
circuits of policy knowledge’ (McCann and K. Ward, 2011, p. xix). These include: how is
it that so many geographically discrete cities have ‘chosen’ to redevelop their waterfront,
often along remarkably similar lines? In what ways do cities with waterfronts learn from
each other? Who is involved in the transference and reproduction of waterfront
redevelopment from one city to another?
It is our contention that these questions can begin to be addressed through
working through two discrete but overlapping set of literatures that both in their own
ways seek to grapple with how best to conceive of cities and the relationships between
them. The first is on comparative urban studies. This has a long lineage in the social
sciences (K. Ward, 2008, 2010; McFarlane, 2010; Robinson, 2011). Comparing one city
with another, looking both for similarities and/or differences, this literature has sought
to balance specific individual details with general, system-wide tendencies. While this
work has generated a series of insights, more recently it has been subject to a series of
critiques by human geographers, most noticeably around the way in which it conceives of
cities as closed, bounded entities (Robinson, 2006, 2011; Nijman, 2007; M. Smith, 2009;
K. Ward, 2008, 2010; McFarlane, 2010). The second literature is that on the making
mobile of policies. This political science dominated literature has sought to reveal how
policies are transferred from one country to another. Using notions of ‘diffusion’,
‘dissemination’ and ‘learning’ this work has generated a series of insights into how crime,
economic development, education, environmental, housing and welfare policies are
moved from one country to another and with what consequences (Dolowitz and Marsh
2000; Evans 2004; Stone 2004; Jones and Newburn, 2007). As McCann and K. Ward
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(2010, p. 177) note, it ‘focuses on modeling how transfer works, creating typologies of
‘transfer agents’… and identifying conditions under which transfer leads to successful or
unsuccessful policy outcomes in the new location’. However, this literature also suffers
from a number of limits. Two are particularly important in the context of this paper:
first, this work tends to over-emphasize the centrality of the national scale, and, second,
it often fails to consider the sheer multitude of actors involved in what Peck and
Theodore (2001, p. 449) call the ‘complex, selective and multilateral’ process of ‘transfer’
(McCann, 2011).
Fig 1. Cities in a relational comparative context
Figure 1 represents the dominant ways in which cities have been compared with
each other on the one hand (city A and city B) and national policy transferred on the
other (national policy A to national policy B). This paper takes these as its points of
departure but proposes a relational comparative framework, as depicted in the third
example. It rests on five principles. First, it draws on and extends Nijman’s (2007, p. 93)
11
‘multiple individualizing comparisons’. The primary focus is on one city in this paper –
Cleveland (City A in the third section of Figure 1) – but with comparisons to a number
of other cities, not one. Second, the selection of these cities is about mapping existing
inter-connections and networks, about following policy and practice and seeing where
they lead. This distinguishes it from the sort of comparative framework that tends to
characterize much of the existing literature. Third, the notion of ‘policy transfer’ is much
broader than how the term is used in the political science literature. In this it can be
quite ‘literal’ (McCann, 2011). Rather, here ‘policy’ is understood in a broader sense, as
sets or bundles of expertise, learning and knowledge codified in one way or another into
policy form, while ‘transfer’ is not a one off, disembodied movement from one country
to another but rather includes all aspects of the making mobile of the ‘policy’.
Analytically this begins to open up the ‘blackbox’ of how policy is constituted. Fourth,
cities are understood as open and internally differentiated, temporarily assembled and
given coherence but constituted in and through circuits, networks and webs of varying
geographical reach. Fifth, cities are still understood territorially, anchored and embedded
in various spatial contexts that both empower and constrain them. Taken together we
believe this constitutes a refined approach to conceiving of the ways in which cities are
compared and relate to one another, and one that allows us to study the city of
Cleveland’s recent waterfront redevelopment strategy, to which this paper now turns.
CLEVELAND AND ITS WATERFRONT: RELATIONAL AND
TERRITORIAL GEOGRAPHIES
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Like other rust-belt powerhouses of old, Cleveland neglected its lakefront and
river banks for generations, viewing them as grimy tools for industrialists or
playthings for the wealthy – and very little else (Litt, 2001, np)
OVERVIEW
The last four decades have been hard on the city of Cleveland. As Warf and Holly (1997,
p. 209) note, ‘Cleveland in the 1970s and 1980s embodied the worse aspects of the
Rustbelt: deindustrialization, population loss, rising poverty, ugly landscapes and a
notoriously poor reputation’. The numbers are quite staggering. Between 1950 and 1990
the city’s population almost halved, falling from 914,808 to 506,616 (Lowe, 2008). It
currently has a population of just under 440,000 (Cleveland City Planning Commission,
2008). Rundown neighborhoods, boarded up houses, and poorly maintained public
spaces remain visible signs of the how the city continues to suffer, despite attempts to
reclaim this land as part of a re-imagining of the city (Cleveland City Planning
Commission, 2008). Those in employment fell by a third between 1979 and 1993, and
the figures today remain below national averages (Warf and Holly, 1997). By the mid
1990s almost thirty percent of those living in the city of Cleveland lived below the official
poverty line (Glickman et al., 1996). Over the same four decades the racial profile of
Cleveland was transformed, as the ‘black’ population rose from 16% to 44% of the City’s
total. As Krumholz (1982, p. 164) put it, ‘the poor were more often than not black, the
black were more often than not poor.’
While the city might have gone from being known as the ‘mistake on the lake’ in
the 1970s to the ‘comeback city’ in some people’s eyes during the mid 1990s, this
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discursive transformation did not reflect changes in the real economy. Despite the
protestations of the city’s growth coalition – involving elected officials, senior figures in
the local media, the Greater Cleveland Partnership (civic and business leaders), and
others – and its attempts to re-make and re-brand the city’s image (Wilson and Wouters
2003), many of these features of the 1970s economic and social landscape remain largely
unchanged. Thus so do the challenges facing the variety of public and public-private
agencies overseeing the city’s future development, and in particular, how to manage ‘the
use of Cleveland, Ohio’s, fourteen mile lakefront on Lake Erie’ (Keating et al., 2005, p.
129). It is to this that the paper now turns.
REDEVELOPING THE CLEVELAND WATERFRONT: THE EARLY
YEARS
After more than a century of plans and debates, Cleveland has yet to develop an
accepted balance between public uses and private development. Until this
occurs, the lakefront remains a place where priorities are unclear and frustration
abounds among all of the concerned interest groups (Keating et al., 2005, p. 152).
As a port city, the relationship between the waterfront and the rest of Cleveland has
always been an important one. It once marketed itself as one of the ‘great seaports of the
world’, comparing itself with others such as Hong Kong, Liverpool and Rotterdam,
Cleveland was nevertheless a different sort of port to those it compared itself with (see
Figure 2). The bulk of its tonnage has always been domestic as opposed to international,
and most of its business has been handling inbound rather than outbound steel and
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heavy machinery (Ehle, 1996). Currently consisting of eight international cargo docks on
110 acres of land alongside Lake Erie, according to latest data the Port Authority handles
12.5 million tons of cargo per annum, 95 percent of which is ‘dry bulk’ (grain, limestone
etc.) as opposed to ‘break bulk’ (packaged materials) (www.portofCleveland.com). A
number of initiatives have sought to increase trade through the port over the years, and
to use it as a catalyst for economic growth in the city – from the setting up of a Port
Authority in 1968 to the establishment of Foreign Trade Zones in 1978 (Ehle, 1996).
While various reports have pointed to the multi-million pound trade and investment that
the port facilitates in the surrounding areas (Blossom, 1977), the evidence is that the port
and the wider economies of which it is part seem to be diminishing in importance locally,
raising questions over how to develop other economic activities in the city.
Under these economic conditions a local consensus of sorts emerged in the
1980s that the port would have to be augmented by new service-based industries.
Furthermore, as George Voinovich, the City Mayor between 1980 and 1989, argued, and
unlike his predecessor Dennis Kucinich who famously opposed the creep of neo-
liberalization (Krumholz, 1982), the city needed to develop a new entrepreneurial
mentality:
The emergence of a global economy has done injury to many urban areas located
in what can be referred to an as economic fault line that stretches from Gary,
Indiana to the Ruhr Valley… In the midst of all… that we’re facing, cities are
forced to become more self-reliant, more innovative, and more entrepreneurial
(George Voinovich, Cleveland Mayor, 1980, quoted in Wilson and Wouters,
2003: 129)
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Fig 2. Great seaports of the world: A promotional advertisement for the Port of
Cleveland, 1970
Source: Port of Cleveland Information Inc. (1970, p. 47)
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For Voinovich and his successors, Michael White, Jane Campbell and Frank Jackson,
pump-priming the downtown and waterfront became a political priority, in the hope that
it would bring people and investment (back) to the city. The 1984 City Vision 2000 Plan
was honed and refined in the form of the 1988 Cleveland Civic Vision Downtown Plan.
Leaving aside the specifics, emerging out of these was a clear emphasis on the promotion
of ‘large-scale retail, office and hotel development, entertainment and sports attractions
to attract tourists, and the physical modernization of the central business district’
(Keating, 1996, p. 192).
In assembling these plans the experiences of a number of other cities were
referenced. At the time Baltimore was the model for waterfront redevelopment
(Millspaugh, 2003). It was a city with a waterfront and a port that was being talked and
written about as having been successful. This ‘model’ consisted of a mix of leisure,
residential and retail developments on the Inner Harbor, including its much vaunted
festival marketplace. ‘[A]ided by the active promotional efforts of those who were
central to the Baltimore experience’ (S. Ward, 2006, p. 272), it became the model to
which other US (and elsewhere in the world) waterfront cities aspired, and to which they
compared their own experiences. The message for local governments and port
authorities elsewhere would be to work in partnership with the private sector, to facilitate
and help finance post-industrial private development on the waterfront. Its message was
unashamedly neoliberal, and it could be argued that if the Baltimore model had not
existed it would probably have been necessary to invent it, or more accurately to find
another place that embodied these same values (Hoyle, 2000; S. Ward, 2008).
Cleveland was but one of a huge number of cities whose officials visited
Baltimore’s Inner Harbor to observe what was going on and who hosted visiting
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architects, developers and planners involved in the redevelopment of Baltimore’s Inner
Harbor (S. Ward, 2006, 2008). The substance of these various comings and goings was
to hear about and to see what had been achieved in Baltimore. Visitors from Cleveland
saw the model, quite literally in terms of the architectural projections and the realized
revalorized built environment. They met with those who had been involved in the
design and the delivery and sought to interpret and make sense of them in the context of
the various issues facing the Cleveland port and waterfront. These exchanges led to the
development of the North Harbor Coast on Cleveland’s downtown waterfront during
the late 1980s to mid-1990s, a development that had more than a passing resemblance to
Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, unsurprisingly:
[T]he initial plan was just to create a destination on the downtown waterfront.
That was creation of the physical North Coast Harbor. There was dredging there
and creating a harbor. And it was very much based, without apologies, on
Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, I mean that was the model that was used… It was
pretty much a direct steal (interview, City planner, Cleveland, October 2009)
The redevelopment of Cleveland’s North Coast Harbor in the 1990s, much like
Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, focused on lakefront tourist attractions – noticeably the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame, the Great Lakes Science Center and the redeveloped Cleveland
Browns football stadium (see Figure 3). Echoing the rhetoric surrounding the Baltimore
‘model’ it was argued that these attractions would help foster a tourist industry that never
previously existed (outside of the Cleveland Brown’s home games) and give residents and
18
visitors something to go to the downtown waterfront for outside of their working duties
(S. Ward, 2006).
Fig 3. The Port and downtown Cleveland on Lake Erie.
Nevertheless, these attractions soon came to be seen as enclosed islands of day-time
vibrancy in a sea of rarely-used and fragmented outdoor spaces – something, as
Cleveland’s local politicians and policy makers would commonly stress, that Baltimore’s
Inner Harbor and other places successfully avoided:
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We’ll have events there, you know where thousands of people will come down to
the lakefront. But on typical day someone is going to the Rock Hall or they are
going to the Science Center or they are going to a Browns game or they are not
there at all. They are certainly not out there strolling and in Baltimore, Chicago,
San Francisco and Boston, people go down to the waterfront just because it is a
cool place to be. And they walk around, maybe they have a meal, and they don’t
do that in downtown Cleveland because we are not quite there yet in terms of
filling that space with the kind of small scale attractions that make it the kind of
place you want to be instead of a building you want to go inside of. We [need
to]… mak[e] it a real full-fledged place (interview, City planner, Cleveland,
October 2009)
In 1996 the then Mayor, Michael White, formed a task force to re-visit and
update the City Vision 2000 Plan. This Civic Vision group, led by Joseph T. Gorman, a
member of Cleveland Tomorrow, a group of fifty seven CEOs of the wider region’s major
firms (which would subsequently become part of the Greater Cleveland Partnership), met a
number of times over the next two years. Much to the angst of many local activists and
commentators, however, these meetings occurred in a ‘shroud of secrecy’ (Chakalis et al.,
2002, p. 91). Only late in the day, in early 1998, were a couple of ‘public’ meetings held.
And then, in May 1998, the Civic Vision 2000 and Beyond was launched by the Mayor. It
contained few surprises. The plan was a local variation on the standard model that
continues to dominate downtown and waterfront developments (Marshall, 2001). The
city had learnt from what had worked in Baltimore, but its reference points were now
more varied. So, not surprisingly, its most high-profile proposals were a new convention
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center and hotel, an aquarium, a relocated Crawford Museum of Transportation, a transit
center, the redevelopment of the Euclid Avenue corridor and the building of almost ten
thousand residential units.
Within Cleveland opposition was fierce. Its opponents argued that very few
people had been consulted in the drawing up of the plan. It was undemocratic. Other,
alternative plans were subsequently launched, the most high profile of which was that
unveiled by the county commissioners. In the most part ignoring the expressions of
concern and disquiet, in July 2000 the Mayor re-launched his earlier plan:
White’s plan, rolled out at a press conference in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame,
evoked visions of countless families enjoying themselves on a full 85 acres
surrounding the North Coast Harbor. Families riding a Ferris wheel. Families
strolling along a public promenade. Families taking charter boat tours.
Cleveland families. Tourist families. All manner of families seemed ready to
jump – picnic baskets in hand – right out of the architectural renderings and into
the realm of possibility (Marino, 2000, n.p.)
Images of Chicago and, in particular, Navy Pier, adorned the press conference
and littered the accompanying development proposal (VOA, 1999). It was no surprise to
hear that Mayor White was being aided by the Chicago architects VOA whose portfolio
included the co-designing of the redeveloped Navy Pier. For White, Navy Pier, like
Baltimore’s Inner Harbor earlier, showed that city waterfronts could be more-than-
industrial, family-friendly playgrounds (J.M. Smith, 2005). They could be ‘fun’ (S. Ward,
2006). Built on an underutilized pier which had had a variety of transient uses since its
21
construction in 1916, from Navy training base to university campus, Navy Pier was re-
opened in the mid-1990s. Perhaps most eye-catching to White was that Navy Pier, like
Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, attracted millions of visitors each year – 9.1 million people
visited Navy Pier in 2000 (J. M. Smith, 2005). For White this ‘carnivalesque’
redevelopment would ‘take the [Cleveland] Great Lakes Expedition of the 1930s to a
new level’ (City of Cleveland, 2001, p. 1). As part of the process of comparison a
number of senior staff from the Mayor’s office, together with senior officials from the
Port Authority went on a study tour to Navy Pier in the summer of 1999 (Marino, 2000).
City and county stakeholders were further animated by this latest plan. The choice of
Chicago and its newly redeveloped Navy Pier also drew on the most common lay
comparison made in the city. As two local officials explained, to reference and to
compare Cleveland to Chicago was to reinforce a popularly held view in the city:
Cleveland often looks towards Chicago because it is Midwestern, it is on a lake.
It is just bigger. In part because of its size it has been more successful… we look
to Chicago for the use of the lakefront (interview, City planner, Cleveland,
October 2009)
Particularly Chicago because when [Cleveland] people go there they are like ‘this
is Cleveland on steroids you know’ (interview, Cleveland Waterfront Coalition
member, November 2009)
Despite the attempts by the White administration and VOA to place a lay
comparison at the centre of the strategy, the Chicago referents – most noticeably the
22
planned centre-piece Ferris Wheel – were too crudely ‘transplanted’ for some. On top of
this, political infighting at City Hall over who should oversee the planning process led to
a political impasse (interview, ex-City planner, Cleveland, September 2009).
In this territorial context it is perhaps not surprising that it was only with a
change of Mayor that things began to move on the redevelopment of the waterfront.
Mayor Jane Campbell’s Connecting Cleveland: The Lakefront Plan was launched and consulted
on in 2002 and 2003. This was an altogether different kind of document. Public
consultation was centre stage, and there were four rounds of meetings. Cleveland
Lakefront Partners was formed – an alliance of the City of Cleveland, Cleveland Neighborhood
Development Corporation, Cleveland Tomorrow and the Greater Cleveland Growth Association. This
organization worked with the Port Authority to produce the document. Over a hundred
meetings took place, attracting over 5,000 people, leading to what was claimed to be ‘a
community consensus for the future of Cleveland’s lakefront’ (City of Cleveland, 2002, p.
1).
The final Lakefront Plan was adopted in December 2004, and was known locally
as The Waterfront District Plan. It spoke of bringing people to the lakefront, creating a
walkable and cyclable lakefront, joining up a fragmented and often fenced off lakefront,
re-connecting the waterfront to the city, and, perhaps most revealingly, ‘capitaliz[ing] on
its special public assets’ (City of Cleveland, 2006, n.p.). It was not confined to the North
Coast Harbor site but would be city-wide, incorporating eight miles of Cleveland’s
waterfront. The port still had a place in the plan but it was to be complimented by
integrated green spaces and new residential and commercial development. While its
assembling had been more inclusive, involving a number of members of the public, in
reality it did not constitute a significant departure from its many predecessors. Mayor
Campbell’s loss to Frank Jackson in the mayoral election in 2005, together with the
23
various disagreements amongst the different territorial stakeholders in the city and
region, meant that the plan stalled for a few years. However, it did set the parameters for
the 2009 plan, to which this paper now turns.
CLEVELAND’S WATERFRONT: ASSEMBLING THE 2009 PLAN
Following the change of mayor, the Port Authority took the lead in keeping discussion
going about the future redevelopment of the waterfront. It appointed Adam Wasserman,
fresh from his redevelopment experience in Hull, England, to lead the redevelopment as
its new President and CEO. It hired the global consultants URS at a cost of $1.3 million
to study the sites for a possible port relocation (URS, 2008). This compared eight
possible relocation sites. It came to the same conclusion as The Waterfront District Plan.
The port should be relocated to East 55th street (just north east of Burke Lakefront
Airport). This recommendation was approved by the Cleveland City Planning
Commission in early 2008. Concurrently the Port Authority also commissioned Martin
and Associates to assess the future of container shipping on the Great Lakes more
widely. They had done something similar for Pittsburgh earlier in the decade.
Together these two reports and the references they made to elsewhere gave extra
local impetus to producing a new plan for the Cleveland waterfront and port. They
witnessed the beginning of a new development phase, with even great emphasis given to
bringing together actors of different geographical reach into dialogue over its future.
Community consultation and the local public and private sectors alone were understood
not to possess the know-how to deliver a redeveloped waterfront. As a result, a number
of actors situated elsewhere were brought to Cleveland in this period. Three groups
predominated. First were the architects at Ehrenkrantz Eckstut & Kuhn (EE&K) who
24
won the tender to ‘masterplan’ the lakefront site. According to the Port Authority (2009,
p. 1), EE&K were chosen by a committee comprised of public and private actors
because they ‘best matched the project’s vision for a mixed-use pedestrian friendly space
that maximizes Lake Erie’s recreational amenities’. EE&K, as nationally-recognized
architects based elsewhere and having been involved in the redevelopments of Battery
Park City in New York and the Inner East Harbor in Baltimore, were seen to bring
experience and knowledge, or what Söderström (2006, p. 555) terms ‘cultural and artistic
surplus value’. The company’s reputation, based largely on an expanding portfolio, was
also seen as a guarantee (of sorts) to potential investors who would be told of EE&K’s
successes elsewhere (if they were not already aware). Second were a group of
international consulting firms, PA Consulting, Rebel Group and Kahr Real Estate, which
were commissioned by the Port Authority to write Cleveland Waterfront Market: Demand and
Development Options which sought to ‘show what is possible in Cleveland, and provide
practical lessons of how this can be achieved’ (PA Consulting et al., 2009, p. 4). Again, it
was their reputations derived from work elsewhere that secured them a role in shaping
the Cleveland development process. Third were a group of three high-profile actors who
were keynote speakers at a prominent forum at the Cleveland’s Maxine Goodman Levin
College of Urban Affairs entitled Transforming Cleveland by building a worldclass waterfront.
This was hosted by the City, the Port Authority, the Cleveland Foundation, the Urban
Land Institute and the Downtown Cleveland Alliance. The speakers were Tom Murphy
(former Mayor of Pittsburgh), Juan Alayo (Director of Development Planning in Bilbao)
and David Taylor (UK based redevelopment consultant) who each spoke about their
‘hands-on’ experience of redeveloping waterfronts. This event constituted the kind of
‘micro space’ (Larner and Le Heron, 2002) that other studies have shown to be
25
important in the making mobile of certain ‘models’ (McCann, 2011, McCann and K.
Ward, 2010, Cook and Ward, 2012).
While the insights and expertise from afar were certainly celebrated, there was a
need and a desire to bring these extra-local actors into a dialogue with those with
localized knowledge and power. EE&K, for instance, teamed up with Cleveland-based
architects Van Auken Akins, Columbus-based architects Moody Nolan, as well as a
number of other consultants to develop the 2009 Masterplan. It was not only about
responding to the implicit requirements of the City and Port Authority to have local
minority-run (gender or ethnicity) architects; it was also about gaining local knowledge
and legitimacy:
[C]oming from out of town, they don’t know anything about the city. They don’t
know anything about the history of the city, the politics of the city, you know, all
the people that have been involved in all of the planning. So I think it is really
helpful for them for [someone] to say, ‘today we are just going to meet with so-
and-so, tomorrow we have a board meeting with this guy’… Giving them the
background, it is all about Cleveland. They did Battery Park, they did Baltimore.
They don’t want it to be about any other waterfront but Cleveland, so they need
someone from Cleveland showing them [around] (interview, architect #1,
Cleveland, October 2009)
Conversation, exchanges, and dialogue between between EE&K, PA Consulting
and the local architects, public bodies and a narrower range of public and private
stakeholders was a continuing feature during the course of 2009. Telephone calls and
emails flowed in and out of Cleveland, while meetings and conferences provided
26
opportunities for stakeholders to meet face-to-face. Amid this trans-local dialogue, the
Final Masterplan was finalized in September 2009 (Figure 4). At its centre was the
planned creation of a 200 acre port, relocated from the site adjacent to the Cleveland
Brown’s stadium down to East 55th street (just north east of Burke Lakefront Airport, see
Figure 3). The plan ‘envision[ed] an urban village along the waterfront’ (Cleveland-
Cuyahoga County Port Authority et al., 2009, p. 5). Focusing on the downtown
waterfront, it prescribed a network of new mixed-used buildings and streets, ‘pedestrian
oriented but auto convenient to and from all points on the site’ (ibid., p. 3). It was to be
punctured by a series of green ‘pockets’ and squares with an extended promenade along
Lake Eerie. For Stanton Eckstut, a principal architect at EE&K, the emphasis was on
creating ‘iconic experiences, not iconic buildings’ (quoted in Litt, 2009, n.p.).
Fig 4. The proposed downtown waterfront in the 2009 Masterplan
As part of the various activities involved in the assembling of the 2009 Plan,
relational comparisons with cities elsewhere were frequently drawn upon in a number of
ways we discuss here. The first was in the form of a temporal comparison (Nijman,
27
2007). Cleveland was situated as lagging behind other cities in terms of its economic and
social profile, its competitiveness, and, perhaps most importantly, its past history of
learning from other cities. This reinforced the more long-standing framing of the
Cleveland political economy. Decisions to create a Port Authority during the 1960s,
plans for a conference center in the 1980s, and the most current plans to create an
engaging, walkable waterfront, to name but a few, have all been couched in claims –
inside and outside of the city – that Cleveland was being left behind; it was failing to
learn from other North American cities who had faced similar challenges:
We are so far behind now that a port authority is the only way to get ahead…
The city just hasn’t shown the imagination required (Steamship agent, quoted in
Blossom and Shelton, 1965, n.p.)
When compared with such places as Chicago, Toronto and Baltimore, with
inviting waterfronts increasingly at the heart of civic life, Cleveland falls short
(Litt, 2001, n.p.)
A second way in which relational comparisons were present in assembling the
2009 strategy was in and through the use of spatial reference points. Cleveland was
frequently represented as displaying the kinds of problems common in other North
American cities – often in terms of declining levels of port activity and city-wide
investment, redundant waterfront land, shrinking tax revenues, and ‘white flight’. In
addition, those cities that had (seemingly) successfully addressed their problems were
represented as being ones from which Cleveland could learn. New York’s Battery Park
City and Baltimore’s Inner Harbor (once again) became the dominant points of
28
reference, not simply because they were deemed to be successful and appropriate
waterfront regeneration sites, but also because EE&K also helped masterplan these sites.
It was claimed that the aim was to learn from these examples not simply copy from
them, as Stanton Eckstut noted in a presentation at the Maxine Goodman Levin College
of Urban Affairs forum:
We do rely on precedents, meaning we are not coming in to think about
reinventing the wheel. There is much to learn certainly from Cleveland as Mayor
Murphy has pointed out, but also from other places in the world. We would not
ever be copying them, we are not ever going to duplicate, but we can certainly
learn and interpret.
As well as using qualitative narratives of success, failure, transferability and opportunity,
quantitative measures were frequently drawn upon. This is perhaps most evident in
Cleveland Waterfront Market: Demand and Development Options (PA Consulting et al., 2009). In
great detail it explored ten examples of waterfront redevelopment elsewhere from which
Cleveland should learn and against which their plans should be compared. Echoing and
expanding upon existing reference points in Cleveland, these were Hafen City
(Hamburg), Kop van Zuid (Rotterdam), Abandoibarra (Bilbao), Euralille (Lille), Harbor
East (Baltimore), South Street Seaport (New York City), Bellingham (Washington State),
Millennium Park (Chicago), Three Rivers Park (Pittsburgh) and the singular Global South
case study, Victoria and Alfred Waterfront (Cape Town). While space means we are
unable to go into the specifics of each comparison, in general terms as well as drawing
upon qualitative ‘tales of transformation’ via short descriptions of successful schemes,
quantitative data – notably property values over time, costs, project durations,
29
development sizes, unit numbers, and land use percentages – dominated the report. This
was used to compare the different examples with that of Cleveland. Together these data
were used to support the report’s main recommendation that, like many of these case
studies, the ‘Port should develop a human-scale, vibrant, mixed-use waterfront
neighborhood that brings downtown Cleveland to the water’s edge, while also bringing
water users to the city through water-based activities’ (ibid., p. 4).
CONCLUSION
I mean I am… quite sensitive… because New York is deemed as a very different
kind of place that the rest of the country and it is really different… You have to
be careful… you have to be sensitive… You have to be careful not to say ‘you
have to be like Battery Park City’ because that is not the point of our
comparisons (interview, architect #2, Cleveland, December 2009)
This paper ends by making five points. The first point is that over successive
decades the Cleveland public have seen waterfront plans come and go. They were not
alone. Many other North American and Western European ports have attempted to
revalorize their waterfronts in an effort to kick-start faltering economies (Malone, 1996;
Marshall, 2001). The difference was that some US some cities (i.e. Baltimore, Boston,
Chicago and New York) were understood by some to have been ‘successful’, in terms of
creating a waterfront spectacle that could seemingly attract new post-industrial
investment to the area. Cleveland’s waterfront was not attracting such capital, being one
of a number of cities worldwide that has struggled to turn around their economies.
30
While the history of waterfront redevelopment in Cleveland is sprinkled with
minor successes – such as the establishment of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and a
number of other prestige consumption-based facilities – its waterfront, for the local elites
(and the public), remains disconnected, grimy, broken up and a place people would
rather avoid. Successive mayors have been unable to deliver on plan after plan after plan.
The end of 2009 saw further frustrations and barriers. Adam Wasserman resigned by
‘mutual consent’ as President and CEO from the Port Authority. Following this, it was
announced in the summer of 2010 that the Port Authority was no longer seeking to
relocate the port to East 55th Street (just north east of Burke Lakefront Airport)
(Cleveland Cuyahoga County Port Authority 2010), and instead was commissioning
further consultancy reports to initiate a ‘comprehensive review of its business’ (ibid., p.
1). Somewhat symbolically the Port Authority’s yourfutureport.com website was shut
down soon afterwards. After the various plans, the influx of consultants, the numerous
relational comparisons elsewhere, and the public funding that accompanied this, a clear
future for the waterfront remains elusive.
Second, the redevelopment of Cleveland’s waterfront should also be understood
with reference to those officials based elsewhere tasked with envisioning and delivering a
renaissance on the waterfront. Different sorts of consultants – architects, economists,
engineers and planners – have been involved. In some cases these actors have visited
the city, flying in and giving seminar or talks, tailoring their place-specific narratives to
the (perceived) needs of the ‘local’ audience. In other examples they have been more
centrally involved in fine-tuning the redevelopment plans, as architects or real estate
developers. Working alongside local actors with political clout and local ‘expertise’, the
consultants were understood to have accrued reputational capital through redeveloping
waterfronts and downtowns elsewhere. While this is not without historical precedence,
31
the current neo-liberal urban condition is one in which a set of consultative industries
have grown dealing in the trans-urban movement of models and policies. This sets it
apart from the past (Peck and Theodore, 2010b).
Third, the case of Cleveland reaffirms that ‘‘local’ policy development now
occurs in a self-consciously comparative… context’ (Peck 2003, p. 229). Comparisons to
other cities have been embedded within the longer history of planning Cleveland’s
waterfront. Cleveland has been positioned as lagging behind other cities as a means of
legitimizing a particular future development trajectory: a form of temporal comparison.
It has been situated as a city facing issues similar to those faced by the likes of Baltimore,
Boston, Chicago and New York: a form of spatial comparison. These sorts of
comparison and the technologies that make them possible (and probable) have been
important in the case of Cleveland, and other studies suggest this is illustrative of a more
general trend (McCann and K. Ward 2010, Robinson 2011). So, while the 2009
Masterplan claimed that it will bring people ‘back to the downtown – by offering them
something that does not exist anywhere else’ (Cleveland-Cuyahoga County Port
Authority et al., 2009, p. 3), this paper has argued that its assembling has by no means
been exclusive to Cleveland and has involved drawing upon and referencing all sorts of
bits of elsewhere.
Fourth, the reports produced in the last few years as part of the redevelopment
process exemplify how in many ways in recent years ‘the global has become more
knowable by placing the experiences and performances of [other cities] into
quantitatively and qualitatively encoded proximity’ (Larner and Le Heron, 2002, p. 417).
In and through the process of translation, cities appear to have been shepherded into
line, the unknown rendered both knowable and comparable. Urban complexity has been
reduced to a series of numbers, stories, tables and images, bringing into comparative co-
32
existence territories from around the world. As with the other relational comparisons
drawn upon, they opened up a range of possibilities for the future of Cleveland, as well
as closing down some others.
Fifth and finally, the case of Cleveland and its material and discursive
connections and comparisons with places elsewhere show that urban studies needs to
take seriously the ways in which blueprints, expertise, ideas and knowledge, not to
mention, finalized ‘models’ are mobilized through trans-local circuits, networks and
webs. This is as much about friction, fixity, and mutation in motion as it is about a
smooth and frictionless surface over which ‘models’ are moved. This is no intellectual
argument for a frictionless world! So, it is important to pinpoint the actors involved, the
multiple discursive frameworks through which cities are compared to other cities, the
disputes and struggles involved, and the very real territorial implications of these mobile
policies. This should not simply be limited to studies of waterfront development –
important as they are – but to a whole variety of urban policy domains from crime to
transportation, health to economic development. For if we are to continue to study the
territorial politics of the city it is important we reflect on what (and where) goes into the
making up of the ‘urban’ in urban politics.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The Leverhulme Trust, in the form of a 2005 Philip Leverhulme Prize, financed the
researching and writing of this paper. We owe a debt of thanks to all of those who we
spoke to, or interviewed, during this project, which is part of a wider program of research
(http://research.northumbria.ac.uk/urbanfutures/). We acknowledge the supportive
33
comments of the editor of Urban Geography, Elvin Wylie, that of the editors of this
special edition, Colin McFarlane and Jennifer Robinson, and those of the two reviewers.
The project is an equal, two-way collaborative effort and all papers are authored
alphabetically. Responsibility for the arguments here are ours.
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... Such a global-relational conceptualisation of space and place resonates with existing literature on globally circulating policies, which has drawn scholarly attention to the role of banal practices, expertise, and representations, through which policy knowledge is transferred from place to place (McCann, 2011;McCann and Ward, 2011;Baker et al., 2016;Crivello, 2015;Levenda, 2019). Focus has been on the policy transfer roles played by different actors, such as consultants (Rapoport, 2015;Cook and Ward, 2012), calculative techniques (Prince, 2010;Levenda, 2019;Cook and Ward, 2012), and non-elites (Baker et al., 2020). However, this body of work has focused on what has happened at present and rarely engaged with what has not or may never occur: the future. ...
... Such a global-relational conceptualisation of space and place resonates with existing literature on globally circulating policies, which has drawn scholarly attention to the role of banal practices, expertise, and representations, through which policy knowledge is transferred from place to place (McCann, 2011;McCann and Ward, 2011;Baker et al., 2016;Crivello, 2015;Levenda, 2019). Focus has been on the policy transfer roles played by different actors, such as consultants (Rapoport, 2015;Cook and Ward, 2012), calculative techniques (Prince, 2010;Levenda, 2019;Cook and Ward, 2012), and non-elites (Baker et al., 2020). However, this body of work has focused on what has happened at present and rarely engaged with what has not or may never occur: the future. ...
... Furthermore, policy mobility literature has revealed that policies that are "imported" from other places require justification and legitimation (Temenos and McCann, 2012;Cook and Ward, 2012). Attention has been paid to how statements, discourse, and technologies are used to justify and facilitate smooth policy transfer to other contexts (Temenos and McCann, 2012;Prince, 2014). ...
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The urban waterfront is widely regarded as a frontier of contemporary urban development, attracting both investment and publicity. City, Capital and Water provides a detailed account of the redevelopment of urban waterfronts in nine cities around the world: London, Tokyo, Kobe, Osaka, Hong Kong, Sydney, Toronto, Dublin and Amsterdam. The case studies cover different frameworks for development in terms of the role of planning, approaches to financing, partnership agreements, state sponsorship and development profits. The analysis also demonstrates the effects of economic globalization, deregulation, the marginalization of planning and the manipulation of development processes by property and political interests.
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For more than 50 years Toronto, Ontario, Canada has sought to host the Olympic Games. This article argues that Toronto's quest to win the right to host does not emerge from a love of sport, but rather stems from the city's inability to define the meaning and purpose of its water-front. Through merging the symbolic power of sport with the spatial significance of Toronto's waterfront land, various interest groups have used bids for the Olympic Games as an occasion to redefine the vision for the city's waterfront. Toronto's bids for the Olympics have never been successful, but this paper argues that there is much to be gained from investigating a city that has failed to win the right to host the Olympics Games. The bidding process remains crucial to the course of urban redevelopment even in the event of a failed bid.