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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

If the Russian government continues to pump money into it and makes their national teams train in Sochi and just sort of prop it up as a point of pride, then perhaps. But I don't think anybody living there was begging for multiple 40,000-seat venues to be plopped down in the city.