Paving The Way For Neoliberal Development: Urban Transformation And The Mega-Event
BY TONY SAMARA
In 2010 Cape Town, South Africa will host a number of soccer matches for the World Cup, including one of the semi-final matches. That same year New Delhi, India, will host the Commonwealth Games, and Shanghai, China the World Expo. Different as they are, all three cities confront an urban population marked by increasing inequality, entrenched poverty and growing spatial segregation. It is not, therefore, altogether surprising that in each city the event is explicitly marketed as an urban development project that will improve living conditions for all residents.
THE CHALLENGE OF URBAN GOVERNANCE
The explosive growth of cities in recent decades, in terms of population and geographic size, and the accompanying increases in poverty and inequality, has pushed scholars, anti-poverty activists and policy makers to focus on the issue of urban development. As early as 1996, UN Habitat declared that, “urban poverty and its attendant human cost is perhaps the single greatest challenge of our time” (UN Habitat, 1996). Estimates vary, but what is undeniable is that virtually all population growth in the coming decades will be in urban areas, mostly in the cities of the global South. This presents a host of challenges – environmental, social, economic and political – that can be understood collectively as the challenge of urban governance.
These major events in Cape Town, Delhi and Shanghai– what urban scholars refer to as mega-events – are cultural in nature, and of a relatively short duration. However, given the enormous expenditure of time, energy and public resources required to put on them on, it is understandable that proponents, including city officials, argue they will leave in their wake a deep and lasting socioeconomic legacy for the host city.
Urban development is the central theme of the Shanghai Expo, captured in the slogan, “Better City, Better Life”, and the event will showcase best practices from around the world and focus attention on a sustainable urban future. More importantly, preparations for the Expo, including a massive expansion of the inner-city metro-rail system, are credited with creating jobs, improving public infrastructure, and revitalizing neglected parts of the city.
In Cape Town, local officials and proponents from the private sector see the World Cup as an anchor for future economic growth in a city that is still struggling with unequal development inherited from the apartheid era, and urban planning documents regularly refer to a successful World Cup as central to the city’s future. In Delhi, the India Olympic Association, the governing body for the Commonwealth Games in India, proclaims that, “The 2010 Games will be the catalyst for the development of the city of Delhi and its environs. New venues will be built, existing world-class venues will be further upgraded and a range of infrastructure projects which will benefit the population of Delhi and its surrounding areas will be initiated and completed including technology infrastructure, a comprehensive roads programme and a new metro system” (Commonwealth Games Delhi).
The idea, and the hope, that mega-events can serve as engines of development should be understood within the context of a dramatic shift in how cities are governed that emerged in the United States in the 1970s. Often referred to as urban neoliberalism, the new approach involves a delinking of cities from the national states in which they exist and increased responsibility for their own economic growth. The expectation is that this new entrepreneurial city will compete as a relatively independent economic actor in the marketplace rather than depend on the support of the federal government (Harvey, 1989). Cities will have to find ways to create jobs, attract investment – including investment from their own central governments – and profitably use urban space. In response, cities are tying socioeconomic development to economic growth and economic growth to the accumulation of capital, generating in the process an era of inter-city competition that is today global in scope. Mega-events, due to the enormous amount of attention and economic activity they generate, and the amounts of investment associated with them, are a much sought after prize in this contest.
Central to urban neoliberalism is the ascent and dominance of an unbelievably profitable and dynamic urban property market that has transformed inner cities across the world, and the related efforts of city leaders to attract businesses, visitors and affluent residents. In cities across the U.S. and in many other countries the effort has been a success, ‘revitalization’ now a common buzzword used to describe the process of creating downtown playgrounds.
At the same time, increases in the cost of living have heightened tensions between older, less affluent residents and the new urban elite. In many cities around the world revitalization has meant sharp conflicts over urban space and resources, as well as a change in the class, and often the racial and ethnic composition of now desirable inner city neighborhoods. The city transformed is often a more affluent, less diverse and, for marginal populations, a less welcoming and accessible one.
THE MEGA-EVENT AS ECONOMIC MIRACLE?
Mega-events fit comfortably into the model of cities competing against each other on the open market to attract investment, tourists, conferences, and other income and employment generating activity. The Olympic Games are perhaps the most well known example but many other events of varying sizes, ranging from major sporting events to international conferences, are fought over with equal vigor by cities large and small seeking to brand themselves as globally prominent “world cities”. These efforts often become part of broader revitalization projects led by city and business leaders and shaped by the desire to become destination cities, and can include construction of convention centers and hotels, public safety campaigns, regulation of informal economic activity and the upgrading of infrastructure.
But do mega-events live up to the hype? Have they in the past, and can they in the future, help cities to confront “perhaps the single greatest challenge of our time”? It is unlikely. The academic research on the economic and social impacts of mega-events is fairly clear: these events, contrary to the rosy predictions which tend to precede them, rarely generate the growth they promise, often generating debt instead, and can exacerbate conflict between various social groups within the city (COHRE, 2007; Flyvbjerg, Bruzelius & Rothengatter, 2003). Lower income urban residents, ostensibly major beneficiaries, pay a steep price before, during and after the events.
Even in the small number of cases where the events arguably did more good than harm, as in the 1992 Olympic Games in Barcelona and 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, it is debatable whether hosting the events was the wisest use of public funds, and whether these examples are replicable in other cities. It is also important to keep in mind that most of the research conducted focuses on cities of the global North, in the United States, Western Europe, Canada, and Australia, where the development context is quite different from cities like New Delhi, Shanghai and Cape Town.
PAVING THE WAY
Although it is important to assess the cost-benefit aspect of mega-events, we must examine how cities prepare for them as well, as they incur steep social and political costs, in addition to their economic costs. These preparations, often neglected in later assessments, also form part of their legacy. As neoliberal development projects, mega-events can transform, or help to transform, urban spaces, and significantly impact urban populations before they happen. The events in Shanghai, Delhi and Cape Town, for example, will all occur in, or close to, the heart of the central city. Massive construction projects are well underway in each location, greatly changing the physical and social characteristics of the event sites and surrounding areas.
These physical changes are accompanied by social changes as well. One of the most controversial issues to emerge as cities prepare for mega-events is the displacement, eviction or resettlement of those who occupied the spaces previously. The site of the new Green Point stadium in Cape Town, for example, was for many years home to over 800 informal traders who were evicted from the site in November 2008. According to the city, this is because of ongoing construction, but they have offered neither a guarantee that traders will be able to return once the construction and the 2010 soccer matches are completed nor compensation for lost income in the meantime. Furthermore, management of the site post-World Cup has been turned over to a private consortium for at least thirty years. Traders fear 2010 means the end of the livelihood that supports them and their families, and are frustrated at being effectively locked out of the negotiation process between the city and the consortium over how the site will be used after the World Cup.
In Delhi, activists and former residents of the Yamuna Pushta informal settlement in the inner city link the bulldozing of 40,000 homes and the eviction of over 140,000 people along the Yamuna riverbed in 2004 to preparations for the 2010 Commonwealth Games (Bharucha, 2006). After the courts ruled the informal settlement illegal and a source of pollution, the city evicted the residents but provided no compensation for the lost homes and possessions. Less than a quarter of the residents were offered resettlement aid, the rest were left to fend for themselves. Most of those resettled were moved far from the city center to a barren, peripheral area with little or no access to public services, transportation, or means of livelihood. Yamuna Pushta, before its destruction, was one of Delhi’s largest and oldest slums, a community containing schools, clinics, temples and mosques. All were torn down. Today the riverbed area is home to the Commonwealth Games Village, Metrorail Headquarters and plots slated for market-rate accommodations.
Shanghai has also experienced evictions linked to its 2010 Expo. Over 40,000 residents were resettled in 2004, in part due to preparations for the event, and the Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions estimates an additional 400 000 will be evicted under an urban revitalization program that includes the Expo (COHRE, 2006). Unlike Cape Town and Delhi, in Shanghai authorities have compensated most of the displaced and provided new, often upgraded accommodations. Satisfaction over the compensation is mixed, however, and residents often have little room to negotiate or resist relocation.
In 2006 another 50,000 residents were resettled from the Pudong River area, site of the Expo, over a quarter of whom are elderly. Residents were moved to the Sanlin resettlement area, approximately 5 kilometers away from downtown. Although the new accommodations are an improvement over their previous homes, some residents complain the relocation has increased commuting times, and that they are now far from shopping facilities and conveniences. Many of the elderly also complain of being lonely and isolated with the loss of their old communities. Beyond the immediate impact on individuals, the consequences of this type of development are clear: demolition of old neighborhoods and resettlement of residents for the Expo are part of a broader urban renewal process that is contributing to an overall decline in affordable housing in or near the city center (He, 2007; Wu, 2001).
CONCLUSION
Evictions are only one issue among many that are important in studying the impact of mega-event preparations on urban development. They do, however, raise some important questions about the relationship between mega-events and urban development in general. Advocates for the urban poor, and organizations of the poor themselves argue that these events contribute to, rather than ameliorate, urban inequality. Although urban neoliberalism is often touted as a new approach to urban growth, there is, sadly, nothing new in excluding marginal groups form meaningful participation in the decision making process. At the same time, an approach to development which not only privileges but depends upon private capital gives enormous power to unaccountable local, national and global actors with little investment in the particular spaces which millions upon millions call home.
Beyond the evictions themselves and the trauma associated with them for those who are resettled or simply pushed off is a dramatic restructuring of urban space. Although not a uniform process, a basic pattern holds true in most cases: formerly residential areas, be they working class or slum, are simply wiped off the map and replaced with parks, rail stations, stadiums and upscale housing for affluent locals and foreigners. The evictions or resettlements thus signify more than event preparations, they can represent the physical, social and cultural obliteration of huge sections of the city. Central cities often become hollowed out, with the working class and the poor driven to the urban periphery, welcome only to make the now long, and often expensive, trek back into the city to labor.
Given this pattern, can the mega-event, as an expression of urban neoliberalism, be considered a catalyst for development? As even this brief overview indicates, there are a range of effects on vulnerable urban residents from event preparations. These include their status, the existing level of development, and state action/inaction. In Shanghai, working class urban residents fared relatively well compared to slum dwellers in Delhi with regard to replacement housing and compensation. In Cape Town, where apartheid had already removed the urban poor from downtown, city officials face a much smaller population of displaced and, perhaps predictably, are finding them fairly easy to ignore. On the measure of urban democracy, however, inhabitants in each city appear to have been denied their fundamental right to determine the conditions of their lives and the future of their city. This new market-driven urbanism, unless it can be effectively challenged, will in many places continue to produce cities for the rich, townships for the poor.
Dr. Tony Roshan Samara (tsamara@gmu.edu) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology & Anthropology at George Mason University (http://sociology.gmu.edu). His research and teaching interests include race, ethnicity and nationalism, globalization, urban studies, criminology and international development and security. In particular, Samara’s work focuses on mechanisms of social control and the struggle over political power in global and local contexts.
REFERENCES
Bharucha, Ruzbeh N., 2006, Yamuna Gently Weeps: A Journey into the Yamuna Pushta Slum Demolitions, Sainathann Communication, India.
Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, 2007, Fair Play for Housing Rights: Mega-Events, Olympic Games and Housing Rights. Geneva, Switzerland. http://www.cohre.org/view_page.php?page_id=270. Accessed January 3, 2009.
Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, 2006 Global Survey on Forced Evictions: Violations of Human Rights 2003-2006, COHRE, Geneva.
Commonwealth Games Delhi, http://www.qbtpl.net/cwg/bid_history/html/WHY-DELHI-FOR-2010/main.htm. Accessed November, 2008.
Flyvbjerg, Bent, Nils Bruzelius & Werner Rothengatter, 2003, Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition, Cambridge University Press.
Harvey, David, 1989, From Managerialism to Entrepreneurialism: The Transformation in Urban Governance in Late Capitalism, Geografiska Annaler, 1, 3-18.
He, Shenjing, 2007, State-sponsored Gentrification Under Market Transition: The Case of Shanghai, Urban Affairs Review, 43(2), pp.171-198.
UN Habitat, The Recife Declaration, 1996, Recife International Meeting on Urban Poverty, Recife, Brazil, 17-21 March 1996. http://ww2.unhabitat.org/programmes/ifup/rde.asp. Accessed January 3, 2009.
Wu, Fulong, 2001, Housing provision under globalisation: a case study of Shanghai, Environment and Planning A, 33, pp.1741-1764.
