Introduction: Mega-Events as Urban Game Changers?

Mega-Events as Urban Game Changers?

Abstract

This special issue on the urban impacts of mega-events emerged in the aftermath of the Paris Olympic Games and the 2024 AESOP conference held at Sciences Po. Following that meeting, a few contributions were revised and assembled into the present collection. The connection between the conference and the Games was explicit in the conference title, which echoed the recurrent claim that mega-events function as urban game changers.
Yet this proposition has never been self-evident. A substantial body of scholarship has instead qualified the transformative role of the Games in urban development, while showing that their effects on ordinary planning procedures are often more consequential, and at times more problematic, than their celebrated material legacies. All six papers were written after Paris 2024, with several substantially revised or completed in 2026; thereby drawing on post-event assessments rather than bid-stage projections. Paris appears in every paper, not only those directly devoted to it. It is the reference point for Delaplace’s giga-event classification, the comparator for Barcelona and London in Deffner’s analysis, the principal case for Bourdin et al. and Cremaschi, and an implicit benchmark in the Buenos Aires discussion of successful and failed Olympic urbanism.