In preparation for my talk at this year’s American Association of Geographers annual conference I’ve been thinking about Sochi several years after the Olympics. I think it’s worth taking a look at the city after the circus has left town, when the international spotlight has largely moved on to other events and other places.

Sochi 2014 was never just about the sport. Beyond the aspirations to reframe public perceptions of Russia inside and outside the nation, there was a clear attempt to use the Olympics to push through an ambitious urban and regional development plan. This helps explain the egregious costs of the event (as high as USD 55 billion by some estimates). It’s not just white elephant sports infrastructure and rampant corruption, but also a costly urban development agenda. Now, is it problematic to tie development plans to mega-events? I would say so, absolutely. Is it unusual? It happens all the time. Mega-events are now so expensive that they often can only be justified by tying into some sort of broader plan that should, in theory, benefit the host population.

So what does Sochi look like now, four years after the Olympics? There’s enough material here to fill a book, but let’s do a quick run through of a few aspects.

The Sochi 2014 Official Report filed with the International Olympic Committee gives the following as a rationale for hosting: “A visionary plan for a lasting legacy for Russia, the region, and the Olympic Movement, serving as a catalyst for the social and economic development of the Sochi region and helping to launch its renaissance as a world-class, year-round resort.” (Vol.1, p.23)

Also, following the IOC’s Agenda 21, the Russian organizing committee strove for a sustainable games, both economically and ecologically. This led to them creating a development plan called “The Games in Harmony With Nature”. The plan was “to minimize and when possible eliminate negative environmental impacts in Sochi during the construction and operation of Olympic venues and infrastructure.” (Vol.3, p.50)

They were so destructive to the natural environment that ecologists couldn’t publish warnings fast enough to warn about endangered species before they were eliminated. But the program was named beautifully, and look at that picture!

Of the many (dubious) environmental legacies touted by organizers, one that caught my eye was the boast that “Sochi today is a city without a landfill… The waste generated in Sochi is sorted into eight different streams at the [new] urban waste processing plant and then sent to recycling enterprises… 100% of non-recyclable waste is briquetted and sent outside to inter-municipal landfills.” (Vol. 3, p.56)

This sounds great. It’s a UNESCO World Heritage Site, after all, and should be kept clean so that everyone – visitors and residents alike – can enjoy the unparalleled beauty of the natural environment.

Here’s what that urban waste processing plant looked like, by the way, two years after the Olympics:

Extremely sad photo credit goes to BlogSochi.ru, now shut down by the authorities – probably because of taking too many photos like this.

This is a familiar story of shady contracts, unpaid employees, disappearing businessmen, and prolonged court cases, but that’s not what interests me here. What is this doing to the people who live in Sochi? This unmanageable trash mountain led to massive pileups in the rest of the city…

…and with the smell of garbage hanging over the entire resort city, people started dumping their trash in the forests…

…and also, entrepreneurially, opening their own (totally illegal) private dumps.

This is all a backstory, however, to what I’m talking about in New Orleans in April. I am arguing that some Sochi residents are using the rhetoric of the Olympics and of the city as Russia’s resort capital to protect themselves as they protest these intolerable conditions. So far it’s not a total success but not a total failure either. And in any case I think it’s important to take a look behind the shiny rhetoric and explore the lived legacy of what they called, with straight faces, the Games in Harmony with Nature.