Life in the shadow of mega-events: Beijing Summer Olympiad and its impact on housing

Abstract

Beijing's selection as the host city of the 2008 Summer Olympic Games was reportedly received with joy among Beijing residents. As part of the city's preparation of this mega-event, massive reinvestment in Beijing's urban space was carried out in order to transform the city to have a global look. This accompanied large-scale demolition and redevelopment of dilapidated inner-city neighbourhoods and migrants' enclaves. In this regard, this paper seeks to discuss the drivers of the Beijing Summer Olympiad, and critically examine its social legacy. The paper argues that the benefits and costs of hosting the Beijing Olympic Games were disproportionately shared among local residents due to their differences in socio-economic status and place of residence, and that the hardest hit were poorer residents in dilapidated inner-city neighbourhoods and migrants' enclaves. The Olympic Games preparation facilitated the rebuilding of Beijing, contributing to significant loss of affordable housing stocks for urban poor families and migrants. It is therefore necessary to address the social impacts of the Beijing Olympic Games within a framework of wider urban policy contexts.

Keywords:

• mega-events
• Olympic Games
• social impact
• urban poor
• migrants
• urban villages
• inner-city neighbourhoods
• urban redevelopment
• Beijing
• China

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the audience at the Asia-Pacific Network for Housing Research Conference held in Seoul, Korea, and the anonymous referees for their constructive comments. The author acknowledges the support of the British Academy Small Research Grant.

Notes

1. The experience of the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games is an oft-cited example by many critics to show that mega-sporting events facilitated democracy in a host country (Greene 2003).

2. According to the representative exchange rates from the International Monetary Fund, US$1 was equivalent to 8.3 yuan in December 2000, 7.8 yuan in December 2006, 7.4 yuan in December 2007, and 6.8 yuan in September 2008.

3. The investment in the real estate sector constitutes part of total investment in fixed assets in Chinese statistics. The real estate investment has been reported in the statistics as a separate item since 1990, and ‘refers to investment in the development of properties that can be sold in markets (commonly housing and offices)’ (Wu 2002a: 157). Other major components of the total investment in fixed assets include (1) investment in capital construction (i.e., new construction); (2) investment in innovation (i.e., addition to the existing assets); (3) other investment by state-owned enterprises and collectives (ibid).

4. See, for example, the well-documented experiences of private tenants in Seoul who were brutally evicted against their will (Kim 1998).

5. Anne-Marie Broudehoux (2007) also claims that the total investment in the 2008 Summer Olympic Games would reach US$40 billion, which is ‘three times what Athens spent, and more than all the Summer Games since 1984 combined’ (p. 384). Her paper, however, fails to clearly indicate how this calculation has been made, and it seems that the total amount of investments she refers to may be the sum of total project costs for key Olympic projects including the National Stadium, National Swim Centre, and a capital airport (new terminal), many of which actually proceeded on previously mentioned BOT basis. Nevertheless, this does not conceal the fact that the Beijing Olympic Games have been the most expensive Olympic games in recent history.