A Sacrifice Zone is any area of land whose speculative value is outweighed by the costs of capitalising on that value, i.e. it costs more to make it saleable than would be gained by selling it. When a space achieves this state, it becomes a sacrifice zone. What is then necessary for it to be made valuable again is a sacrifice of value: energy, time, money, human life.
-The University of Openness Faculty of Cartography, ‘Walking the Olympic Sacrifice Zone’.http://uo.twenteenthcentury.com/index.php/UoNew
[Regeneration] … seems to travel along water, canal systems, sewers, ditches, anything as long as there’s a glimpse of water the developers will whack it into their prospectus and there’ll be photographs of Water and parks and regardless of what else is there they just take over all the industrial premises and come up with more and more New York loft-living style tackily built hutches. What was once very marginal and off the map seems to have become central to the arguments of the city at the moment.
-Iain Sinclair quoted in The Occupation, a film by the London Particular
The shock of London winning the bid to host the 2012 Olympics was only superseded by the catastrophe that followed the day after, of the four bomb attacks of 7/7. With a disastrous recent history of large public projects such as the Millennium Dome and Wembley Stadium still in the news, it seemed like a bad joke that Londoners were to be afflicted by yet another expensive folly in the name of making London a ‘world-class city.’
It would be hard to list in detail here the potentially negative impacts of the London 2012 Olympics upon the local population of East London. Suffice it to say that previous Olympics have resulted in widespread demolition of housing, evictions (720,000 people evicted in Seoul) and dramatic rent increases (between 240 and 287 percent in Barcelona). In each city where the Olympics took place they have generally raised the cost of living by providing opportunities for investment by global capital at the expense of local workers and the poor.
Clays Lane housing estate was subject to a compulsory purchase order issued by the London Development Agency on behalf of the Olympic Development Authority as it stands on the future Olympic site. These 450 units of social housing stand empty, with the 11 remaining tenants who have been holding out for appropriate re-location as a group, now facing eviction this week (23/07/07).[1] Although the LDA promised that all tenants would be re-housed before work had started on the estate, many feel that this promise has been reneged upon. In any case, at no point during the CPO process was an offer made to re-build similar housing elsewhere. Therefore the destruction of Clays Lane Housing Estate amounts to exactly that - a destruction of existing affordable housing. Those re-housed will be housed at the expense of people on waiting lists elsewhere. Five years before its completion the London Olympics is already putting pressure on what remains of affordable housing. We can only imagine this pressure will increase in the future.
The Olympics are bound to intensify competition for housing, especially with an expanding buy-to-rent sector hyping rents. Locals already squeezed between two of Europe’s biggest business districts Docklands and the City of London are going to find themselves surrounded on all sides by intensive gentrification.[2]
Having achieved its status as the centre of financial markets for Europe over the last ten years, London has become a key conduit for financial speculation, property investment and off-shoring of private wealth. The City, the square mile in which London’s financial institutions are concentrated, has been expanding eastwards, making incursions into the traditionally cosmopolitan and poor areas of East London. With the City close by, Docklands in the South East and Stansted Airport 40 minutes drive east of London it seems as if, over the last 20 years, the commercial city has lurched eastwards to colonise all and any available space.
REGENERATION
Regeneration is the public facing name for the process of state-backed gentrification. It is a process by which cosmetic works and short-term projects are carried out in order to re-brand an area, attract investment and transfer housing stock and other properties to private landlords and developers. Regeneration restructures the city in the interests of the business elite and the middle classes, creating privatised and exclusive (overpriced) space. It is often a process that happens in poor areas, but has little to offer the poor, in fact more often than not it displaces them from the area that is being ‘improved.’
The Government, the Mayor of London, the London Development Agency (LDA), the Olympic Development Authority (ODA) and the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games (LOCOG) are all adherents to a corporate doctrine which promotes the development benefits which they insist will flow from hosting the Olympic Games.[3]
The Olympics follows on from a series of public projects that have left huge public costs, divestment of public assets, failure, disaster and gentrification in their wake: The Clissold Park swimming pool, Wembley Stadium, The Millennium Dome, Foster’s wobbly Millennium Bridge … not to mention the growing housing crisis which the Olympic led ‘regeneration’ is supposed to, but will not, allay. In some cases, landmark regeneration projects (this is especially true for projects funded through PFIs) have taken the form of a direct transfer of assets (later rent) from public to business interests and on occasion even (in the case of closed hospitals and schools, demolished infrastructure and unfinished projects) an apparently needless destruction of value and resources.
WATER
As the Sinclair quote that opens this essay points out, regeneration in London has followed water. Developers have commented that the proximity of property to water can add as much as 30 percent to its eventual value. Luxury developments, often second homes, stretch from Tower Bridge along the Thames to Docklands and now inland along Limehouse Cut and Regents Canal towards the future Olympic site. Public amenities; schools, swimming pools, unemployment offices and council housing in the path of this development have been either converted into private housing, transferred to private landlords or stand empty awaiting sale.
Few people in this country did more than myself to advance the cause for retaining and developing our canals and waterways systems… big, and I mean big, property developers … are steadily encroaching onto public land – land which has become more attractive and valuable near water because of mine and other people’s efforts.[4]
Supposedly as part of the effort to make London 2012 the ‘greenest Olympics ever’ a part of the Olympic Delivery Authority’s plan includes proposals to build a new lock as part of the extensive canal network in the Lee Valley. The lock is intended to allow commercial traffic supplying building materials to the future Olympic site to travel along existing canals from the Thames to the south and from Hertfordshire in the north. However, a report issued by canal users and environmentalists has criticised the efficacy and motives of the proposed lock.
Regents Network considers the proposal by British Waterways for a new lock in Prescott Channel is seriously flawed and is being proposed for indirect motives that are not waterway related… We consider their motive is more likely to be the encouragement and promotion of building development, and not for navigational purposes. For instance, British Waterways want a number of small basins in the area which are too small for flood relief, but are "to act as nodes for waterside development." Note, waterside development, not waterway development.[5]
Up to the time of writing, this report has been completely ignored. To an extent this is not surprising, it is a familiar dynamic of regeneration. The report illustrates the contestation of two agendas and two ideas of development that have been repeatedly opposed throughout the planning and execution of the London 2012 Olympics. On the one hand existing users of what will become the Olympic site have attempted to give their opinions of, and advice for, the future of the site, on the other hand planners, bureaucrats and politicians have made sweeping and generalised statements that ignore existing uses of the area in favour of projecting a grand future that justifies the substantial costs:
The 2012 games will be a catalyst for one of the most extensive urban and environmental regeneration programmes ever seen in the UK. The new Olympic Park under construction in the Lower Lea Valley will revive one of the most deprived areas in the country. Thousands of jobs will be created. Transport links will be transformed. Thousands of homes for key workers will be built. Parts of the landscape that have been wasteland will spring to life. [6]
As elsewhere, the logic of development requires the designation of a zone of blight, decrepitude, ‘waste.’ The Lower Lea Valley is characterised in almost all official statements by the London Development Agency and the Government as either ‘deprived’ or as white (blank) space.[7] The planners of the Olympics have persisted in seeing and presenting the zone as a tabula rasa despite significant public contestation that the contrary is actually the case. Despite their efforts to evict users and inhabitants of the land along with the substantial material evidence of pollution that now presents a second challenge to their development of it, the planners maintain a public-facing view that this is area is empty and null. It is my conviction that we are dealing here, as with the originary enclosure of the commons[8] that took place simultaneously in England and her colonies, with arguments of ‘improvement’ used to justify a leap essential to capital’s future ability to accumulate. We urgently need to develop new arguments to counter this process before we are left only with the ruins and enormous public debt it produces.
[1] See http://www.hackneyindependent.org/2007_news_menu/the_latest_on_the_clays_lane_estate.html
[2] Mark Saunders ‘Regeneration Games’, Mute www.metamute.org and Eurozine, http://www.eurozine.com/articles/2007-05-25-saunders-en.html
[3] Martin Slavin, ‘Probable impacts of the Developments (particularly the Olympics phase) on tenants in privately rented accommodation’ Document prepared from research by Martin Slavin, http://www.hic-net.org/articles.asp?PID=543
[4] Illtyd Harrington, ‘Hunt for profits is sucking canals dry’, Camden New Journal, 7 Dec, 06.
[5] The Regents Network, Regents Network Report, November, 2005
[6] Tony Blair, ‘The Greenest Games Ever’, The Guardian, January 23, 2007 http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1996481,00.html
[7] In a public consultation in a market in Hackney in September, 2006 one of the consultants hired for the day directed me to a map of the Lower Lea Valley, ‘look at all that white space’ she said indicating the necessity of its development.
[8] For an overview of the discussion of common land in the Lower Lea Valley see the longer essay from which this one is drawn http://www.metamute.org/en/Of-Lammas-Land-and-Olympic-Dreams