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Tag: mega-events

File under: clever strategies to skim a little off the top

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 island into a viable part of the city. So the new 35,000 seat World Cup stadium is sited there, and other developments are slated to…

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The World Cup and/or Urban Development

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 a sporting event attached. In my view, there is some validity to this argument. In Russia, for example, the 2018 World Cup is clearly being…

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Sleight of Hand

Sleight of Hand

If you’re feeling critical, it’s easy enough to find problems in the preparations for a World Cup. In seemingly any host nation, journalists and academics alike find ripe fruit in bribery and corruption scandals, tales of misused funds and human rights violations, busted budgets, and the sad parade of white elephant stadiums. In this, unfortunately, developments in Russia for the 2018 World Cup are no exception. But what I find interesting in recent Russian news is a tricky maneuver that…

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