Suchergebnisse

Many cities have abandoned plans for hosting the Olympics due to crises of high costs, unnecessary infrastructures, and a range of socio-spatial exclusions. These problems stem from conflicts between the short-term needs of the event and the long-term needs of the city. In response, Olympic organizers launched a series of reforms to improve alignment between the Games and the host city. This paper examines these reforms, identifies urban development agendas in preparation for Paris 2024, and explores their implications on selected spaces of urban intervention within Paris. Thinking through rhizomatic philosophy, the paper advocates for a more nuanced approach to exploring the problems and potential of mega-event-led urban development. In so doing, the paper maps organizer and activist assemblages, and posits that efforts at reform are stymied by a too-narrow interpretation of who counts as a stakeholder. Subsequently, the spatial articulations of the mega-event risk perpetuating the exclusions that reform intended to resolve. Ensuring a wider representation of resident voices could help minimize the distance between word and deed in the latest rounds of Olympic reform.

Russia's accelerating authoritarian turn has not ignored the internet, and in recent years, the Russian state has clamped down on internet activities that diverge from the statist line, employing a variety of strategies to dominate online spaces. Nevertheless, oppositional voices flourish on the Russian internet, taking shape in independent blogs and videos. This paper explores three political bloggers through surveillant and resistance assemblages, making sense of this contestation through an interpretation of the Deleuzian virtual that underscores the emancipatory potential of online activities for producing more egalitarian configurations, but also taking stock of the ways that these technologies have increased domination. Encompassing the blurriness between digital and corporeal spaces, the paper contributes by revealing new geographies of contestation against state strategies to dominate the Russian internet. Overlapping with but not corresponding to Russian territorial boundaries, these dynamics highlight shifting spaces of power and resistance in the increasingly illiberal world.

This thesis uses the 2018 World Cup in Russia to engage with the processes of neoliberal restructuring and the conception of soft power. Based on a comparison of the host cities of Ekaterinburg and Volgograd, it unpacks the World Cup at multiple scales of analysis and offers a light and revisable framework for understanding mega-events. Grounded in primary qualitative and secondary documentary data, the thesis demonstrates multiple dimensions of Potemkinism in the articulation of this World Cup. Inspired by but moving beyond traditional post-colonial thought, it attempts to make good on the premise of theorizing from anywhere, making a case for the relatively invisible cities of the Global East in a landscape of urban theory dominated by the hegemonic North or the subaltern South. This ambition represents the overall frame for the thesis, while the work itself focuses more specifically on the planning and impacts of hosting the World Cup. This work is composed of two central thrusts. Within an understanding of mega-events as fundamentally urban events, the first thrust explores hosting as the vanguard of neoliberal restructuring, one of the traditional means of making sense of mega-events. In this view, bidding and hosting are seen as a strategy for inter-urban competition and a ploy to attract increased flows of tourists and capital. This is understood as one of the markers of a shift to a more entrepreneurial mode of urban governance and is part of wider global political economic restructuring that de-emphasizes the national in favor of regional or municipal scales. Using Neil Brenner's conceptualization of rescaled competition state regimes, this part of the thesis explores how rescaling worked on the ground in Russia and demonstrates that these processes of neoliberalization are not as easily understood as they might first appear. Instead, what is revealed in the articulation of the Russian World Cup is a seemingly paradoxical combination of national state-led projects to develop the peripheries in ...

Mega-events are global affairs with profound effects across a variety of scales, and are the focus of a large and growing body of academic inquiry. This special section in Sports in Society centers on the urban and economic impacts of mega-events on the societies that host them, offering an examination of individual cases and emerging patterns. The authors explore different dimensions of the recent mega-event expe- rience from around the world, proposing novel ways of theorizing these outsized expressions of transnational sport, politics, commerce, and culture. Combined, these contributions unpack how socio-economic and cultural contexts shape the organization of events and impact hosts in variegated and contingent ways in the Global North, South, and East. This introduction offers a brief overview of the landscape of the existing research before summarizing each contribution and placing them in context within the broader literature. All told, the articles in this special section explore how the Olympics, the FIFA Men's World Cup and the Commonwealth Games deploy different mechanisms to transform urban space, and offer innovative means of understanding what mega- events can do to the people and places that host them.