Istanbul Should Not Be an Olympic City – 2
The 2024 Olympic Games in Paris last summer raised the usual contradiction between high entertainment and the preparations that saw forced evictions of the most vulnerable in the host city, among other human rights violations. (See “Mega-events, human rights and the Paris Olympics,” Land Times/أحوال الأرض, Issue 30 July 2024.) The prospects of host in the Mediterranean region have come up for consideration again. The Paris Games may have netted a $12 bn gain to the French economy; however, this metric does not consider the costs to local inhabitants through inflation and the loss of popular urban spaces.
This article takes a second look from Istanbul to explain why that city’s 2036 Olympic bid is risky. The “2” at the end of the title refers to this second look at the prospects of Istanbul hosting the Games from an article by Cihan Uzunçarşılı Baysal bearing the same title in Radikal İki on 7 April 2013 —HLRN.
It is tiring for someone who opposed the Istanbul 2020 Olympic project and shared reasons in various media based on relevant news, statistics and reports to rewind and repeat them 11 years later, based on Istanbul 2036. On the other hand, it also requires rolling up one’s sleeves 11 years later as a member of the anti-Olympics “Geziciler” group [participants in the 2013 uprising in Istanbul’s Gezi Park].
Then, we were honored with the ‘poisoned gift’ of then EU Minister Egemen Bağış, when Türkiye’s central and local governments of the time eagerly tried to market Istanbul’s 2020 candidacy as an Olympic-host city. It was an initiative easy to predict. The government, which had mounted so much forced eviction and dispossession, would try to build legitimacy through the Olympics and turn Istanbul into a mega construction site, at the expense of its natural, historical and cultural assets and neighborhoods. Had Istanbul prevailed in its Olympic bid, the planned facilities would have subjected the Northern Forests villages--already subject to plunder under the pretext of the long-term Istanbul Canal project--to much earlier development. [See Cihan Uzunçarşılı Baysal, Whose Land? Whose Villages? The Vanishing Settlements of Istanbul’s Northern Forests (Cairo: HIC-HLRN, 2024).]
Considering that the administrators who brought the Olympics to their countries/cities as a means of national pride had polished their own images, it was easy to understand the appetite and ambition of the prime minister of the time. Today, we look at a self-acclaimed social democrat local government and wonder: “What has changed?”
When the political gains of the Olympics are considered from the perspective of the charismatic and ambitious metropolitan mayor, nothing has changed on the administrative side. The result is no different from the norm, but only higher urban rents and capital accumulation. Local government was just trying to market the city by branding it as even-more touristic.
Violations of the “right to habitable housing/habitat” and forced evictions in Olympic cities
The Olympics, FIFA World Cup and similar mega-events are also defined as mega-projects because they cause large-scale transformations in cities. These mega events attract significant numbers of visitors/tourists and have a wide media reach, thus ensuring the recognition of the host city. Meanwhile, as luxury projects aim at touristic gentrification of the city, housing and rentals become increasingly inaccessible for the locals.
Olympic City dwellers can no longer afford to live in their own cities. In Seoul, the host of the 1988 Olympics, apartment rents increased by 20.4% and land rents by 27% in the first eight months of preparations, reaching the highest level since 1978. In Barcelona, host of the 1992 Olympics, residential rents increased by 131%. Touristic Barcelona is one of the cities where the housing crisis is most severe today. In Atlanta, where the monthly rent increase was 0.4% in 1991, rents increased by 7.9% in 1996, just before the hosted Olympic Games, and 15 thousand people from the lower income group left the city due to expensive rents. And this is in addition to the infamous mistreatment of the city’s homeless population through the Olympic season and beyond. In Sydney (Olympic host city in 2000), housing prices increased by 50%, and in London (2012 Olympic host), real estate prices in the Olympic Village area jumped from 1.4% to 4.6%. The Olympics make housing and rentals inaccessible in all host cities, both directly and indirectly causing forced evictions.
Since the Olympic city that takes center stage in front of the global public, the world press and multinational companies need to present the host cities as free of all their ugly, disorderly, dirty and ‘informal’ aspects to become ever shiny, stylish and sterile. Infrastructure, transportation and other transformation projects are put into action under the pretext of the Olympics, but for some reason all these projects are being carried out through the living spaces of the ‘others’!
The unwanted inhabitants of the beautified city are being expelled from the one that wears the Olympic medal. That means that the poor, low-income groups, elderly populations, ethnic minorities, refugees and immigrants, ‘rural-looking’ folks, and the homeless among them, in short, marginalized and vulnerable groups must not appear on that urban stage. Meanwhile, human sexual minorities and street animals are to be culled, as was infamously the case with Istanbul’s hosting of the 1996 UN Conference on Housing and Human Settlements (Habitat II).
While the opposition of Vancouver 2010 was chanting “No to Lands Stolen from Indigenous People,” in London (2012), the low-income groups and the residents whose social housing will be demolished were shouting “Not for Us” and questioning “Whose Games? Whose City?” In 2016, similar voices were echoing from the favelas, the informal housing areas of Rio: “Games of Exclusion.” While the slogan in Tokyo 2020 was “Olympics Kills the Poor”; the opposition to Paris 2024 was denouncing “Social Cleansing.” If the thousands of street cats and dogs that were massacred could talk, would they say “Games of Atrocity”?! Between 1998 and 2008, around 4 million people were forcibly evacuated due to the Olympics and mega projects.
Barcelona’s Romani neighborhoods were demolished; 720,000 people were forcibly evicted from Olympic Seoul, and two million people were forcibly evicted from Beijing (if we count indirect evictions). In London, low-income neighborhoods and social housing around the Olympic Village were demolished and their residents were forcibly evicted. In Rio, favelas were subjected to a ’cleansing’ operation, and thousands of people were forcibly evicted. While Tokyo 2020 declared war on the homeless, Paris 2024 expelled refugees, as well as the homeless, from the city.
These ‘cleansed’ urban spaces are now opened up to the luxurious projects of capital investments for infrastructure, transportation and entertainment. Contrary to the claims that the Olympic projects will improve the lives of those living there, improving the infrastructure does not necessary improve the lives of the current residents, but more often displaces them. The vacated land is then marketed with high-rises with equally high rents.
With the Olympics and related mega-events, sports have become an industry of displacement. If our town becomes an Olympic city, how will that solve the livable housing/housing crisis of Istanbul, where rental prices have skyrocketed, access to freehold housing has become impossible, and low-income groups are condemned to unsafe housing due to the inadequacy of the social-housing stock. Rather, experience tells that these problems will only be exacerbated by the mega event.
Is it possible to prevent neighborhood demolitions and forced evictions while winking at global capital?
The City Budget Waiting for Its Olympics Earthquake
As we have seen in all mega-projects, the budgets foreseen for the Olympics cannot be reconciled with the actual budgets, and serious economic crises typically arise. The Athens Olympics have a share in Greece`s economic crisis, with their budget multiplied by a factor of ten.
Olympic budgets multiplying tenfold are not unique to Athens. Montreal, the host city in 1976, was only able to pay off its debts in 30 years. Brazil, which was the 5th largest economy in the world when it bid for the Olympics in 2007, subsequently experienced its worst economic crisis since the Great Depression.
Not a single city has hosted the Olympics under budget since 1960. The average cost increase is 156%. Hosting the Olympics means undertaking the riskiest and most costly of mega-projects at present. So, is the local government of Istanbul, which is waiting for an earthquake, planning to light the Olympic flame at the cost of destroying Istanbul by wasting the budget that should be spent on strengthening the city? Is it rational to host the Olympics, which enriches construction/real estate capital and sponsors, while Istanbul has vital social needs ranging from education to health and housing?
Where Will These Facilities Be built?
The facilities that generally fall idle after the games, are often left to decay due to their costly maintenance, and cause environmental pollution. Such ‘white elephants’ are being built, bypassing the city’s master plan and urban planning principles. While the Vancouver 2010 facilities are nestled in a reserve area that has been the habitat of Indigenous Peoples for hundreds of years, one of the most valuable ecological reserve areas in the North Caucasus has been destroyed for the sake of Putin’s image-enhancing Sochi 2014 project.
Given that no room remains for large sports facilities in Istanbul, where will the Olympic facilities be built? Will these be in the Northern Forest villages that are becoming more and more commodified and transformed into concrete with the Istanbul Canal plans, or in the city’s precious remaining agricultural lands? What kind of a contradiction is the ambition for the Olympic mega-project amid fierce opposition to the Canal Istanbul mega-project?
Epilogue
Let us end by asking our metropolitan mayor and his colleagues who are working tirelessly to bring the Olympic flame to Istanbul: “If the Olympics are being held for universal peace, unity, brotherhood and a harmonious global order, why do they embody so many injustices and violations? Why are the billions of dollars spent for the Olympics not spent on ensuring that city dwellers live in safety, health, prosperity and dignity against looming disasters and their violated human right to accessible housing. Why instead are these assets spent on displacement, gentrification and demolition? Why should the people be held accountable for resulting debts, while sponsors, private security companies and investors are being enriched by the people`s taxes?
Grand ceremony and athletic achievement apart, these contradictions have become the Olympic legacy our city fathers are trying to bequeath to us. It is the governance of circus without bread.
Image: Proposed logo for Istanbul’s bid to host the 2036 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Source: PaintRubber38.
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