Special issue article: Why does everyone think cities can save the planet? Urban Studies 2020, Vol. 57(11) 2339–2356 Ó Urban Studies Journal Limited 2019 Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/0042098018808489 journals.sagepub.com/home/usj Visualising sustainability at the Olympics John Lauermann City University of New York, USA Abstract Cities are increasingly central to sustainability discourse, as urban lifestyles and infrastructure are framed as solutions to global environmental problems such as climate change. This framing relies on geographically referenced visualisations such as architectural renderings, maps, and geospatial models, which portray environmental futures by envisioning the ‘sustainable city’. By showing what sustainability might look like in a future city, these geovisualisations strategically link urban planning interventions to global environmental policy debates. This process is explored through a case study of sustainability design proposed in Olympic cities. Aspiring Olympic hosts regularly adopt sustainability narratives of global–urban sustainability. In an effort to cast their events as ‘the most sustainable Games ever’, city leaders experiment with urban design (e.g. temporary sta- diums, zero-carbon building design, or large-scale environmental restoration projects) and link them to global environmental debates. Visual analysis techniques are used to code architectural and geospatial images in 61 Olympic planning proposals, and to evaluate the use of visualisation practices in urban politics. While these designs are quite speculative, the visual artefacts produced through the planning process can be used as political tools for catalysing investment and project- ing policy leadership. Keywords geovisualisation, mega-event, planning, sustainability, urban design Corresponding author: John Lauermann, Medgar Evers College, City University of New York, 1650 Bedford Ave, Brooklyn, NY 11225, USA. Email: jlauermann@mec.cuny.edu