Listening to buildings: exploring the Lucerne Culture and Congress Centre through sound

The Culture and Convention Centre Lucerne, KKL Lucerne, is a state-of-the-art concert and convention hall located at the shores of Lake Lucerne in Lucerne, Central Switzerland. Our work on KKL Lucerne is part of a larger project where we investigate cultural flagships as global objects emerging from relations spanning the world. In this article, we present how sound is both a productive object of study and a research tool in our aim to think of cultural flagships as multiple, vital and assembled buildings (Kraftl, 2010). The workshop “Making Noise - Sound in Urban Research Practice” at the University of Lausanne took place a few weeks before we went to Lucerne for fieldwork. It inspired us to reflect on the role of sound in the design, the atmospheres and the life of buildings (Berrens, 2016). Drawing on data from our exploration of the KKL and walkalong interviews, we study the multiple lives and relations that have shaped the building from genesis up to the present day. This article retraces our experiment with sound in the KKL through three moments and tells a particular fieldwork dynamic where sounds, spaces and affects are untangled to make sense of buildings

The structural deficit of the Olympics and the World Cup: Comparing costs against revenues over time

The Olympic Games and the Football World Cups are among the most expensive projects in the world. While available theoretical explanations suggest that the revenues of mega-events are overestimated and the costs underestimated, there is no comprehensive empirical study on whether costs exceed revenues. Based on a custom-built database from public sources, this article compares the revenues and costs of the Olympic Games and World Cups between 1964 and 2018 ( N = 43), together totalling close to USD 70 billion in revenues and more than USD 120 billion in costs. It finds that costs exceeded revenues in most cases: more than four out of five Olympics and World Cups ran a deficit. The average return-on-investment for an event was negative (– 38%), with mean costs of USD 2.8 billion exceeding mean revenues of USD 1.7 billion per event. The 1976 Summer Olympics in Montréal, the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi and the 2002 World Cup in Japan/South Korea recorded the highest absolute deficits. The Summer Olympics 1984 in Los Angeles, the Winter Olympics 2010 in Vancouver and the 2018 World Cup in Russia are among the few events that posted a surplus. The article concludes that the Olympic Games and the Football World Cup suffer from a structural deficit and could not exist without external subsidies. This finding urges a re-evaluation of these events as loss-making ventures that lack financial sustainability

The urban and economic impacts of mega-events: mechanisms of change in global games

Mega-events are global affairs with profound effects across a variety of scales, and are the focus of a large and growing body of academic inquiry. This special section in Sports in Society centers on the urban and economic impacts of mega-events on the societies that host them, offering an examination of individual cases and emerging patterns. The authors explore different dimensions of the recent mega-event expe- rience from around the world, proposing novel ways of theorizing these outsized expressions of transnational sport, politics, commerce, and culture. Combined, these contributions unpack how socio-economic and cultural contexts shape the organization of events and impact hosts in variegated and contingent ways in the Global North, South, and East. This introduction offers a brief overview of the landscape of the existing research before summarizing each contribution and placing them in context within the broader literature. All told, the articles in this special section explore how the Olympics, the FIFA Men’s World Cup and the Commonwealth Games deploy different mechanisms to transform urban space, and offer innovative means of understanding what mega- events can do to the people and places that host them

Peak event: the rise, crisis and potential decline of the Olympic Games and the World Cup

This paper tracks the growth of two of the largest tourist events: the Olympic Games and the Football World Cup, drawing on a dataset containing all events between 1964 and 2018. Overall, the size of the three events has grown about 60-fold over the past 50 years, thirteen times faster than world GDP. We identify an S-shaped growth curve and four different growth periods, with an emergent crisis phase in the late 2010s that may have brought us to ‘peak event’ – the point at which these events have reached their largest size. Outlining three different scenarios, we argue that the Olympics and the World Cup are at a critical bifurcation point, which also requires new bidding and hosting policies

Competing for space in Tbilisi: transforming residential courtyards to parking in an increasingly car-dependent city

Urban transformation in the postsocialist Global East was heavily determined by the mass privatization of state assets and by a dramatic increase in car ownership. Tbilisi, Georgia, has experienced these significant changes. The upsurge in private vehicle ownership was brought about by failing public transit, ineffective planning, suspended vehicle quality control and greater individualism. The problem has been exacerbated on two fronts in Tbilisi: new buildings built since the 1990s are now consuming former open spaces, while more people seek parking for their cars in the few crowded remaining areas leading to competition for parking space. Households of residential buildings are devising strategies for guarding nearby areas suitable for parking, while non-driving residents are at a loss to use these formerly open spaces for other purposes. Barriers are installed by the car-owning residents of apartment blocks to impose the primary function of parking to shared residential courtyards, an understudied communal space, turning them into part of the city’s automobility system. The article relies on data from in-depth interviews with city officials and residents of affected areas, policy documents and field observations from the districts of Tbilisi most affected by such change. It argues that the changes started with the privatization of urban space and followed by an increase in the dominance of the automobile in Tbilisi have led to the rapid modification and deterioration of collective areas of multistory apartment blocks and created factors that are transforming courtyards from leisure space into the part of Tbilisi’s automobility system

Baku formula 1 city circuit: exploring the temporary spaces of exception

Since 2016 Baku, Azerbaijan has become the newest addition to the Formula 1 Championship. Organized in the downtown Baku, the F1 European Grand Prix has brought transformations in physical and regulatory terms by imposing temporary rules and restrictions to host this motorsport event. The result was a disruption to the local population’s daily practices in the areas directly impacted by the race, as access to such areas were only made available to F1-related visitors and staff, and beyond for weeks leading up to the event. Through on-site observations and in-depth interviews in Baku, this paper explores the role mega-events, such as the F1 race, play in transforming cities and examines it’s temporary and longer-term legacies. Theoretically, these processes are analyzed through Giorgio Agamben’s concept of the state of exception, which theorizes the abandonment of the rule of law and introduction of an exceptional legal regime in the name of public good. The paper argues that mega-events produce spaces of exception in its host cities by declaring temporary regulations that are tailored towards the needs of the events rights holders and their commercial partners, along with national elites, normalizing the exceptional procedures and compromising the daily activities of locals in the spaces appropriated for the event