[Urbanstudy] The Games and Urban Capture

[Jeebesh Bagchi]

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/story/0,,2100794,00.html

London is getting into the Olympic spirit - by kicking out the Gypsies

Evictions of the poor, along with mentally ill people and beggars,  
are one of the games' best-established traditions

George Monbiot
Tuesday June 12, 2007
The Guardian

Everything we have been told about the Olympic legacy turns out to be  
bunkum. The games are supposed to encourage us to play sport; they  
are meant to produce resounding economic benefits and help the poor.  
It's all untrue. As the evictions in London begin, a new report shows  
that the only certain Olympic legacy is a transfer of wealth from the  
poor to the rich.

Both Lord Coe and Tessa Jowell, the sports secretary, like the  
boosters for every city to have bid for the Olympics, have claimed  
that the games will lever us off our sofas and turn us into a nation  
of athletes. But Jowell knows this is nonsense. In 2002 her  
department published a report which found that "hosting events is not  
an effective, value-for-money method of achieving ... a sustained  
increase in mass participation". One study suggests that the Olympics  
might even reduce our physical activity: we stay indoors watching  
them on TV, rather than kicking a ball around outside. And this is  
before we consider the effects of draining the national lottery:  
Sport England will lose £100m.

The government's favourite thinktanks, Demos and the Institute for  
Public Policy Research, examined the claim that the Olympics produce  
a lasting economic boom. They found that "there is no guaranteed  
beneficial legacy from hosting an Olympic games ... and there is  
little evidence that past games have delivered benefits to those  
people and places most in need". Tessa Jowell must be aware of this  
as well - she wrote the forward to the report. A paper published by  
the London assembly last month found that "long-term unemployed and  
workless communities were largely unaffected [by better job  
prospects] by the staging of the games in each of the four previous  
host cities".

Far more damning is a study released last week by the Centre on  
Housing Rights and Evictions. In every city it examined, the Olympic  
games - accidentally or deliberately - have become a catalyst for  
mass evictions and impoverishment. Since the 1988 Olympics in Seoul,  
more than 2 million people have been driven from their homes to make  
way for the Olympics. The games have become a licence for land grabs.

The 1988 games are widely seen as a great success. But they were used  
by the military dictatorship (which had ceded power in 1987) as an  
opportunity to turn Seoul from a vernacular city owned by many people  
into a corporate city owned by the elite - 720,000 people were thrown  
out of their homes; people who tried to resist were beaten by thugs  
and imprisoned; tenants were evicted without notice and left to  
freeze (some survived by digging caves into a motorway embankment);  
street vendors were banned; homeless people, those with mental health  
problems, alcoholics and beggars were rounded up and put into a  
prison camp. The world saw nothing of this: just a glossy new city  
full of glossy new people.

Barcelona's Olympics, in 1992, are cited as a model to which all  
succeeding Olympic cities should aspire. But, though much less  
destructive than Seoul's, they were also used to cleanse the city.  
Roma communities were evicted and dispersed. The council produced a  
plan to "clean the streets of beggars, prostitutes, street sellers  
and swindlers" and "annoying passers-by". Some 400 poor and homeless  
people were subjected to "control and supervision". Between 1986 and  
1992 house prices rose by 240% as the Olympic districts were  
gentrified, while the public housing stock fell by 76%. There was no  
consultation before the building began - the games were too urgent  
and important. Around 59,000 people were driven out of the city by  
rising prices.

Even before the 1996 Olympics, Atlanta was one of the most segregated  
cities in the US. But the games gave the clique of white developers  
who ran them the excuse to engineer a new ethnic cleansing programme.  
Without any democratic process they demolished large housing projects  
(whose inhabitants were mostly African-American) and replaced them  
with shiny middle-class homes; about 30,000 families were evicted.  
They issued "quality of life ordinances", which criminalised people  
who begged or slept rough. The police were given pre-printed arrest  
citations bearing the words "African-American, Male, Homeless": they  
just had to fill in the name, charge and date. In the year before the  
games they arrested 9,000 homeless people. Many were locked up  
without trial until the games were over; others were harassed until  
they left the city. By the time the athletes arrived, downtown  
Atlanta had been cleared for the white middle classes.

In 2002, there was much less persecution of the poor, but the  
economic legacy was still regressive: house prices in Sydney doubled  
between 1996 and 2003. No provision was made for social housing in  
the Olympic village, and there were mass evictions from boarding  
houses and rented homes, which the authorities did nothing to stop.  
The old pattern resumed in Athens, where the Olympics were used as an  
excuse to evict 2,700 Roma, even from places where no developments  
were planned.

In Beijing 1.25 million people have already been displaced to make  
way for the games, and another quarter of a million are due to be  
evicted. Like the people of Seoul, they have been threatened and  
beaten if they resist. Housing activists have been imprisoned. One  
man, Ye Guozhu, is currently serving four years for "disturbing  
social order", and has reportedly been suspended by his arms from the  
ceiling of his cell and tortured with electric batons. Beggars,  
vagrants and hawkers have been rounded up and sentenced to "re- 
education through labour". The authorities are planning to  
hospitalise mentally ill people so that visitors won't have to see them.

London is about to establish its credentials as a true Olympic city  
by evicting Gypsies and Travellers from Clays Lane in Newham and  
Waterden Crescent in Hackney: 430 people will be thrown out of the  
Clays Lane housing co-op and a 100-year-old allotment will be  
destroyed to make way for a concrete path that will be used for four  
weeks. Nine thousand new homes will be built for the games, but far  
more will be lost to the poor through booming prices, which are  
rising much faster around the Olympic site than elsewhere in London.  
The buy-to-let vultures have already landed.

The International Olympic Committee raises no objection to any of  
this. It lays down rigid criteria for cities hosting the games, but  
these do not include housing rights. How could they? City authorities  
want to run the games for two reasons: to enhance their prestige and  
to permit them to carry out schemes that would never otherwise be  
approved. Democratic processes can be truncated, compulsory purchase  
orders slapped down, homes and amenities cleared. The Olympic  
bulldozer clears all objections out of the way. There can be no  
debate, no exceptions, no modifications. Everything must go.

None of this is an argument against the Olympic games. It is an  
argument against moving them every four years. Let them stay in a  
city where the damage has already been done. And let it be anywhere  
but here.

· George Monbiot's book Heat: How to Stop the Planet Burning is now  
out in paperback
www.monbiot.com