The (Spoiled?) Legacy of Lisbon 2023 World Youth Day: Unraveling the Influence of Media and Public Opinion on Opportune Urban Planning

Abstract

World Youth Day (WYD) is a relatively recent and understudied mega-event, gathering the Pope with worldwide young Catholics, bishops, and priests for a week of religious and cultural activities. Compared to other major events, it usually resorts to minimal human resources and requires reduced public investments. Yet, it involves mass concentrations in time and space of thousands to millions of people—crowds that are extremely rare in Europe.

Lisbon, hosting WYD in 2023, departed from traditional approaches and, rather than using existing/temporary facilities, took the opportunity to redevelop a waterfront site and use it as the event’s main venue. Originally a landfill, the site had been earmarked for transformation since 1999, as part of the uncompleted Expo’98 plan. WYD thus appeared as a great opportunity to finalize the plan and turn the landfill into one of the city's largest urban parks.

However, public uproar ensued when the event's budget, particularly the cost of a colossal stage, was disclosed, sparking intense public debates, scrutiny and widespread media attention—especially due to comparisons with the cost of the event’s previous editions. In response, a consulting team of specialists and academics was tasked with estimating the event’s economic return to clarify the reasonableness of the investment. Conclusions showed returns much higher than investments, but the media deliberately decided not to disclose them. As a result, the pressuring public opinion seeking justifications for the stage’s investment ended up influencing the future of the site, inducing the political decision to continue utilizing it for events rather than progressing with the park's development—even though the stage was removed. Currently, the park remains undeveloped, with most of the area closed to the public, awaiting a large biannual music festival that was relocated from its usual venue.

As part of the consulting team, the author of this paper contributed by analyzing the coherence of the urban interventions with the prevailing national to local spatial planning instruments with effect over the designated area, also highlighting the intervention’s main urban impacts and legacies and emphasizing the event's catalyst role. Findings indicated a high level of alignment between interventions and existing plans, with works focusing on site preparation for the park’s post-event development—namely soil decontamination, urban space liberation and provision of basic infrastructure. Furthermore, they showed how the interventions contributed for the environmental restoration of the Tagus waterfront, paving the way for the future establishment of green spaces and public facilities, seamlessly integrated into the urban landscape and existing mobility systems. Collectively, these interventions significantly contributed to brake physical barriers in between urban settlements and the waterfront, thus enhancing community access to the riverbank. The construction of the stage, however, was not completely coherent with spatial plans. While its cultural and leisure functions align with strategic goals and the proposed land uses, its magnitude greatly exceeds the scale of the planned facilities, meant to be of a more local and municipal scope. This might explain why dismantling the stage after the event was always an intention.

Despite being evident that the overall intervention brings positive environmental and social impacts, to use the site for future large events will probably compromise the development of the park, as these are two incompatible functions due to the different urban designs needed for logistical and security reasons. With that in mind, this paper shows how a long well-planned urban intervention morphed into a kind of free-wheeling and directionless project due to the influence of uninformed and overstated public opinion, fueled by sensationalist media coverage—which can reasonably share blames if the park's future development and its enjoyment by the population is adversely impacted.