Barcelona showed that the Olympics can transform a city; every Summer Games since has underlined how difficult this trick is to pull off.

With the endless wrangling over the future of the Olympic Stadium - epitomised by this week's collapse of the original deal with West Ham football club - it is starting to look like London 2012 will be no exception.

We shouldn't be surprised.

"Doing a Barcelona" involves achieving a perfect balance between the stringent demands of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) - which has been spoilt for choice these past couple of decades when it comes to Host Cities - and the city's long-term needs.

In some ways, these tend to dovetail rather nicely.

Take transport, which ironically was the first big concern about a London Olympic bid.

The infrastructure required to bring thousands upon thousands of spectators with utmost efficiency to and from Olympic venues, with a high percentage of people looking to arrive and leave at around the same time, can hardly fail to make life easier long-term for a portion of the city's commuters.


The only exception to this rule of thumb would be if the main Olympic zones were on sites entirely divorced from the day-in-day-out life of the city.

Even if the Olympic related transport routes were not initially deemed optimal by city planners, there is a strong chance they would attract development, with the city, to an extent, reshaping itself to make best use of its new asset.

The Olympic Movement also brings to a Host City the perfect tool for blasting through the red tape and prevarication that often hold up urban developments for years on end: an immovable deadline.

So, whatever else happens, future Londoners will probably have cause to thank the Olympic Movement for improved public transport and for firing the starting-gun for redevelopment of what was, in the main, a fairly rundown area of back-street garages, scrap metal dealers and the like.

It is when it comes to determining what the development should consist of that any link between what the Olympic and Paralympic Movements think they need for a month-long global sporting spectacular and what the city requires to ameliorate the lives of its inhabitants over up to 50 years can be stretched to breaking-point.

Not on every detail, mark you; there is often enough common ground to make compromise possible.


Does East London need a new velodrome? Probably, as long as the British cycling boom doesn't puncture.

Does it need an Olympic-sized swim complex? Very much so - and while a building as swish as the Olympic Aquatics Centre was not strictly necessary, any Olympic park does require some sort of signature structure.

Does it need the sort of housing that an Olympic Village-style development can offer? Again, yes, although whether hefty price tags put Olympic Park accommodation beyond the reach of most local people remains to be seen.

Can it utilise an Olympic-sized media centre? Hmmm, one would hope so, but the jury is still out and one logical utiliser is on its way to Salford.

And the main stadium? That, as so often, is where the circle seems impossible to square.

In West European cities like London, football is the only sport likely to supply a viable week in, week out occupant of a stadium of anything like Olympic scale.


But football, in recent years, has become rich and spoilt.

Top clubs, by and large, want to play in stadiums designed for football, not multi-sports arenas.

And that means no athletics track.

If the commercial realities of life are now such that compromises over such an apparently trivial issue - trivial in the context of a stalled industrialised world economy and a Euro-zone crisis - are beyond the pale, then perhaps it is a mistake to try to use the Olympics primarily as an urban planning tool.

After all, though 21st century retail culture leaves me cold, I wouldn't mind betting that the Westfield Stratford City shopping centre ends up having a bigger influence on the future development of that part of London than any building erected specifically for the 2012 Games.

Perhaps "doing a Barcelona" is no longer possible.

David Owen worked for 20 years for the Financial Times in the United States, Canada, France and the UK. He ended his FT career as sports editor after the 2006 World Cup and is now freelancing, including covering the 2008 Beijing Olympics and 2010 World Cup. Owen's Twitter feed can be accessed here.