Olympic Games displace people through eviction. They also result in higher land values and the consequent displacement of poorer residents through rises in rents and higher house prices. A recent report by Dr Georgios Kavetsos of the Cass Business School has confirmed that this process is underway in the vicinity of the 2012 London Olympic Park.

By Tom Tresser

I live in Lincoln Park and have been working in the arts, local economic development and civic engagement in Chicago since 1980. In 1993 I went to work for Peoples Housing, a grass roots community development organization in east Rogers Park that developed and maintained low income housing. I organized a community arts program that combined culture, education and micro-enterprise.

Leabank Square residents have panned the design for the Media Centre. So has CABE, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment. Only they won't have to live opposite what one resident has called a 'tower block on its side'.

Professor Bent Flyvbjerg took up his post as Chair of Major Programme Management at the Said Business School at Oxford University on April 1st 2009.

“In a landmark study, ....[he] analysed over 250 major transport infrastructure projects and found that 90% went over budget — and that the benefits averaged only half of those promised. This was so consistent that Flyvbjerg concluded it amounts to “strategic misrepresentation”, and that the culprits are politicians and bureaucrats competing for scarce public resources or seeking to get a suspect project off the ground to make political capital.“

One of the proudest boasts of the 2012 London Olympics was that it would create the largest new urban park in Europe for 150 years. I asked a Freedom of Information question (see attachment) to discover how the ODA had arrived at this description. They were unable to provide any clear information. All they could say was that they had consulted with 'CABE Space and the London Parks and Green Spaces Forum (who) had assisted the ODA in preparing benchmark studies on parks around the world and in London including previous Olympic Parks.'Landschaftspark Duisburg-Nord: Europe's biggest new urban park at over 200ha, some 500 acres, was completed in 1999 retaining the industrial archaelogy

Of course, the largest new park is no longer as large as it was having shrunk by 19 hectares. But even when it was 129 hectares its claim to be the largest new urban park in Europe was questionable. A friend recently sent me a link to a park in Duisburg, Germany, constructed on a site with many similarities to the Lea Valley, as it was a former industrial area. At over 200 hectares it is considerably larger than the much vaunted 'largest new park in Europe'.

The Duisburg industrial park shows how the Lea Valley could have been developed in an imaginative way, which illustrated the industrial history of the area, by creating a park based around the rivers and canals linking sites like the Tidal Mill at Three Mills

On 15th October Shona Abantu-Choudhury posted the statement below on the noise and dust at Leabank Square on the Leabank Square Blogspot along with pictures of the machinery at work. You can see what other residents have to say by following the 'comments' link below his statement on the blogspot. Shona and his wife Nadira were also interviewed by BBC News. This follows earlier reports contained in More ‘Anecdotal’ Complaints of Noise and Dust from Leabank Square Residents about the situation at Leabank Square. Residents are increasingly concerned at the steadily diminishing legacy they and others in Hackney Wick will inherit once the Games are over. Having lost a vital green space at Arena Fields they are now worried the promised replacement parkland will not materialise.

Washing day at Leabank Square

I recently found a message on my phone from a journalist at BBC Radio London, who had seen the Games Monitor article about noise and dust at Leabank Square, ‘Hackney Wick residents complain about noise and dust from the Olympic Park’. She wanted to get in touch with Shona Abantu-Choudhury, who had been complaining on behalf of residents. But by the time I got back to her she said they had already done the programme and anyway the problems had been ‘resolved’. Really! I asked who had told them this. The ODA. Hmmm! I said I didn’t think so and just in case I would ask Shona when I next saw him. ‘No way!’ he said. Well, that’s public relations.

Despite admitting that there is no housing legacy from the Athletes’ Village, as the housing would have been built anyway, the ODA is still claiming the Athletes’ Village is an Olympic Legacy, a kind of Time Lapse Legacy, because they assert that the involvement of the Olympics means the project will be delivered earlier than it would otherwise have been, see article ‘2012 Legacy Housing Double Counting’. So I decided to ask another FoI question to establish when the ODA thought the housing would have been delivered if the ODA had not taken over the site and to ask them to further explain their reasoning.