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Despite growing public opposition, megaevents such as the Summer Olympics continue to proliferate both in the Global North and South, thus reshaping the built environment of cities and the living conditions of their inhabitants. This paper presents a novel analytical tool that expands the perspectives from which to explore urban megaevents. Building on the controversy among megaproject scholars around Albert Hirschman's Hiding Hand principle, we study the diverse roles that optimism can play in the justification, planning, implementation, and evaluation of megaevents. This approach has the potential to unveil key urban policy agendas underpinning the hosting of megaevents. It does so by focusing on two key aspects: first, the various types and degrees of power exercised by the involved stakeholders in their attempts to justify and support or oppose an event during the planning phase, and second, the coping mechanisms deployed by the promoters as they face unexpected constraints during the implementation phase. In doing so, the approach can help to develop more nuanced and context-specific criteria for evaluating the success of megaevents. We exemplify the approach by using the 1992 Barcelona Olympics as an illustrative case study. • The Hiding Hand controversy provides a framework for the analysis of urban megaevents. • We use the Barcelona 1992 Olympics as case study to illustrate the framework. • Sincere and strategic overoptimism play diverse roles throughout a megaevent lifecycle. • The analysis exemplifies the context-dependence of the notions of success and failure. • Sincere and strategic overoptimism typically operate in tandem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Political decisions and support for experimentation to solve socio-environmental problems have potentials to provide innovative solutions. • Small-scale projects combining urban drainage and rainwater harvesting are possible in the built environment and suited to dense areas as well. • Urban planners rather than water planners may be able to push forward for sustainable drainage projects. • Planning for blue-green infrastructure opens windows of opportunity towards urban sustainability to multiple urban challenges. • Urban rain and urban drainage should be considered a resource and not a hazard. A plethora of socioenvironmental issues, and growing concerns over the effects of climate change, are forcing cities to rethink conventional urban water management practices. However, change towards more sustainable practices has been remarkably slow. This paper examines two cases of greening projects aimed at urban rehabilitation in Stockholm and Barcelona, which have turned into examples of innovative approaches to urban rain management. Both cities share high densities and flooding problems in certain neighborhoods. Specifically, the paper attempts to answer three questions: 1) what were the driving forces and key factors that facilitated the breakthrough of urban rainwater-harvesting (URH) schemes based on the two cases?; 2) who were the actors involved and what were their roles in moving towards URH schemes?; and 3) how can URH schemes become part of multifunctional, sustainable urban systems? To answer these questions, the paper uses concepts of adaptive context and capacity, and of actor agency, drawn from the transitions literature, and opportunistic and guided flexibility planning drawn from the planning literature. Empirical material for both case studies was obtained from policy documents and semi-structured interviews with key actors. The main results show first political support for flexibility in public planning, the adaptive context and the capacity of the actors, especially in taking advantage of windows of opportunity for the materialisation of new ideas. Second, the design and implementation of these systems widened the number and scope of actors in urban water management, incorporating new professionals such as architects and involving more city agencies and organizations. Third, small scale URH systems contributed not only to control urban drainage but performed other functions such as the much-needed greening of dense areas in both cities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The built environment can mediate or constrain the opportunities for social interaction, essential to the formation of social ties. This study uses the large inflow of immigrants in Barcelona between 1998 and 2008 to study whether the configuration of buildings and open urban areas in a block is associated with the residential segregation of immigrants—a proxy for social interaction. Based on a rich set of shape metrics, I use machine learning techniques to classify each block in Barcelona into one of eight typologies, which provide a summary measure of their built environment. I then combine these data with measures of residential segregation constructed at the building level using data on the exact address of each resident of Barcelona. The findings show that some features of the built environment of a block—as measured by the typologies—are systematically associated with reduced residential segregation of Spaniards and newly arrived immigrants in that block. • The paper uses the large inflow of immigrants in Barcelona between 1998 and 2008 to study how the configuration of buildings and open urban areas has mediated the residential segregation of immigrants. • The empirical analysis combines several geometric indicators for urban shape and uses Machine Learning techniques to create a categorical measure of urban form. • The results suggest that certain spatial qualities of the built environment are associated with the degree to which immigrants become segregated and are potentially relevant to the fields of urban design, planning, and policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]