By Erik Berg, Chairman, Habitat Norway
Starting point: “The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity”. The Olympic Charter.
The present day global, urban context: From mid – 2013 to mid – 2014 corporate buying of existing properties exceeded USD 600 billion in the top 100 recipient cities. A year later it had almost doubled exceeding 1 trillion. Norwegian finance capital is also involved.
This trend reflects a move away from a system of small properties embedded in city areas, criss-crossed by streets and small public squares. The trend moves towards mega projects with sometimes huge footprints that erase much of the public tissue of people, streets and squares and of playing fields for children and young people – not to mention public meeting places for adults and elderly people. This privatizes and de-urbanizes city space – no matter the added density. It forces people out of areas where they have been living for years. It destroys the economic activities upon which ordinary people base their lives. It reduces opportunities for a decent future for children and youth.
This is fatal because it is in the cities to a large extent that the powerless have left their imprint – culturally, economically and socially – and forged alliances and advocated policies with great success. It is only in cities that the power in one’s powerlessness can be gained. Because nobody or nothing can fully control such a diversity of people and engagements. Not even extreme police brutality can do this as we have seen in Brazil where young, black people according to Amnesty International and Norwegian Church Relief reports have been killed in scores since 2007. All this in order to facilitate the so – called inclusive games. They in my mind turned out to be rather exclusive. As the broader developments around the Games in Rio de Janeiro will be presented in the film and the subsequent discussions in the event on the 16th, I will not evolve further into those.
Thus, the theme of this meeting reflects directly a contentious clause in the negotiations on the draft New urban agenda: the clause on the “Right to the City”. The term originates in the French philosopher Henri Lefebre’s 1968 book “Le Droit a la ville”. He prioritises collective right over individual right to urban space and gives every inhabitant – and not just the legal citizens – the right to not only occupy a pre-existing urban space, but also to produce spaces accord-ing to needs. In the negotiations on the New urban agenda the US and the EU explicitly rejected that a country needs to adhere to the principle of social justice for all urban inhabitants, and not only the legally recognized citizens.
It is in the context of the neo-liberal world that the Olympic movement operates. The dominating ideology is an “all you can eat mentality – privatizing gains and socializing losses”. Is this an ideology that the IOC can identify itself with? Does the new IOC manifest “Olympic Agenda 2020” take a clear stand on redistributional issues?
The Olympics as a force of eviction: International mega events, including global conferences and international sporting events such as Olympic Games, are often the rationale behind large scale evictions. For instance, reports indicate that some 720000 peoples were forcibly evicted in Seoul and Inchon (South Korea) prior to the 1998 Olympic Games. Some 30000 were forcibly evicted in Atlanta prior to the 1996 Olympic Games. The oldest public housing project in the US, Techwood Homes, was deliberately detonated because it stood in the way of a “sanitised corridor” running through to CNN headquarters and the city centre. Half of the 800 houses were knocked down. Of the remainder, after renovation, only one fifth was reserved for poor families, and strict new credit and criminal record checks excluded many who needed the these units. The other apartments have become middle to upper income accommodation. Preparat-ions for the 2004 Olympic Games in Athens were used as a pretext to forcibly evict several Roma settlements located in Greater Athens, similarly forcing hundreds from their homes. A further 1,7 million people was reportedly evicted in Bejing (China) in the run up to the 2008 Olympics. Targets included homeless people, unregistered taxi drivers, snack vendours, garbage collectors and other actors in the informal economy. Many were forcibly kept in holding centres before they were sent to their assumed places of origin.
According to a report from the Geneva based Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions (COHRE) from 2008 more than 2 million people have been moved from their homes over the past 20 years, many of them forcibly, to clear space for the Olympic Games.
Human rights violations: Repressive measures within China and Tibet at the 2008 games, LGBT rights surrounding the 2014 Winter Games in Sochi and casualties on construction sites for the Qatar 2022 World Cup all point toward the persistent human rights issues which all too often accompany mega-events. Rather than representing unity and diversity, it seems as though the Olympic Games have started to signify oppression and exclusion.
The Olympics and security: In many host cities, publicly funded yet privately owned urban renewal projects, have been leveraged to impose enhanced surveillance measures. For instance, London, 2012, saw the rise of “defensible” architecture, which restricts the access and activities of those deemed “undesirable” – particularly skateboarders, protesters and the homeless – in newly developed areas.
London’s Strand East Community – developed by Vastint Holding, IKEA’s holding company for residential development, ahead of the 2012 Olympics, is characteristic of the city’s propensity towards “enclave living”. This means a high security presence, which accepts those with the capital to invest and rejects those who are deemed a threat to the safety and security of its residents. Such projects have caused urban spaces to be splintered. Those who lack the desire or means to engage with the consumer economy are stigmatised as unwanted.
This process of securitisation has been fuelled by fear of attacks on popular sporting events such as the bombing of the 2013 Boston Marathon and the targeting of of Paris’ Stade de France in November 2015. Planning committes have been burdened with the impossible task of preventing such attacks, by building security into the infrastructure, planning, organisation and practice associated with mega events.
Questions to the panel and the audience:
Given IOC’s noble goals of promoting peace and development and their “transnational” authority to decide during approval processes/negotiations on the design and place of sports and additional infrastructure, an important issue becomes: how can the IOC approve development plans that destroy the life conditions and habitat of millions of people?
How can this in the future be avoided or at least reduced? How can IOC avoid being captured by private interests in local organizing committees who ends up promising much more than the cities can afford? What measures does the “Olympic Agenda 2020” introduce to avoid such situations?
These days the Summer Games might generate USD 5-6 billion dollars in total revenue – nearly half of which goes back to the IOC.
With the enormous financial and human resources that the IOC commands how will it spend these resources to promote peace, human rights and people’s basic needs? To empower the category of people that it alienates?
What will the IOC do with the Sustainable Development goals (11) and the New Urban agenda’s both prioritizing directly and indirectly people’s right to the city – both adopted by the UN in 2016? How will the IOC work with the UN to meet these challenges.
Further: how will the IOC for instance work with local governments and local communities to promote sport for all in a more systematic and structural manner? Today the global South is “belittered” with a multitude of small, ad hoc sports for development projects and young, enthusiastic experts from the North.
How will the IOC and its national committees promote a more sector and programmatic approach with national and local authorities? How will it with for instance UN’s Special Rapporteur on adequate housing lift global awareness around such issues? Do the IOC and the Norwegian Sports Association see this as a challenge?
