Investigating mega-event host cities after the spotlight

In July 2023, Dr. Sven Daniel Wolfe joined the Spatial Development and Urban Policy (SPUR) group at the Institute for Spatial and Landscape Development (IRL) at ETH Zurich. Here, he will lead an SNF Ambizione project entitled “After the spotlight: Sustainable urban development and geopolitical legacies in former mega-event cities.” This 4-year project focuses on the aftermath of mega-events like the Olympics on host cities and societies. The project establishes a comparative investigation of under-explored former host cities, societies, and events from around the globe, working through a theoretical framework that considers mega-event urban infrastructures and interventions, governance paradigms, dominant narratives, and the conduct of everyday life. Contextualized within the uniqueness of national, cultural, and political-economic configurations, the project allows for coherent and meaningful comparison between former host cities, discovering novel patterns, connections, and comparative development trajectories. In so doing, the project seeks to better understand the material and immaterial aftereffects of hosting within the interplay between local specificities and global patterns.

A political and urban geographer, Sven Daniel Wolfe works on the socio-spatial impacts of mega-events, urban sustainable development, everyday geopolitics – particularly in regards to the Russian war against Ukraine – and also on issues of authoritarianism and the digital. He’s the author of “More Than Sport: Soft Power and Potemkinism in the 2018 Men's Football World Cup in Russia” (LIT Verlag), co-founder of the City Collaboratory urban studies research network, and a vice president of the Swiss Association of Geography.