This book provides theoretical and empirical perspectives on the urban impact of mega-events globally. It takes mega-events as an instance to analyse urban transformations and their effects on citizenship. With contributions from leading scholars in the field, the book presents innovative and multidimensional analyses of mega-events with an international selection of case studies. The work provides a grounded theorisation of mega-events in the first part and scrutinizes its practices and processes in the second. Each chapter explores mega-events as crucial drivers and accelerators of urban and citizenship transformations. Rather than just focusing on a staged momentum, this book takes stock of the 'before' and 'after' that these events imply for the urban condition. This book will be of interest to students and scholars in urban studies, human geography, economics, architecture, planning, sociology, political science. It will also appeal to professionals and policy makers engaged in the planning, hosting and management of mega-events.

Tokyo's seemingly endless sea of buildings has grown incrementally over the past centuries, leading to an urban condition that is both coherent and contradictory at the same time. The understanding of Tokyo as a continuous and interdependent urban complex is a much-neglected perspective in previous readings of the city. An attachment to the land, strong civic commitment, and a deep appreciation of the immaterial has produced a nested megastructure of smaller communities. These places have all evolved in a related way, briefly and temporarily disrupted by earthquakes and a devastating war. Over time, a set of distinct urban patterns emerged through centralisation processes, the "manshon urbanisation", the relocation of various types of manufacturing, and other developments. What might appear homogeneous in composition and rhythm is in fact a configuration of distinctly different spaces, created by the routines of everyday life that make the district of Shinjuku different from Shimokitazawa or Kitamoto. This book not only provides the first comprehensive reading of the many urbanisation processes shaping Tokyo today, but also seeks an entirely new approach for looking at megacity regions: through their differences, and the way those differences are produced in the course of everyday life.