Urban Development Through the 2018 FIFA Men’s Football World Cup: Mutated Mobile Policies in the Peripheries

Planners, politicians, boosters and other elites often use mega-events like the 2018 FIFA Men’s World Cup as a strategy for urban development. This was also the case with the World Cup, hosted in eleven Russian cities and designed to modernize Russia’s peripheral host cities. While the idea of developing cities through mega-events is common, the Russian experience displays much that is new. This paper examines urban development in the World Cup as an example of mobile policy, exploring how this mega-event was imported from abroad and how this policy mutated as it was implemented on the ground in Russia. The specificities of the Russian experience were due in large part to the ways in which the World Cup organizing committee was created and operated as an extension of the central government in Moscow. What appeared at first to be a way for Russian peripheral host cities to differentiate themselves through urban development in a form of inter-urban competition, turned out to be a reestablishment of the central state in regional spatial planning. In this way, even as certain material conditions in the host cities were improved, the World Cup represented not an expression of regional democracy, nor even a strategy for inter-urban differentiation, but rather one more instance of development dictated from the center and from afar.