One of the challenges for any mega sporting event is what to do with the stadia once the fans have left. Qatar has an interesting idea for a legacy use for the stadium. The plan is to donate 20,000 seats to developing countries to give them a boost in their development of stadia of their own; and the remainder to be used by Qatar Foundation staff and students and the Qatar Women’s team.
As delightful as they are to design and build, the venues that are created to host mega sporting events are often not as much fun to maintain once the event is over. What is to be done? In the last decade, much of the philosophy behind the venue legacy for major sporting events has changed. It used to be very common for large, permanent complexes and stadia to be built far from the center of town. The thinking was that a use would be found for these small cities (without inhabitants) later. This proved a costly error in planning as more and more venues went derelict with no commercial enterprise available to sustain them and too far from the center of the cities to be of much use to anyone.
