Sports for the Planet? Analysing the Sustainability of Major Sports Events February 2024 – January 2028
Researchers: Martin Müller (Lead PI), David Gogishvili (Senior Researcher, Project Coordinator)
Funding: Swiss National Science Foundation
Major sports events like the Commonwealth Games, Olympics, and World Athletics Championships have driven urban transformation, economic ventures, and global media attention but have often faced criticism over human rights, corruption, and environmental impact. Despite their global influence, there has been a lack of systematic, longitudinal research on their sustainability. To address this gap, this project develops a conceptual model and indicator framework to analyse the sustainability of major sports events. Employing a mixed methods approach, it compiles a detailed database with over 60 indicators covering 260 editions of 24 major events from 1990 to 2024, enabling comparative analysis over time. Additionally, eight in-depth case studies provide context-specific insights into factors influencing sustainability outcomes. A multidisciplinary team examines four interconnected themes: Cities & Environment, Governance & Performance, Integrity & Human Rights, and Media & Diversity. This pioneering research culminates in the creation of the Lausanne Observatory of Major Events (LOME), which monitors and benchmarks future events, promotes greater sustainability.
Cultural Flagships: Pathways, Practices and Politics of a Global Urban Type
October 2020 – September 2024
Researchers: Martin Müller (PI), David Gogishvili and Laura Neville (postdoctoral researchers), Clotilde Trivin (doctoral student)
Funding: Swiss National Science Foundation
This project seeks to achieve two goals: first, to think and characterise cultural flagships as a global urban type and, second, to trace the individual articulations of four cultural flagship exemplars as what it calls global buildings. A database of cultural flagships worldwide will allow drawing more general conclusions on the prevalence, genealogy, context, rationales and outcomes of cultural flagships and tracing the pathways, practices and politics of the cultural flagship as a global urban type. The four case studies are all drawn from cities outside the West, which represent the global frontier of the cultural flagship as an urban type: the Louvre in Abu Dhabi, the M+ Museum in Hongkong, the Museum of Tomorrow in Rio de Janeiro, the Second World War Museum and the European Solidarity Center in Gdańsk. This choice allows not just examining their (potentially different) positioning vis-à-vis the particular urban type that is the cultural flagship, but also vis-à-vis the global cultural hegemony of the West
Uneven Geographies of Urban Knowledge September 2024 – ongoing
Researchers: Martin Müller (PI), Quentin Rihoux (Research Assistant), Laura Neville (postdoctoral researcher)
More than four-fifths of the global urban population live in the Global South and East. Most urban theories, however, originate in the Global North. Building on recent efforts to address this mismatch, this research seeks to examine the geographies of urban knowledge production by analysing the institutional affiliations of contributions in leading Anglophone urban journals urban handbooks. The first results indicate that Northern institutions still dominate knowledge gatekeeping, while authors are more diverse. These findings underscore the need for greater epistemic diversity in gatekeeping positions and broader understandings of what counts as theory to better incorporate diverse urban knowledge.
‘Urban Projectification’, and the politics of spatialising urbanisation through projects. September 2024 – ongoing
Researchers: Quentin Rihoux (PhD candidate)
Quentin Rihoux’s PhD research lies at the intersection of political economy and cultural theory, with a particular focus on urban projectification – the growing and worldwide tendency of cities to invoke projects as habitual, legitimate and performative responses to urban problems. While critical urban studies literature on projects sees them primarily as instruments of urban governance, he proposes to supplement this approach by investigating how the project as a conceptual framework is becoming increasingly pervasive for the transformation of urban spaces, with a focus on the dynamics of order, power and contestation within these processes. The mixed methods design incorporate database analysis and assemblage applications with ethnographic sensitivity. It aims to advance urban political geography debate on the politicisation of urbanisation processes and to partake in developing a postcolonial understanding of how concepts shape the production of cities.
Thinking with the Global Easts
August 2016 – ongoing
Researchers: Martin Müller
Carving up the world into Global North and Global South has become an established way of thinking about global difference. This binary, however, erases what this project calls the Global East – those countries and regions that are often labelled post-socialist and are neither clearly North nor South. This project seeks to think the Global East as that unbounded region which is suspended between globalising processes and the legacies of multiple transformations from imperialism to communism to neoliberalism and neopatrimonialism. It works through cases ranging from IKEA to Sci-Hub to recover the Global East for scholarship and probes the distinctiveness of its contribution for a global theorising of state, cities and society.