The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in east London has a fantastic opportunity to lead the way in sustainable living for its neighbours across London and beyond. However, sustainability in the Park goes beyond the environment. It is also a story of social equality and employment, and of economic growth and prosperity.

For the 2012 Olympics, London was announced to us in images and words which combined sophisticated rhetoric and crude simplification. Two related promises emerged from the compact between design and politics: to replace a fragmented, neglected and polluted area with a smooth, harmonious new city district; and to bequeath an enduring foundation, a ‘legacy’, to the future. The references to ecology and inequality can be identified with their early twenty-first century moment, but the spatial strategy of a city in a park was something of a throwback to the twentieth and nineteenth centuries: a techno-pastoral in which nature redeems the city from its fallen state. In short: a vision of the future inherited from the past.

The Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park (QEOP) opened to the public in 2013/2014. In the preceding ten years the future of this 250-hectare site in east London was subjected to intense debate, planning and envisioning. This paper analyses the evolving vision for the Park during this period. The analysis contributes to the literature on this significant case, but it also helps us to appreciate the challenges associated with event-led urban projects and the design and management of public parks in the twenty-first century. The paper is based on the author's attendance at over thirty seminars, conferences and public events 2004–2014 at which officials and relevant professionals presented their work and ideas about the Park. These presentations were analysed alongside the enormous number of policies, plans and strategies (and accompanying media coverage) published to reveal the sort of place that was envisioned by the professionals hired to shape it.

In the literature that has dealt to date with architecture and urban design related to London's 2012 Olympics and their urban legacy, emphasis has been placed on questions of where and what has been built or envisioned, and on how this can be viewed as reflective of broader political agendas, economic contexts and accompanying issues. In this, there has been relatively little emphasis on design processes and ideas, and particularly on questions of how these are oriented toward and help construct urban legacy as a future – as a matter of how and when. An urban legacy design process was established in 2008 to facilitate the transition of the Olympic Park to a set of new neighbourhoods by 2031 and, through it, to help fulfil a promise of long-term sustainable regeneration for east London. The twenty-three year timeframe and its intended outcome raise questions concerning the urban and architectural imagination of distant futures as of the possible processes of their realisation. Indeed, the ability to design for legacy depends on ways of anticipating the social, political and economic realities that will shape development in east London in the future and of using these to both chart and represent possible paths and conceptual approaches to desired outcomes.

‘Where the pastoral meets the post-industrial’. London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC) Chief of Design, Kathryn Firth's words to describe the area that the Corporation inherited as part of its remit following the Summer Olympic Games in 2012. Seeming to exemplify this, the former industrial warehouses of Hackney Wick, such as the Counter Café [2], allow shrubbery growth and sprawling ivy; their brick exerior walls emblazoned with art work reminiscent of William Morris. What we have here is recognition of the area's pre-industrial, industrial and post-industrial episodes; a narrative that serves to provide some temporal coherence to what is a complex and fragmented landscape.

The design of an urban area chosen to host a mega-event such as the Summer Olympics begs fundamental questions of scale, process and context. Not least since this is an international event whose physical impact is highly localised, where the tension between ‘permanent’ architecture, landscape and the temporal is being played out over an extended period of time. This paper covers the period from 2003 when the UK bid for the 2012 Games, followed by its award in 2005, from when the construction, compulsory land purchase and clean-up exercise began in earnest. Writing in the initial post-event legacy stage of this major placemaking project means that assessing any notions of sustainability and regeneration – and the role of design therein – is necessarliy provisional. Current visions and plans produced by the agencies responsible for transforming this event site into an established community project forward until 2030 so, in regeneration terms, a twenty-five year process is under way.

As soon as the bid to host the 2012 Olympics was won by London in 2005, and the plans to build the Olympic site in the Lower Lea Valley were announced, an inconspicuous yet steady stream of artistic projects started to interrogate the impact that the transformation of the area would have on its inhabitants, landscape and social life. This undercurrent of criticality, largely invisible to the mainstream, offered an alternative to the official account of the process – one that spoke of displacement, surveillance and the effacement of local history. Through a myriad of art works, images, events and discussions, an important space of dissent was produced in the lead up to the Games. The relational, collective and public dimension of these artistic practices is explored in the first part of this article, via an analysis of Jim Woodall's Olympic State project in Hackney Wick.

This article considers the legacies of place revealed by critical walking journeys through the city and the potential for transforming their interpretation through the distribution of new forms of map. As Francesco Careri implies in Walkscapes: Walking as an Aesthetic Practice, walking pre-dates the city and nomadism is the original condition of civilised living. Put simply, settlement is the process of civilisation becoming static.

Holly Hendry is a sculptor based in London. Graduating from the Slade School of Art, University College London in 2013, Hendry was the inaugural Woon Fellow at Northumbria University, a significant prize for young and emerging artists. Hendry held a twelve-month residency at Baltic 39 in Newcastleupon-Tyne, culminating in her first solo-show at Gallery North, Hollow Bodies. Her work is concerned with the spatial, material and structural qualities of architecture and how space is experienced in historical and contemporary contexts. Currently in the first year of a two-year sculpture MA programme at the Royal College of Art, London, Hendry sat down with reviews and insight editor Ed Wainwright to discuss the intersections of art and architecture, the architecture of hollowness and the cut, and how her sculpture interrogates architecture for its silent symbolism.