Professor Marcus Foth
School of Design, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia
Brisbane’s successful bid for the 2032 Olympic Games was globally promoted as the world’s first “climate-positive” Olympics. The host organisers used the media to signal this as a supposed turning point in mega-event sustainability. Yet this contractual commitment was later quietly removed from the Olympic Host Contract, replaced by weaker aspirational language with no enforcement mechanisms. Drawing on comparative research with colleagues at Politecnico di Torino and recent developments in Brisbane, this talk examines how sustainability rhetoric, visual spectacle, and governance practices intersect in contemporary Olympic planning.
Using stadium renderings and public communication campaigns as case studies, the presentation introduces the concepts of “engagement theatre” and “bedazzlement” to analyse how political legitimacy is manufactured through imagery and promise-making rather than participatory decision-making. The talk also presents emerging grassroots responses, including how community groups are experimenting with generative AI tools to visualise alternative futures, counter official narratives, and mobilise public resistance.
By situating Brisbane 2032 within a longer lineage of Olympic governance failures and sustainability backtracking, the presentation reflects on what these dynamics reveal about the limits of mega-event-led urban transformation and the urgent need for more accountable, transparent, and genuinely regenerative planning models.
Bio: Marcus Foth (/foːt/) is a Professor in Strategic Design in the School of Design and a Chief Investigator in the QUT Digital Media Research Centre (DMRC), Faculty of Creative Industries, Education, and Social Justice, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. For more than two decades, Marcus has led ubiquitous computing and interaction design research into interactive digital media, screen, mobile and smart city applications. Marcus founded the Urban Informatics Research Lab in 2006. He is a founding member of the QUT More-than-Human Futures research group. Marcus has published more than 300 peer-reviewed publications. He served on Australia’s national College of Experts (2021 – 2025). He is a Fellow of the Australian Computer Society and the Queensland Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Distinguished Member of the international Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
Photo: To scale overlay showing the actual size of Perth’s Optus Stadium against the Crisafulli Government’s artist’s impression of a stadium in Victoria Park. Used with permission. Source: https://www.savevictoriapark.com/new-stadium-analysis
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