Sport Mega-Events and City Changes: Analysis of Citizens' Claims

Keywords: sports mega-events, the right to a city, social constructionism, claims, claims-making, rhetoric This paper is devoted to the study of the claims of citizens in anticipation of the sport mega-event. This topic is relevant nowadays because interests of local community during the preparation for the event are ignored, including in the scientific sphere or media discourse. In this paper, the critical theory of mega-events, the theory of the right to a city and social constructionism are taken as the basis of the analysis. The paper proposes a conceptual scheme for analyzing the claims of citizens from two perspectives: as communicative activity and as the essence of social problems. The material for the empirical study was the online petitions of citizens, made up on the portal Change.org. With the help of online observation and discourse analysis, we revealed the identification of employed agents, the characteristics of requirements, and the rhetoric of citizens’ claims. In the course of the study, the hypothesis we confirmed the hypothesis of the research: urban residents offer their urban development options for the 2018 World Cup and update the problem of the right to the city, trying to establish a dialogue with the authorities through online petitions. In addition, we concluded about the effectiveness of claims-making for citizens on the portal Change.org. The results of this study can be used as recommendations in the construction of a sport mega-event in order to prevent conflicts between citizens and the organizers. Further, it was suggested to study the rhetoric of the claims for each city or to conduct a comparative analysis of different claims-making channels.