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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.

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.

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.