Abstract

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 experience 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.

摘要

大型活动是全球性事务，在各种规模上都具有深远的影响，并且是大量且不断增长的学术研究机构的焦点。社会体育中的这个特别部分以大型赛事对举办它们的社会的城市和经济影响为中心，提供了对个别案例和新兴模式的研究。作者探索了来自世界各地的近期大型赛事体验的不同方面，提出了将这些跨国体育、政治、商业和文化的超大型表达理论化的新方法。综合起来，这些贡献揭示了社会经济和文化背景如何塑造活动的组织，并以多样化和偶然的方式在全球北部、南部和东部影响东道主。在总结每项贡献并将其置于更广泛文献中的背景之前，本介绍简要概述了现有研究的概况。总而言之，这个特别版块中的文章探讨了奥运会、FIFA 男足世界杯和英联邦运动会如何部署不同的机制来改造城市空间，并提供创新的方式来了解大型赛事对主办方的人和地方的影响他们。