Abandoning legacy: towards conceptual clarity and better outcomes in mega-events research

Mega-events research continues to flourish across a variety of disciplines, but despite this diversity, usage of the term legacy persists. Legacy refers to the period after the conclusion of a mega-event and is generally presented as beneficent or at least benign. It remains a key term for rights holders, organising committees, practitioners, city planners, political figures, media, and researchers. Closer examination, however, reveals the conceptual fragility of this term. Legacy is an overburdened concept, inconsistently theorised and incoherently applied. Employing it risks communicating a normative positive framing that deemphasises the well-documented harms of hosting. This paper argues that legacy has outlived its usefulness in planning, politics, and research. The paper is agnostic about replacement terminology, but suggests that adopting alternative framings is a necessary and overdue step to better identify and ameliorate the exclusions, inequalities, and other deleterious outcomes that too often result from hosting mega-events. These alternatives should be grounded in political neutrality, scientific independence, and data diversity, and be sensitive to micropolitical subjects, subjectivity, positionality, and time. The paper explores these dimensions with one potential light and transferable operationalisation to demonstrate how abandoning legacy provides more authentic representations of what mega-events actually do to cities and societies.