Every potential Olympic Games organiser assumers that the games they organise will be special, that they will help to set new, high standards both in the organisation of sports events themselves, as well as in the planning and carrying out of projects accompanying the games. Since the document entitled Agenda 21 was approved by the UN at the Earth Summit in 1992, environmental protection has become the mainstay of the discussion among the Olympic family, and the problem of sustainable planning has become one of the main features of published reports. The conclusion of the conference coincided with the Lillehammer Winter Olympics of 1994, which were praised as the first green games to be held, under the motto “White Green Games”. Four years prior, in Nagano, its organisers advertised the games with the slogan “Coexistence with nature”. London 2012, with its motto “Inspire a Generation”, highlighted the educational aspect of the events and the words “environment” and “sustainability” were on the lips of everyone everywhere in the context of every activity the organisers were undertaking. During Rio 2016, the motto was “Green Games for Blue Planet”. The goal of the article is to investigate whether these mottoes have been actually reflected in the measures taken by authorities and encompassing the period between proclaiming them as Games organisers, during the sports event itself, and during the post-Games period. The author focused on the two most recent Games (Rio 2016 and PyeongChang 2018) in order to verify whether the ambitious assumptions that filled all manners of reports have been made a reality. The diagnosis presented in the article indicates that the pursuit of satisfying the ambitions of authorities and organisers is often at odds with the precepts and concept of sustainable development. The results of the study are an essential starting point for the discussion on developing a new formula—that of the European Games, whose third edition is to be organised in Krakow in 2023, and whose respective subject matter is identical to the problems that an Olympic Games organiser must face in terms of infrastructure planning.

This paper presents the geography of the historic central district of Kraków, Poland before, during and after the first wave of the 2020 pandemic. It describes how the disneyfied main part of the UNESCO heritage site of universal values turned into a ghost town as functional changes were turning into physical ones amid restrictions. From the results of pre-pandemic processes (that, as we argue, turned the city into its disneyfied version), to the lockdown (that later revealed itself to be but the first one in a row), to the post-lockdown recovery, these changes are presented in modified figure-ground diagrams with accessibility being defined by both tangible and intangible properties. The results are set against the background of the city’s current policies regarding economic recovery, mobility and accessibility to urban green areas. As an attempt to address the present vulnerability of the once resilient historic city centres—of which Kraków Old Town is a luminous example—this paper tends to be a voice in the debate on the post-2020 planning and the strategies we will need to face the subsequent waves of this, or other, pandemics as well as consequences of climate change.

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