As I wrote in my summary of 2022, I was fortunate enough to win a Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione grant last year. I am overjoyed, and deeply grateful that I’ve been entrusted to bring this project to life.

It’s called “After the spotlight: Sustainable urban development and geopolitical legacies in former mega-event cities.”

The problem is that mega-events like the Olympics and the Football World Cup have dramatic impacts on cities and societies. Typically, organizing authorities promise infrastructural, political, and social benefits for host cities, while critics predict that hosting will be dangerous and destructive. Most of these debates occur before the event, however, and too often global attention disappears after the event is concluded. My project aims to fill that gap by exploring mega-event cities and societies after the global spotlight.  

Overall, this project seeks to answer the question: How does hosting mega-events affect cities and societies over the long term? Within this frame, I’ll investigate former mega-event host cities along two dimensions: sustainable urban development and geopolitics. These are two of the central arguments used to legitimize mega-event hosting around the world.

In this way, I’ll discover and categorize material and social aftereffects in former host cities, while respecting the interplay between local specificities and global patterns. This is going to happen in two phases. The first phase collects present-day data on ten former host cities, all of which are understudied in the aftermath of their events. With a number of research assistants (still to be hired!), this will be compiled into the world’s first aftereffects database in order to explore potential patterns across diverse cases and, ultimately, to understand the long-term effects of hosting.

The second phase comprises a detailed investigations of four case study cities drawn from second-tier mega-events, all of which remain understudied. So, situated at the intersection of mega-event infrastructures and everyday life, this phase produces nuanced conclusions about what happens to so-called ordinary cities after hosting mega-event spotlights.

I’ll begin work on this project at ETH Zurich in July this year, after I’m done with this short-term fellowship at the University of Zurich. I’m really excited to get started. Onward and upward!