From a sports mega-event to a regional mega-project: The Sochi Winter Olympics and the return of geography in state development priorities

This article explores the relationships between sport, space and state in the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics. While the extant literature has predominantly attributed the Russian government’s motives behind hosting the Olympics to showcasing Putin’s Russia, this article provides a more nuanced account of the Sochi project in light of its entanglements with regional development and its implications for Russia’s spatial governance. It argues that Sochi has been an important experimental space for the federal state in its reconstitution and re-territorialisation of the institutions of economic development. The Sochi project signposts a dual process: the return of regional policy to the state’s priorities and a (selective) return of the federal state to urban development. Whilst not without controversies and inconsistencies, this practice signifies a re-establishment of strategies seeking a more polycentric economic development, including through supporting places on Russia’s less developed peripheries. The article also presents insights into the practical operations of the Sochi project and its legacies, including most recent data on the disbursement of its budget

City as a geopolitics: Tbilisi, Georgia — A globalizing metropolis in a turbulent region

Tbilisi, a city of over a million, is the national capital of Georgia. Although little explored in urban studies, the city epitomizes a fascinating assemblage of processes that can illuminate the interplay of geopolitics, political choices, globalization discourses, histories, and urban contestations in shaping urban transformations. Tbilisi's strategic location in the South Caucasus, at the juncture of major historical empires and religions in Eurasia, has ensured its turbulent history and a polyphony of cultural influences. Following Georgia's independence in 1991, Tbilisi found itself as the pivot of Georgian nation-building. Transition to a market economy also exposed the city to economic hardship, ethnical homogenization, and the informalization of the urban environment. The economic recovery since the early 2000s has activated urban regeneration. Georgia's government has recently promoted flagship urban development projects in pursuit of making Tbilisi as a modern globalizing metropolis. This has brought contradictions, such as undermining the city's heritage, contributing to socio-spatial polarization, and deteriorating the city's public spaces. The elitist processes of decision-making and a lack of a consistent urban policy and planning regimes are argued to be among major impediments for a more sustainable development of this city

The geopolitics of real estate: assembling soft power via property markets

The article problematizes the role of real estate in geopolitical circulations. The internationalization of real estate increases mutual dependencies and vulnerabilities between nation states and therefore calls for a better appreciation of the geopolitical externalities and exteriorities of real estate. The article brings together disjoint bodies of literature on real estate globalization, assemblage theory, and international relations to show how real estate is a case of the geopolitics of the multiple – geopolitics that is being assembled by diverse and distributed actors, discourses, and materialities representing the contingent and emergent formation of connections and considerations, which affect the ways how foreign relations are negotiated today. The argument is substantiated by considering several dimensions of the real estate/geopolitics nexus: (i) external influences over domestic real estate markets; (ii) the implications of outward real estate investment; (iii) state-led mega-projects conveying externally the power of the state. These dimensions are considered empirically in the context of the renewed geopolitical tensions between a resurgent Russia and the West. Overall, the article calls for a better positioning of real estate in the conceptualizations of soft power, state power, and geopolitics

Artificial intelligence and robotics in smart city strategies and planned smart development

Smart city strategies developed by cities around the world provide a useful resource for insights into the future of smart development. This study examines such strategies to identify plans for the explicit deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics. A total of 12 case studies emerged from an online keyword search representing cities of various sizes globally. The search was based on the keywords of “artificial intelligence” (or “AI”), and “robot,” representing robotics and associated terminology. Based on the findings, it is evident that the more concentrated deployment of AI and robotics in smart city development is currently in the Global North, although countries in the Global South are also increasingly represented. Multiple cities in Australia and Canada actively seek to develop AI and robotics, and Moscow has one of the most in-depth elaborations for this deployment. The ramifications of these plans are discussed as part of cyber–physical systems alongside consideration given to the social and ethical implications

Can resilience be redeemed? Resilience as a metaphor for change, not against change

Resilience has been critiqued as being regressively status quo and thus propping up neo-liberalism, that it lacks transformative potential, and that it can be used as a pretence to cast off needy people and places. We move from this critique of resilience to a critical resilience, based in the following arguments: (i) resilience can sustain alternative and previous practices that contradict neo-liberalism; (ii) resilience is more active and dynamic than passive; and (iii) resilience can sustain survival, thus acting as a precursor to more obviously transformative action such as resistance. These bring us more closely to a heterogeneous de-neo-liberalized reading of resilience, explicitly opening it to social justice, power relations and uneven development, and performing valuable conceptual and pragmatic work that usefully moves us beyond resistance yet retaining (long-term) struggle

Russia and the politics of extraverted urbanism in the 2014 Winter Olympics and the 2018 FIFA World Cup

This chapter discusses the state’s role and the politics of space in a comparative analysis of the 2018 World Cup and 2014 Winter Olympics in the Russian Federation. Critiquing the hegemonic use of ‘the Putin factor’ as an all-explanatory epistemological narrative in understanding developments in the new Russia, the authors argue that the two sports mega events have been critical for Russia’s internal spatial restructuring, even though they may still be entangled, like the case of any games of this sort, with soft power and soft nationalism. While Sochi was more place-centric, the FIFA World Cup is allocated to 11 different cities primarily across the European part of Russia. What is emerging in many of the host cities is mixed and spatially variegated: some significant and welcome material investments (such as new airports and improved central roads) but also contested developments, neglected areas, and poor planning (like oversized infrastructure aimed at satisfying the short-term needs of the event rather than the longer term needs of residents). Overall, both events represent shifts in Russia’s regional policies and a return of the federal state to urban development after years of neglect of this domain, but also highlight the contradictions of the new politics of space. Hence, this chapter examines such developments and the geo-political dimension of sport in Russia

The urbanization of transition: ideology and the urban experience

This paper debates the relationships between transition and urbanization by problematizing the operation of transition on three inter-related levels. Firstly, at the level of ideology, it is important to rehearse the understanding of transition from that of merely area-based reforms and rather understand it as a totalizing project of planetary reach, which completes the subjugation of the whole world to capitalism and crowns neoliberalism as the only global order. Secondly, at the level of practice, it is important to properly account for the spatializing effects of that ideology – which is not simply “domesticated” by local practices, but itself mediates the subsumption of pre-existing practices by capital, thus alienating them from their history. Thirdly, at the level of the urban: while urban change is usually portrayed merely as a projection of societal relations, the urban is actually the central stage where ideology mixes with the everyday, through which the societal change is mediated; new meanings, social relations and class divisions are construed; and through which ideological transition achieves its practical completeness. What combines these three levels is the notion of urbanization of transition, which articulates the centrality of the urban in the spectacular post-socialist experience