Eviction notice: Housing the Games

Delhi is soon to be a world-class city. In October the first Commonwealth Games (CWG) held in India will camp out in the capital city. Seventy-one national teams will be welcomed by 26 new stadiums, a web of new transit networks including an almost US$2 billion airport terminal, and a Games Village priced at US$230.7 million.

The city is set to accommodate 10 million tourists in 2010 who, if all goes well, won’t confuse world class Delhi with another Delhi – city of 150,000 homeless people, hundreds of informal slum clusters, and an estimated 60,000 beggars. A recent report by Housing and Land Rights Network-Habitat International Coalition (HLRN-HIC) describes the latter Delhi and details direct steps by the local and national Indian governments to clear the streets in preparation for the CWG.

The report, ‘The 2010 Commonwealth Games: Whose Wealth? Whose Commons?’, is a biting account of the social impact of the CWG on Delhi’s poor and marginalised, who have faced unprecedented formal and indirect eviction to accommodate the USD$1.6 billion mega-event.

‘We’ve been used to evictions for mega-events … but this size and magnitude, it’s really alarming,’ said Shivani Chaudhry, report co-author and human rights activist.

Delhi won its bid to hold the CWG in 2003. According to the report, from 2003-08, almost 350 slum clusters holding 300,000 people were demolished and only one third of these residents relocated. Between 2004-07 alone 45,000 homes were razed.

‘Close to 400,000 people are going to be displaced because of this event, and that’s a conservative estimate,’ said Miloon Kothari, HLRN coordinator and co-author of the CWG report.

In the largest documented single move, Delhi authorities cleared homes along the Yamuna River, adjacent to the Games Village, for a 2004 beautification project. More than 35,000 families were evicted.

‘The argument is that it’s for the prestige of the country, so people have to be sacrificed. It completely violates human rights,’ Chaudhry said.

While the scale of evictions seen in Delhi is uncommon, Chaudhry said the history of mega-events is a stunning pattern of nearly uninterrupted human displacement.

The group of international mega-events most notably includes the CWG, the summer and winter Olympic Games and the football World Cup, and cities that have vied for and joined the league of the world class, host city are many. Each host has a trailing legacy of formal evictions and informal displacement. A 2009 UN report by Raquel Rolnik, special rapporteur on adequate housing, found that evictions, displacement, and sweeping action against the homeless have become host city norms.

A widely cited but still stinging example is the 1988 Olympic Games in Seoul, where 15 per cent of the population were evicted. Twenty years later with Beijing as the Olympics host, nine central infrastructure projects required one million square meters of land but the number of evictions is unreported by the Chinese government and its media dispatchers.

Europe too is familiar with human shuffling for mega-events. For the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona, Spain, 200 families were evicted. To prepare for the 2012 London Olympics, a minted Compulsory Purchase Order gives local government the power to force residents out for projects in Olympic districts.

‘Every Games in history has had evictions and every city gets away with it,’ Chaudhry said.

While every host city may displace to clear land for venues and transit – and some for less altruistic ‘beautification’ purposes, like India’s criminalisation of its unsightly beggars in Delhi – certain cities with a legacy of mass displacement share characteristics that Chaudhry said should serve as a warning sign for future mega-event bidders.

In the physical make-up of the city, one major indicator to foreshadow mass evictions is a deficit of existing infrastructure. Host cities in advanced countries often have adequate stadiums and more importantly transit; existing major airports as in London prior to its bid for 2012, or roadways and city transit as in Vancouver before it was 2010 Olympics host.

‘In India we don’t have that,’ Chaudhry said. ‘It all has to be built, so families have to be evicted just for a highway or a flyway.’

Another indicator that a host city will issue evictions in its preparation is a large population, Chaudhry said. Inflated populations breed large numbers of homeless. These factors combined with elements like weak human rights and housing laws create a perfect storm for forced eviction.

Countries like India and South Africa, current FIFA World Cup host, share these traits; both have high levels of social exclusion, Kothari said.

When host countries hold a significant poor population, the prickly subject of sports versus social needs becomes more relevant. Both India and South Africa have allocated vast and over-budgeted resources, citing national image-building and domestic industry promotion; a mega-event that really works for everyone. But the trickle-down effect of an international sports event is not a perfect theory.

‘It might provide benefits for the whole, but those won’t be accessible to the marginalised,’ said Davinder Lambda, president of HIC and executive director of the Mazingra Institute.

Lambda said the drive for host-city prestige has created a new form of entrepreneurial governance, where local and regional governments vie for mega-events to spur their urban development.

The large-scale urban restructuring that mega-events require – at an unnaturally rapid pace – inevitably leads to evictions, Lambda said.

‘It ends up being a large public-private partnership,’ Lambda said. ‘And it’s the local and central governments who carry out the evictions.’

SOCCER CITY, SOUTH AFRICA

Preparation for South Africa’s World Cup is another testament to urban development-driven evictions. Residents of the informal Joe Slovo settlement in Cape Town were handed a court-ordered eviction in 2008 to clear out for a pilot housing project. A high court judge had found 6,000 families to be illegal dwellers on the land and ordered their relocation to Delft, on the outskirts of the city. The neighbourhood that would replace Joe Slovo, called N2 Gateway – a project started in 2004 by developer Thubelisha Homes, would hold some 22,000 new housing units. The development project included a plan to relocate Joe Slovo residents, but this is criticised for its grossly inadequate relocation proposal and failure to include residents in any dialogue. A 2009 report by the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) found that ‘community participation in the development solution was non-existent and little care [had] been taken to ensure that housing for the urban poor [was] on well located land’.

Developers and third party government offices also faced heavy criticism for seemingly sacrificing Joe Slovo residents for a project labeled a beautification scheme to prepare for Africa’s first football World Cup.

‘The N2 Gateway evictions are most associated with the 2010 World Cup,’ said Mzwanele Zulu, who lives in Joe Slovo and is head of the group Joe Slovo Liberative Residents.

‘That development mandate was about beautifying and making sure people can’t see South Africa as it is.’

Zulu points to the Joe Slovo location, visible along the Cape Town airport corridor where thousands of international football fans have traveled en route to fill the 64,100 capacity Cape Town Stadium.

An estimated 20,000 shack dwellers in Joe Slovo have so far been evicted, Lambda said.

One ‘temporary relocation area’ (TRA) in Delft is the neighbourhood Blikkiesdorp, nicknamed Tin Can Town. People liken living conditions here to a concentration camp.

‘Residents say it’s worse than apartheid townships,’ Lambda said. ‘If the South African government wanted to hide these people, is that the way to do it?’

South Africa’s TRAs also turned out a euphemism for eviction. The COHRE report documents how families began to defy orders to leave Joe Slovo when the housing units in phases one and two of N2 Gateway started filling up with a different class of residents. Luxury cars appeared in front of the new homes as they began to fill up. The 70 percent allocation of N2 Gateway promised to now-TRA residents remains unfulfilled.

‘There is no such thing as a temporary displacement,’ Chaudhry said. ‘When they’re forced out of the city they lose their livelihoods. It’s permanent.’

In India the Delhi High Court has found gross violations of housing and human rights in the process of CWG development. But with no CWG watchdog or ethics committee, ‘the state is not accountable; the state gets away with it’, Chaudhry said.

‘There have to be much stricter rules when countries bid for games,’ Kothari said, along with monitoring and penal measures for non-compliance.

The CWG report recommends that each city draft a legacy plan before a host bid is advanced, yet alone accepted. Kothari said the commitment to ensure human rights are not sidelined as mega-events crowd host cities should be the responsibility of organisers like FIFA and the International Olympic Committee, and both host and participating governments in ‘the international sporting club’.

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* Dana Wagner is a recent journalism and political science graduate from Carleton University and an intern with Pambazuka News.
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