Abstract
Urban planning practices can be a means to reinforce class domination and benefit those with control over societal resources to the disadvantage of the less powerful city residents. Those negatively impacted by such practices may contest these decisions executed by the local state. However, how do state representatives handle actual or potential contestation of planning decisions, and how do these official responses vary between different societies? Addressing this issue means making comparisons between cities in different countries, which can be challenging due to variations in socio-political conditions and circumstances of each intervention. This introduction firstly argues that sports mega-events and their itinerant nature provide an optimal starting point to examine these responses across a broad range of space and time. Then it makes some key theoretical considerations on the nature of contemporary urban governance and the capitalist state to later present an appropriate theoretical framework designed to enable sports mega-events-based comparisons, which are explored over the following chapters.
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Omena, E. (2023). Enabling Urban Governance Comparisons. In: The Games of Land Dispossession. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-7536-5_1
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