New York and Paris, more traditional rivals, should never be under-estimated.Building the right infrastructure is stage one Doing a good Games is stage two But we should be able to do both those, surely. Using the event to make London more secure in its world position - and hence increase still further its contribution to the UK economy - is the greatest opportunity and the toughest challenge of all.Award for 'Independent' writerThe Independent's Hamish McRae has been awarded one of the most prestigious prizes in journalism.McRae, Associate Editor of The Independent and the paper's chief economics commentator, won the David Watt Prize for his "outstanding contribution to the clarification of national, international and global political issues and the promotion of their greater understanding". London is, and will remain, a high-cost producer of the goods and services it makes. You can waste a lot of money putting in the wrong infrastructure - but worse, you can waste a lot of potentially useful land.
Money can be repaid; the land can be blighted for a generation.That leads to the third matter, the intangibles. London is already, on many measures, the most international place on earth This is not just a matter of people flying in It is people living here and what they create. The largest non-national professional community in the world lives within or close to the M25 Foreigners visit Paris but live in London. So, London has no great need to "put itself on the map" in the way that Sydney and Barcelona very successfully did It's already there. Indeed that's probably why it got the job: it offers the vibrancy and diversity that chimes in with the Olympic ideal.The Olympic Games are the world's biggest media even.
The question is whether we can use this event to position London so that it can bolt down this position of global leadership more securely. More people fly though London's airports than any other city. You can gauge the overall acceptability of the infrastructure by the flow of international businesses that choose to locate in London, despite the pressure. But there are serious gaps, particularly when it comes to rail and road infrastructure.Managed wisely, the transport links and new housing are just what the capital needs. It has to grow and growing eastwards is the only place where there is spare land close to the centre. It will slightly help rebalance the city towards the east, reinforcing the trend towards it becoming a three-centre agglomeration (West End, City and Canary Wharf plus docklands) instead of a two-and-a-half-centre one.If, on the other hand, the stuff is built without thought for after the Games, then it will be the Dome times ten. The sports facilities are less important than the transport and the accommodation.