Everything in Athens is probably a good example. Any time when there really isn't a need for these facilities in these cities, but they get built anyway for the games, everybody has kind of wishful thinking about what the afterlife of these spaces is going to be. If there is not demand for it before the Olympics, there's probably not going to be demand for it afterwards.
Every city and country just has a different reason for wanting to host the [Olympic] games.
Beijing is an example of [families were displaced for the Olympics]. Something like 10,000 families were moved out.
We were talking to shop owners or ordinary people who were living in these buildings now. A lot of the Olympic Villages were turned into housing.
In some bigger cities, I don't think people really realize these structures were built for the Olympics.
Even in a city like Barcelona, there are still some people in the city who are angry because that waterfront area is a big tourist destination, and all the rents went up, and they had to move.
So many people that we met had some sort of connection to the [Olympics] games. Some story about how they volunteered there, or some sort of memory of it. It still is in the cultural memory and identity of these cities as much as it is in the physical and architectural memory. It's where these two things overlap, I think, that we're trying to explore with the photos.
If the Russian government continues to pump money into it and makes their national teams train in Sochi and just sort of prop it up as a point of pride, then perhaps. But I don't think anybody living there was begging for multiple 40,000-seat venues to be plopped down in the city.
Who know what life is going to be like. I mean, there was no demand for the spaces before. It's not like people were flocking to Sochi before; they just didn't have enough hotel rooms and arenas to fill the need. So that's what we'll look at when we go there. But we'll wait a few years until things kind of return to normal.
Like for Putin it's really about hosting this two-week [Olympic] party and showing it off to the world.It's a pride thing. It's a big PR exercise for him and for Russia. So, at that point $50 billion and some environmental damage and a small city's future don't really matter.
Smaller cities, places like Sarajevo, for example, even amid all that destruction there's still so much pride that the [Olympic] games were there and that they did it.
