
Sven Daniel WolfeETH Zurich | ETH Zürich · Spatial Development and Urban Policy
Sven Daniel Wolfe
Doctor of Philosophy in Geography
About
40
Publications
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Introduction
I'm a political and urban geographer, Swiss National Science Foundation Ambizione fellow at the Spatial Development and Urban Policy group at ETH Zurich, and a Vice President of the Swiss Association of Geography.
I explore issues of urban sustainable development and (geo)political legitimation in former mega-event host cities, as well as the everyday geopolitics of Ukraine, specifically in reference to the ongoing war with Russia.
Publications
Publications (40)
Russia’s accelerating authoritarian turn has not ignored the internet, and in recent years, the Russian state has clamped down on internet activities that diverge from the statist line, employing a variety of strategies to dominate online spaces. Nevertheless, oppositional voices flourish on the Russian internet, taking shape in independent blogs a...
Through an investigation of authoritarian encounters in Russia, Belarus, and Ukraine, this paper takes seriously the challenges of making geopolitical sense of contextualised micro moments. Working in a minor key, the paper offers three contributions. First, it advances a minor theory, micropolitical sensibility that interrogates the co-constitutio...
Many cities have abandoned plans for hosting the Olympics due to crises of high costs, unnecessary infrastructures, and a range of socio-spatial exclusions. These problems stem from conflicts between the short-term needs of the event and the long-term needs of the city. In response, Olympic organizers launched a series of reforms to improve alignme...
Mega-events like the Olympics and the Football World Cup routinely harm host cities and societies, largely due to their linkages with ambitious urban development agendas. Concurrently, resident protest has had only limited success in mitigating mega-event-related damages, notwithstanding the growth of resistance networks at local, national, and tra...
The contributions in this Forum analyse the Russian war against Ukraine from the micro perspective of everyday life, conveyed by scholars who have been impacted at a variety of personal levels. Framed within the existential threat that continues to endanger Ukrainians and Ukraine, the contributions collected here embrace the messiness of lived expe...
Mega‐events like the Olympics and the football World Cups remain popular around the globe, regardless of their record of damaging host cities and societies. In parallel, research on mega‐events continues to grow across a range of disciplines, including geography. Much of this literature remains fixed at global levels of analysis. In this light, meg...
This chapter deals with the sustainability assessment of the Paris and Los Angeles Games. The economic, social, and political risks inherent in hosting the Olympics are well documented. The literature features a litany of problems for host cities and societies: exorbitant costs and broken budgets, ambitious urban redevelopment agendas that harm cit...
This paper examines the growth of the Olympic Games against that of former host cities to understand whether this mega-event may have ‘outgrown’ its hosts. The increasing hosting requirements and governments’ expansive use of mega-events as tools for urban development would suggest that the ‘Olympic city’ – a term we use for describing the size of...
Los Angeles has a special relationship with the Olympics, having previously hosted in 1932 and 1984. Each time, the city introduced lasting innovations on how the Games were planned and deployed. The upcoming edition in 2028 promises similar historic changes. Framed in the context of the processes of Olympic reform, this chapter presents a forecast...
In the face of the climate crisis and societal pressure, mega-event organizers and their international rights holders increasingly promote their sustainable credentials. Sustainability is now a commonplace term in mega-events, from the introduction of an environmental dimension into the planning of the 2000 Summer Olympic Games in Sydney, to the va...
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 d...
This paper investigates the adjustments to everyday life among ordinary Swiss residents from a variety of backgrounds after a year of the COVID-19 pandemic. Grounded in an appreciation of the quotidian, the paper explores how pandemic-related disruptions have destabilized the traditional boundaries between work and leisure, producing a blurry every...
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 s...
Although events such as the Olympic Games and World’s Fairs are among the largest of mega-projects, there is little systematic data to evaluate their outcomes over a longer period of time and across multiple sites. This research note describes the first longitudinal database on mega-event outcomes. It lays out the rationale and major goals of the d...
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...
The Olympic Games claim to be exemplars of sustainability, aiming to inspire sustainable futures around the world. Yet no systematic evaluation of their sustainability exists. We develop and apply a model with nine indicators to evaluate the sustainability of the 16 editions of the Summer and Winter Olympic Games between 1992 and 2020, representing...
This paper tracks the growth, and recent crisis, of two of the largest tourist events on earth: the Olympic Games and the Football World Cup. It draws on a unique longitudinal dataset that contains 43 events since 1960, with a total cost exceeding USD 120 billion. Overall, the size of the three events has grown about 60-fold over the past 50 years...
Situated at the intersection of the literatures on soft power and mega-events, this paper explains the production and evolution of the dominant narratives behind the 2018 Men's Football World Cup in Russia. It begins from the premise that there are multiple unexplored dimensions to the concept of soft power and proposes three advancements: the exis...
This paper investigates the preparations for the 2018 Men's Football World Cup in Russia through the lens of neoliberal urban entrepreneurialism. Unlike many other mega-events, this World Cup was orchestrated by the central state, though using neoliberal rhetoric to legitimize a wide-ranging urban development program aimed at modernizing peripheral...
As Europe and the wider world struggles with the COVID-19 crisis, I unpack the impacts of the pandemic on the small, wealthy, and diverse nation of Switzerland. Though deeply intertwined with capital flows and global scales, I eschew a high-level view and instead present an analysis from the ground, informed by minor theory. This micropolitical vie...
The economic crisis since 2010 has affected Russia’s political economy by reducing the income available to fund political loyalty—the key mechanism of neopatrimonialism. Through an investigation of key infrastructure development projects, we examine how this crisis has affected the preparations for the 2018 Football World Cup. In so doing we introd...
In this study we undertake an analysis of the major transportation projects developed for the 2014 Sochi Games from a materialist perspective. We seek to uncover the degree to which these projects conform or diverge from a series of primary assumptions regarding mega-event related infrastructure projects in recent host cities. In a first moment, we...
This paper argues that the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi, Russia, represented a soft power attempt to introduce a new conception of “Russian-ness” to both domestic and international audiences. Pre- and post-event attitudes regarding Russia were captured at the international, domestic, and local levels from popular opinion surveys, international and...
Western sanctions have isolated Russia from key international systems. Putting aside controversial questions about Russia's motivations for retaking Crimea, their involvement in the Donbas region, or even the potential for sanctions to bring peace, the west faces unexpected health-related dangers in its pursuit of the politics of isolation.
Mit geschätzt 21 Milliarden US-Dollar wird die Fußball-Weltmeisterschaft (WM) in Russland 2018 die teuerste aller Zeiten werden. Kostenüberschreitungen bereits in dieser frühen Phase lassen jedoch vermuten, dass die Gesamtausgaben am Ende noch deutlich höher ausfallen könnten: Das Budget für die zwölf Stadien ist bereits von anfänglich 2,8 Milliard...
This paper examines the effects of major infrastructure development for an international mega-event on two villages in rural Russia. The focus is on the experiences of people witnessing these changes firsthand, as Russia prepares to host the 2014 Olympics in Sochi. The work is grounded in field research, 19 ethnographic interviews, and government d...