Like for Putin it's really about hosting this two-week [Olympic] party and showing it off to the world.It's a pride thing. It's a big PR exercise for him and for Russia. So, at that point $50 billion and some environmental damage and a small city's future don't really matter.

Who know what life is going to be like. I mean, there was no demand for the spaces before. It's not like people were flocking to Sochi before; they just didn't have enough hotel rooms and arenas to fill the need. So that's what we'll look at when we go there. But we'll wait a few years until things kind of return to normal.

Every city and country just has a different reason for wanting to host the [Olympic] games.

Smaller cities, places like Sarajevo, for example, even amid all that destruction there's still so much pride that the [Olympic] games were there and that they did it.

We were talking to shop owners or ordinary people who were living in these buildings now. A lot of the Olympic Villages were turned into housing.

So many people that we met had some sort of connection to the [Olympics] games. Some story about how they volunteered there, or some sort of memory of it. It still is in the cultural memory and identity of these cities as much as it is in the physical and architectural memory. It's where these two things overlap, I think, that we're trying to explore with the photos.

Beijing is an example of [families were displaced for the Olympics]. Something like 10,000 families were moved out.