Housing the competitors is one of the hardest logistical problems a host city faces. The village must work as a high-performance facility for weeks and as normal housing for decades.
The population is large and badly synchronised
Thousands of athletes arrive from every time zone, and their competition schedules span early mornings and late evenings across the same period.
Some are preparing for an event days away while others have finished and are celebrating, and both groups occupy the same buildings.
Managing noise, lighting and movement between those populations is a genuine design problem rather than a matter of house rules.
Catering runs continuously and at scale
A dining hall serving this population operates around the clock, because there is no hour at which nobody is either preparing to compete or recovering from it.
Dietary requirements span religious observance, allergies, weight-category needs and the very different intakes of endurance and power athletes.
Every ingredient also has to be documented, since a contaminated supplement or mislabelled product can produce an anti-doping finding an athlete cannot explain.
Medical and recovery services sit on site
A polyclinic provides imaging, physiotherapy and general medicine, because sending athletes into a city hospital during a Games is impractical for both parties.
Recovery facilities are heavily used and heavily contested, so access has to be scheduled rather than left to demand.
Teams supplement this with their own staff, which means the village also functions as a workplace for a large medical population.
Security shapes the layout
The village is an accredited zone with controlled entry, and the perimeter determines how athletes move between accommodation, transport and venues.
Transport must run frequently enough that nobody waits before competing, which requires dedicated routes through a city that is otherwise congested.
These requirements push the village towards a single large site, even where dispersed housing would be cheaper.
The afterlife is the hardest constraint
The buildings are designed for temporary occupation at extreme density and then sold or let as ordinary homes.
Conversion is expensive and specified from the outset, because retrofitting kitchens and reconfiguring rooms afterwards costs more than building for both uses at once.
Villages that failed to plan this became the most visible symbol of a Games leaving a city worse off, which is why legacy plans now precede the construction rather than follow it.