Author: Sven Daniel Wolfe
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What is objective information? Robert Orttung in Zurich
“At some point you have to take a moral stance and say that undermining authoritarian governments is better than undermining democratic ones.” This is how Robert Orttung, from the Elliot School of International Affairs at George Washington, answered my question today. Robert, together with Sufian Zhemukhov, have written enough about the Sochi Olympics that you…
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2026 World Cup: Canada + USA + Mexico
I was asked to write a quick op-ed for USA Today on winning the so-called NAFTA bid for the 2026 World Cup. Obviously I’m hugely in favor of investing in and improving international relations, particularly as the USA is in such a delicate situation at the moment. I have my doubts, however, about the wisdom of…
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File under: clever strategies to skim a little off the top
Kirill Bezrukov (@KBezrukov) pointed me to this beautiful example of savvy business in Kaliningrad. There’s a bridge (Vysokiy Most, or High Bridge) that connects the main parts of Kaliningrad to Oktyabrskiy Ostrov, a quirky, mostly undeveloped island in the middle of the city. Among other things, the city’s World Cup development agenda involves transforming this…
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A trashy kind of Olympic legacy
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…
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L’esprit de l’escalier, or Meddling? What meddling?
In April this year I had the opportunity to give a talk at Smith College with Martin Müller and Chris Gaffney. The event was called Sport Mega Events and Urban Development: Cases of Brazil 2014, Rio 2016, Sochi 2014, Russia 2018, and it was hosted by Andrew Zimbalist. If you don’t know him, Andrew is a…
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My Current Conceptual Quandary
Working on any large project – whether writing a dissertation, recording an album, or hosting a mega-event – means keeping track of a lot of moving parts. When I was working as a musician, I hung a large whiteboard on the studio wall where I’d draw a project management grid for each album. One axis…
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The World Cup and/or Urban Development
Mega-events are mega expensive – this is nothing new. And while there are exhaustive lists of the high costs of preparing for the Olympics or the World Cup, there is also evidence that in some cases these are better understood not as the costs of a sporting event, but rather as massive development projects with…