2010: The Year of the Mega-Event
The year 2010 is on the horizon and people from all over the world are coming together. The congregation points: Shanghai, Johannesburg and Vancouver. These are the main sites for next year’s World Expo, World Cup and Winter Olympics, respectively. But all is far from well in these anti-proletarian Potemkin villages that governments are spending billions to build. What we’ve got is a deep trend, and it’s a bad trend. Mega-events are not just in vogue. They’re a growing component of the winner-take-all global economy. They seek to provide sanitized exemplars of what’s good about the modern world but what they really do is expose its worst divisions and deficits. This raises a question we all ought to be asking: Why mega-events and why now?
There’s a traditional explanation: They stoke civic pride, international comity and offer imaginative odes to human progress. All well and good, but the mega-event movement is bigger than that. In this mercurial age of capital mobility, cities seek built environments that are conducive to global connectivity. That is, cities in the new era perpetually seek to become places where the global rich might invest. Planners design their physical spaces accordingly. From that perspective, imagine the bonus of receiving billions in state funds over a period of years for things like high-end mixed use plazas, world class entertainment venues, expanded public transit and tourist accommodation. The high-ending of cities is an inherent feature of the global economy. Preparations for, say, an Olympic games simply provide the funds and justification to accelerate the process of hyper-gentrification.
This mega-event movement is rabidly anti-Jacobsian at its core. What it really puts forth is socially debilitating class homogeneity. It brazenly excludes the poor and makes life harder on the middle class. It threatens to further reduce the world’s great urban districts into millionaire McPlaylands. How polarizing are mega-events? Consider the Olympics. New home prices spiked 240 percent in the run up to the 1992 games in Barcelona. Here in the US, homeless people were arrested or simply booted from Atlanta’s central corridors before the 1996 games. “Police in Atlanta,” the Center on Housing Rights and Evictions reports, “were revealed to be mass producing arrest citations with the following information pre-printed: African-American, Male, Homeless.” This is all micro scale compared with the frenzied neighborhood clearances that happened in Beijing and Seoul, which ruthlessly displaced millions.
There are good reasons to believe that next year’s extravaganzas will not be exceptions. In Vancouver, housing for the poor and elderly was converted to tourist lodging. That conversion reportedly displaced hundreds of people. The city had originally pledged an Olympic housing policy that would deal humanely with the impeding price shocks. When the cost of the needed expansion in low-cost housing became apparent, city hall reneged on its promise in a narrow vote. In Johannesburg there are reports of evictions—the government says “relocations”—to clear a path for World Cup construction. Workers had been earning as little as $100 per month there before a major strike last month. FIFA claims its activities have a positive impact on cities. Why doesn’t its bidding process enforce living wages?
Shanghai’s farcically progressive World Expo theme is “better city, better life.” The event’s many pavilions include one devoted to high tech innovations that are supposed to making cities greener, more efficient, and so on. Now for some good news: UN Habitat’s contingent there will probably be dealing with touchy poverty issues that are germane to Shanghai and its six million-plus slum dwellers. My worry is that they’ll address these issues in the abstract and not speak directly to what happened on the ground beneath their feet. That discussion might start with the 18,000 people forcibly relocated to make way for the Expo. Will the world’s most important advocate for human-centered urban living rise to the occasion? Or will it reject the heart and soul of its being out of politeness to its Orwellian hosts?
The UN, at least outwardly, seems to be taken by Expo fever. So some advice is in order: Don’t mistake these mega-events for the world-uniting forces of internationalism they claim to be. They’re really just polarizing the urban landscapes they claim to enrich.
Josh Leon is a regular contributor to Next American City.
Shanghai’s Rush to the Future
Matt F in Vancouver on Sun, Aug 16, 2009 at 2:37am
VANOC, the Olympic organizing committee in Vancouver, is not living up to its promises regarding the city’s poor. But I think there are going to be some positive legacies from the Olympics that will help make Vancouver a more livable city.
Vancouver’s new rapid transit line, which connects downtown to the airport and Richmond, is opening on Monday. Without the Olympics, this line wouldn’t have been built. The Canada Line has already had an impact on Richmond, where a shopping-mall dominated landscape is being transformed into high-density, mixed use development around the three southernmost stations (furthest from downtown). We also get a pedestrian and bike bridge over the Fraser river. One big caveat to all of this is that the Canada Line was constructed instead of the east-west Evergreen Line to other burbs. The Evergreen line was actually a higher priority before we “won” the Olympics. So really, it might be a wash. Although I think that the provincial and federal funding the city has received for this Olympics-related infrastructure can’t be ignored as a positive.
Also, Vancouver’s Olympic Village is - aside from its crisis-induced financing troubles - a real success. After the Olympics this new development will become a very livable neighborhood, designed from the beginning as a showcase for progressive urban living. Not perfect, but planned and built on a tight schedule and something to be proud of. Beautiful condos, gov’t subsidized low income and seniors housing, and rental stock: all in one neighborhood. Waterfront parks and lots of amenities. It’s hard not to tie this directly to the Olympics. Check out http://www.thechallengeseries.ca/
Meditteranean Guy in Italy on Mon, Aug 17, 2009 at 9:33pm
Health and economy will be the major issue in 2010, with swine flu continue in the 2nd wave and shaky global economy crisis will continue to shake and shape the world. Most organized event will build on top of these two issue. So be smart to tackle your health and plan your future .....
JZ in Philly on Sun, Sep 06, 2009 at 2:53pm
I get the point of the column. However, if the overall city is better off and the poor are no better or worse, then why not invest in large ambitious projects and events? Middle class and well off people live in cities too. With large scale investment cities have more resources to provide services to all their citizens. This is the same issue in Philadelphia and gentrification. We can either have a large fixed number of poor and nothing else, or a large fixed number of poor plus a base of working, tax paying residents. Cities are the future, we have to get used to major investment and mega projects. The challenge is to link these to provide opportunities to the poor that would not otherwise be available.