Good morning. The 2026 Winter Olympic Games officially start today in Italy, but the organizing has been going on for a long time. During these Games, one plan stands out: the Olympic Village in Milan is bringing sustainability to the forefront. The housing project is in focus today, along with a closer look at yesterday’s speech from Bank of Canada Governor Tiff Macklem.

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Hello, or buon giorno as we say in Italy. I am Eric Reguly, the Rome-based European bureau chief of The Globe and Mail and one of the six Globe reporters covering the Milan Cortina Olympics. I am writing from Milan, a city gripped with Olympics mania – and new Olympic sites, not all of them fully completed.

Olympics are associated with waste. All sorts of projects, from arenas to housing, often go unused after the Games, or lie partly abandoned. They exemplify bad planning and near-criminal budget overruns.

The “Big Owe” – Montreal’s 1976 Olympic stadium – ended up costing 10 times more than the original estimate and wasn’t fully finished until more than a decade after the Games. Much of the infrastructure built for the Athens Games in 2004 lies in ruins. Ditto Rio de Janeiro’s from 2016.

The litany of reckless spending and shabby design haunted the organizers of Milan Cortina, whose opening ceremonies take place today. They feared making costly mistakes or building projects that would become white elephants after the Games. Which is not to say that all mistakes were avoided. For instance, the new Santagiulia hockey arena in suburban Milan was still a work in progress one week ahead of the Games (though the rink itself was ready to go).

In general, the Milan Cortina planning focused on temporary structures, such as spectator grandstands, that could be dismantled quickly, or dual-purpose projects that could find practical, sustainable post-Olympic lives.

The Olympic Village in Milan, which I visited yesterday, is a case in point.

The project, whose cost will land at about US$150-million, was conceived as an urban regeneration scheme. It will house some 1,500 athletes (mostly for hockey, figure skating and other rink sports), plus competitors for the Paralympics.

When the Games finish, the site will be converted into Italy’s, and one of Europe’s, largest subsidized student housing sites, with 1,700 beds. The housing is well needed. Milan, Italy’s business and fashion capital, is an expensive city which has priced most students out of the centre.

Milan’s urban planners had been struggling for years, decades even, to devise ways to reinvent the abandoned rail freight site, known as Porta Romana, in the southern part of the city proper – not a suburb. The rail yards were built in the 1890s and died a slow death in recent decades as deindustrialization gutted traditional, hands-on employment in northern Italy. They became an industrial blight in an otherwise dynamic city.

Porta Romana’s overhaul was given a boost when Milan Cortina won the right in 2019 to host the 2026 Games. The global architecture firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was recruited to design the Olympic Village. Six new residential blocks have emerged from the messy spread of rail tracks and warehouses. Two brick repair sheds have been restored and turned into communal spaces. The handsome buildings give a hint of the site’s industrial past. About 40,000 square metres of green space, which include a tree-lined courtyard, were added.

During my visit to the village, athletes from around the world were pouring into the site. Their country flags were being draped from apartment balconies. Some athletes were strolling the pedestrian square in the light rain. Others were visiting the spa, the beauty centre, the gymnasium, the coffee shops and various retail outlets, one of which was selling official Olympic clothing even though all its shoppers were athletes wearing such clothing.

The athletes I talked to praised the village and said they liked their small, simple, sleek rooms, with full bathrooms – including bidets (how Italian!).

“It’s a beautiful atmosphere here,” said Viktoriia Butcaeva, the coach for the Azerbaijani figure-skating team. “The village is small enough to feel intimate.”

Keep reading: Our experts answered your Winter Olympics questions ahead of Milan Cortina, check them out here.