Festivalisation and urban renewal in the Global South: socio-spatial consequences of the 2010 FIFA World Cup

Abstract

Sports mega events increasingly take place in the metropolises of emerging economies. As a city-marketing tool, these events are said to make the host cities more visible in the international competition for foreign and domestic investments. Infrastructural upgrades and fast tracking of urban development projects, as well as giving focus and legitimation to urban policy makers, are supposedly the further benefits of hosting mega events. This recalls the ‘Festivalisation of Urban Policy’ hypothesis by Häußermann and Siebel, which describes the instrumentalisation of large-scale cultural and sports events to support image building and to catalyse urban development in European and US cities. Given that socio-economically very heterogeneous nations increasingly host these events, it is necessary to extend the debate and to investigate whether the political, economic and social effects in these countries of the Global South – conventionally labelled as the developing world – can be explained with the festivalisation hypothesis: Are the urban development effects qualitatively comparable and, if so, are they more strongly or weakly pronounced than in the Global North? The 2010 International Federation of Football Association World Cup in South Africa is a fitting example to explore the characteristics and dynamics of mega events in the host cities of the Global South.

Keywords:

• mega events
• festivalisation
• urban renewal
• 2010 FIFA World Cup
• urban planning

Introduction

The 2010 International Federation of Football Association (FIFA) World Cup in South Africa is representative of a trend throughout the last decade: mega events are increasingly taking place in the Global South, especially in countries known as ‘emerging nations’ with high economic growth rates. These countries approach the old industrial nations in economic terms and are also characterised internally by a huge gap between wealth and extreme poverty (Matheson and Baade 2004). From an urban studies perspective, the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa is a fitting example through which the characteristics of mega events in the Global South can be examined. This contribution is concerned with the transferability and extension of the hypothesis of ‘festivalisation’ (Häußermann and Siebel 1993). The following questions guide the analysis of this paper: (1) What economic and political interests are behind the allocation and hosting of mega events? (2) What are the socio-spatial consequences of these interests for host cities in South Africa?

Nations and cities in the Global South are becoming increasingly successful in applying to host big international events. In 2010 alone, the Commonwealth Games were held in New Delhi, the Expo in Shanghai and the FIFA World Cup in South Africa. In 2014, the FIFA World Cup will put the world focus on Brazil's cities. In addition, Rio de Janeiro has been awarded the 2016 Olympic Games and Durban is preparing for the 2020 Olympic Games application. As a city-marketing tool, mega events are said to make the host cities more visible in the international competition for foreign and domestic investments.

This recalls the ‘festivalisation of urban policy’ hypothesis by Häußermann and Siebel (1993), which describes the instrumentalisation of large-scale cultural and sports events to support image building and catalyse urban development in European cities. In light of the current mega event trends in socio-economically very heterogeneous emerging nations (see Figure 1), it is necessary to extend this discussion and to investigate whether the political, economic and social effects in the Global South can be explained with the festivalisation hypothesis: Are the urban development effects qualitatively comparable, and, if so, are they more strongly or weakly pronounced than in the Global North?

Figure 1 The Gini coefficient of the countries and locations of sport mega events from 2000 to 2016 (illustration by the authors based on information in Le Monde diplomatique 2007, p. 53).

Economic rationalities and the political–symbolic meaning of the World Cup

The current contextualisation of major events (Häußermann et al. 2008) focuses on the metropolitan scale. However, examining festivalisation in the Global South demands the inclusion of national politics and global economic factors. The FIFA World Cup is a highly commercial and simultaneously extremely political event. How these two defining elements are interwoven is highly constituent of the processes surrounding the event and influential for the urban development dynamics that the event initiates or stimulates. From an economic perspective, FIFA auctions the right to become the event's showground. The national associations' application forms are called bid books and present what the potential host nations can offer FIFA in exchange for being selected. What respective interests lie behind this deal?

FIFA's economic interests

FIFA is the owner and the content provider of the World Cup and operates according to market principles. The event must be profitable for FIFA – the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany generated FIFA a profit of over 2 billion US Dollars (Du Plessis and Maennig 2009). FIFA forecast profits of 3.2 billion US Dollars for 2010 (Mail & Guardian Online 18 June 2010, ZEIT Online 8 June 2010). In order to ensure financial success, FIFA leaves as little as possible to chance and just as little to the host countries: it has developed 17 compulsory requirements for potential hosts. This catalogue stipulates conditions regarding immigration regulations, security measures, information and communication technology, the protection of property and marketing rights, the health care system, as well as rules regarding central financial–technical questions relating to the FIFA World Cup. These stipulations are secured through national guarantees, which were provided by the various responsible ministries in South Africa.

The fact that FIFA can enforce its demands with government-backed guarantees illustrates how strongly FIFA can influence national politics and how willing the host nation governments are to accept that influence. The political stakeholders clearly hope to gain something by hosting a World Cup – in South Africa too.

South Africa's political interests as host

The political expectations that South Africa attached to hosting the 2010 World Cup encompass domestic and foreign affairs, as well as economic political interests. Already during the application process, South Africa underlined the special meaning the global event would have for the African continent (Cornelissen 2004). After selection, a wide-reaching African narrative was conveyed (see Maharaj in the issue). The host nation emphasised the event's global symbolic value and employed pan-African rhetoric and discourse which former President Mbeki captured when he said that

we want, on behalf of our continent, to stage an event that will send ripples of confidence from Cape to Cairo – an event that will create social and economic opportunities throughout Africa. […] We want to show that Africa's time has come (Mbeki 2003 quoted in Desai and Vahed 2010).1

This message confirmed the 2010 FIFA World Cup' official slogan: ‘Ke Nako: Celebrate Africa's Humanity’.2

According to this, the mega event was intended as a political vehicle to change Africa's image from the continent of ‘crises, catastrophes and wars’ and to show it in a new, positive light. The World Cup was meant to help Africa achieve greater international respect and contribute to its emergence from a long phase of global political insignificance. This rhetoric expanded Thabo Mbeki's emancipatory idea of an ‘African renaissance’. There again, the rhetoric and the African packaging of the event also illustrate the ‘New’ South Africa's claim to be a leading regional power (Van der Merwe 2008, Soest 2010).

In domestic political terms, the tournament took place at a very convenient time for the ANC, which had been caught in a crossfire of media criticism since Mbeki's resignation in September 2008. The FIFA World Cup gave South Africa's new president Jacob Zuma the opportunity to profit from the prestige of the event. Reciprocally, the tournament dominated the news coverage so that significantly less space was available for government-critical analyses. In this context, the sport is significant for the production of a national ‘feel-good-effect’. Football is a political vehicle – and politicians understand the magic of the big moments that allow people to forget the trials of their everyday lives. In South Africa, especially, sport plays an important societal–political role in the nation-building process. Immediately after the end of apartheid, the ANC government started trying to employ the nation's general enthusiasm for sport for political ends. That was the case during the 1995 Rugby World Cup (‘one team, one nation’) as well as the 2003 Cricket World Cup. With the 2010 FIFA World Cup, football's pacifying and much-trumpeted integrative potential was again to be used as a generator for a national ‘sense of belonging’ in the ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983).

In economic–political terms, the expectation of investment and growth impulses was crucial to the bid. Hosting the World Cup is part of a strategy to ‘rebrand’ South Africa worldwide as a safe, well-governed country. Good infrastructure, a high level of technology, efficient economic structures and a high quality of life were intended to attract investors (Kersting et al. 2010).

Whose costs, whose benefits?

FIFA's profit interests and the South African government's political ambitions intermingled during the preparation phase of the tournament and culminated in the shared target of ‘hosting the World Cup successfully’. Given the aspects mentioned previously, it is clear that ‘success’ is defined in this context as achieving a highly sophisticated show piece with associated imaging effects. In the run-up to the 2010 championship, this aim caused substantial pressure in the host cities, which culminated in enormous event-related investments (see Figure 2).

Figure 2 Host cities and stadiums of the 2010 World Cup (Haferburg and Steinbrink 2010).

Meanwhile, the total investment volume is estimated to comprise up to 4 billion Euros (Sunday Independent 11.7.2010). In Germany in 2006, the figure was approximately 3.4 billion Euros. A comparison of the share of these investments in terms of the per capita gross national product of both host nations clearly shows that South Africa's financial burden is, relatively seen, 15 times larger than Germany's. It seems questionable that Germany would have agreed to host the World Cup if it would cost 50 billion Euros.

The investments required by FIFA mean a financial bind. The question then arises about the opportunity costs, about whether the money could not have been better invested elsewhere. However, government politicians and World Cup organisers reject such doubts:

Government expenditure on the World Cup is not at the expense of other priorities. I challenge anyone to say that money is being diverted from social, housing, health and education projects for this World Cup. The tournament will bring huge benefits to our country […] (Jordaan, cited Nevin 2008).

The 2010 FIFA World Cup was repeatedly proclaimed to be the motor for achieving general growth and development aims more quickly. It would contribute to increasing the gross domestic product and employment rates and improve the nation's infrastructure: ‘The 2010 Soccer World Cup will make an important contribution to our effort to accelerate our progress towards the achievement of the goal of a better life for our people’ (Mbeki 2006). In view of such speeches, it is hardly surprising that the reports, commissioned by the South African government in the run-up to the World Cup, produced very optimistic evaluations (Thornton and Feinstein 2003).3

The prosperity argument is cited before every mega event, although, until now, independent ex-post analyses have recorded insignificant or no positive impulses for the national or regional economy (Baasch 2010, Maennig and Schwarthoff 2010). This discrepancy is so noticeable that one could assume that politicians' assertions about immense growth impulses mainly serve to positively prepare the population for the tournament. Public enthusiasm for the event is obviously a condition for its success – in the commercial sense for FIFA and in the political sense for South Africa.

Unknown side effects of festivalisation in the Global South

As already mentioned, it is vital that the political–economic dimension with the institutional and economic power of the associations (here FIFA) as well as the national political level is included in the discussion on the festivalisation in the Global South. For urban research, this means looking beyond the city limits. This background illustrates what priorities were behind the concrete planning interventions that were part of the World Cup preparations and with what power these were advanced at the expense of other aims. In face of massive urban planning challenges for the host cities in the Global South, the investigation of the establishment of these priorities and the concrete urban-structural effects of the planning interventions is particularly urgent.

The following research focuses on the question about the transferability of the festivalisation thesis to the Global South. Special attention is paid to whether mega events in the Global South create particular effects. To begin with, two assumptions can be made: (1) in view of the lower GDP in these countries, the burden as well as the potential positive effects is of more national and regional economic consequence than in the old industrial nations (Maennig and Schwarthoff 2010). And (2) we can assume that the event-induced interventions in the built environment as well as in the political process of planning are more profound. These assumptions allow the hypothesis to be made that a mega event in the Global South has disproportionately more forceful effects on urban development than in the Global North. But are these more strongly positive or negative – and for whom?

A central statement by Häußermann et al. (2008, p. 267) is useful as a starting point: ‘[…] there is […] no known case, in which the realisation of a singular event alone has turned the direction of development around and realigned it [translation by authors]’.

If this general statement also applies to the ‘festivalisation in the Global South’, it would mean that there too mega events do not per se positively or negatively affect the development direction, but merely accelerate already existing trends – and, in line with the previous assumption, more strongly than in the North. This demands a review of the general tendencies in those cities in which mega events take place.

Urban development trends in the ‘New South Africa’

At the football World Cup in South Africa, impulses from the mega event met the societal context of post-apartheid transformation, which is still marked by extreme economic and social imbalance. According to the World Bank classification, South Africa is an upper middle-income country. However, behind this classification lies an average value that conceals the differences in living conditions: hardly any other countries have such an unequal distribution of income; the Gini coefficient is the second highest in the world, after Brazil, the host of the next FIFA World Cup (UNDP 2008).

Clear spatial patterns in South African cities reflect these extreme economic disparities. The line between affluent and poor urban areas remains almost identical to the borders of the so-called Group Areas during apartheid. Former ‘white’ residential areas are often still home to the wealthy, and the worst living conditions still dominate in townships and informal settlements. This also applies to lack of service provision and inadequate transport links between the urban areas. Although the pattern of inequality is to some extent a legacy of the apartheid era, aspects of the country's current neoliberal economic policies and rapid urbanisation are sustaining it. Johannesburg, with the Gini coefficient of 0.72, is currently held to be the city with the highest level of social inequality worldwide (UN-Habitat 2010).

After the end of apartheid, the number of city dwellers grew significantly due to natural population development and ‘compensatory’ urbanisation. Consequences such as housing shortages and infrastructure deficiencies combined with the socio-spatial fragmentation present the greatest challenge to post-apartheid urban planning. In the 1990s and at the beginning of the new millennium, urban policies tried to counter the fragmentation with a vision of an integrated post-apartheid city; ambitious programmes and strategies were developed and implemented. However, economic liberalisation has led to a consolidation of the situation. In urban policy practice, the guiding principle of social equality has been increasingly replaced by growth-oriented competition. Johannesburg, Cape Town, Durban, Pretoria and Port Elizabeth, in particular, want to reinvent themselves as world-class cities. Hosting the World Cup provided a good opportunity to do that.

Urban-structural and socio-spatial consequences of the World Cup

The development tendencies in today's post-apartheid city can be summarised as follows: increasing urban poverty, planning policies founded decreasingly on social equality, worsening inequality and a continuing fragmentation of urban space. According to the hypothesis outlined above, it can be assumed that hosting the 2010 FIFA World Cup has reinforced these tendencies. In order to assess this, we examine three aspects (1) the provision of urban housing, (2) informal economic cycles of the urban economy and (3) urban traffic development policies.

Housing provision

More than every 10th South African lives without appropriate shelter – as an inhabitant of an informal settlement, in a backyard shack or as a subtenant (Rust 2006, p. 15). In 2010, the Housing Backlog is approaching 2.1 million dwellings (The Africa Report from 21 April 2010). The government has long been striving to ease the shortage by subsidising low-cost housing. Meanwhile, in South Africa's cities informal forms of accommodation are spreading – disproportionately to population growth (SSA 2001). And it is apparent that the mega event has reinforced this development:

The project to the City's image-building efforts particularly with regard to the World Cup is clearly captured by the Western Cape Housing MEC, Marius Fransman, who commented that, ‘with the 2010 Soccer World Cup coming to Cape Town, we have to deal with the informal settlements along the N2’ (cited in Graham 2006, p. 240). In the course of the project, large parts of the settlements have already been demolished. Thousands of the former inhabitants have been rehoused in transit camps in Delft – particularly in the Temporary Relocation Area on the Symphony Highway (cynically called ‘Blikkiesdorp’ or tin village), which is very reminiscent of a refugee camp.

The resettled dwellers were initially given the prospect of returning, but due to delays and rent increases most of them were not able to return to the N2 Gateway area (COHRE 2009, p. 1, Newton 2009). They have to permanently establish themselves in Delft. In a report, the Development Action Group has highlighted the serious social consequences of this resettlement as people are disconnected from livelihood opportunities (DAG 2007).

Figure 3 Informal settlements along the N2 highway in Cape Town (Graham 2005).

1.	The 2010 FIFA World Cup preparations and the public investments in the event-related infrastructure were accompanied by inevitable national budget restructuring, which meant cuts for subsidised housing projects. As early as 2007, the then housing Minister Lindiwe Sisulu warned that hundreds of thousands of new dwellings could fall victim to the 2010 World Cup (Mail & Guardian Online 15 February 2007) – an impressive example of the World Cup's opportunity costs.
2.	In addition, there was a cost explosion in the building sector. The extensive building activity before the World Cup caused construction material and land prices to increase. The rise in prices meant that less public housing could be built. The ‘delivery rate’ sank and the housing shortage increased (Sisulu 2007, Mpofu 2008).
3.	A further point is the displacement of low-income sections of the population during the course of renewal and gentrification of conveniently located districts or urban areas near the stadiums (see Van Blerk in this issue). An example of this is Bertrams in the immediate proximity of Ellis Park Stadium in Johannesburg. In the context of a large-scale urban renewal initiative –‘Greater Ellis Park Development Plan’ – the city wanted to revitalise the area around Ellis Park. The upgrading process resulted in displacements of former inhabitants of this district and moreover the fast-track character of implementation meant an exclusion of those affected by the urban regeneration into decision-making processes (Bénit-Gbaffou 2009, p. 208). Examples like Bertrams illustrate how mega events can contribute to greater marginalisation – as much in the spatial as in the social sense.
4.	The most direct intervention in the housing and living situations of poorer city dwellers are resettlement measures. Such measures have quite a tradition in connection with mega events (Horne and Manzenreiter 2006, COHRE 2007). Local authorities and sport associations often see informal settlements as ‘eyesores’ in the cityscape that have to be removed.4 Here, again Häußermann et al. (2008, p. 265) can be cited: Because major events have the primary target of spreading a visible image of the city internationally, there is the inevitable tendency that in the course of major event policies everything invisible in the city is regarded as unimportant. This of course includes the many social problems that cannot be integrated into the positive image [translation by authors]. In the Global South, it is almost impossible to hide the social problems because they present themselves very clearly in the form of informal settlements. The international attention before and during the event creates a need for action in urban policies to deal with the visible problems or, indeed, the visibility of the problems. The time pressure typical of such events leaves no space for long-term strategies. Therefore, demolishing and resettling often seem to be the simplest way to make the social problems invisible as quickly as possible. Such measures mostly affect settlements that could appear particularly negative to the media or international visitors – especially informal settlements near airports, stadiums or major roads. In South Africa, the best-known example is the N2 Gateway Project in Cape Town, which intends to redevelop six informal settlements along the N2 city highway between the airport and the city – the ‘Gateway’ to Cape Town (see Figure 3).
5.	The biggest danger is that the short-term project policies become part of the legislation and planning practice and will be still effective in the long term – after the World Cup. According to Huchzermeyer (2008), these tendencies are beginning to show in South Africa and she warns against a rejection of democratic participatory processes and a return to repressive approaches that are in some ways reminiscent of apartheid.

Informal economic cycles

Mega events are often accompanied by the necessity to formalise the local economy. Because the marketing of merchandise products contributes to the refinancing or profits of major events, the whole trade sector is subjected to strict controls. This particularly affects informal traders. In urban areas, the informal sector is extremely important for securing a livelihood. In the face of a national unemployment rate of 25.3%, this sector offers the only form of employment for many households (SSA 2010).

To comply with FIFA requirements and to ensure the protection of their trademark rights, informal traders were increasingly driven out of the inner city areas during the run-up to the World Cup. Only FIFA-licensed traders were allowed to do business in Johannesburg's two official fan parks and in the exclusion zones surrounding the two stadiums Soccer City and Ellis Park (Figure 4).

Figure 4 Ellis park precinct and exclusion zone (Wafer 2010).

Over 200 street vendors had been driven out of the exclusion zone around Ellis Park Stadium by 2009 (see Figure 4). Even informally run stalls to provide food for the builders on the stadium building sites were prohibited (Wafer 2010).

Thereby, the host cities gave FIFA control of certain urban areas in order to maximise profit whilst taking on the challenge of making it clear to the countless street vendors that they were not allowed to sell anything related to the World Cup because that would infringe on FIFA's trademark rights. FIFA requirements and the host cities' implementation practice created a situation unbeneficial to the local economy. The strict regimentations and measures imposed by FIFA and the host cities forced small, informal vendors, who wanted to generate an income with their own creative interpretations of football, off the market.

Urban transport development

South Africa's road and rail networks, like South African urban structures in general, are the result of central government planning and legislation – based on the principle of ‘racial segregation’ (Duthion 2002). In accordance with the ‘apartheid city’ model, the infrastructural integration of the individual zones was explicitly discouraged (Braumann et al. 2010). Since the end of apartheid, urban traffic planning has had the task of overcoming segregation while simultaneously creating the precondition for sustainable urban development. In reality, however, over the past 20 years, the condition of South Africa's urban traffic system has become increasingly alarming. This applies to both motorised individual transport as well as public transportation.

The 2010 World Cup was meant to provide both the crucial impulse for sustainable urban traffic development and the arguments for the long overdue investment in the dilapidated infrastructure. However, transport policy was caught between the short-term requirements of the event – FIFA's demands and the needs of international visitors – and the long-term urban development aims. In the run-up to the World Cup, traffic planning was meant to kill two birds with one stone. In fact, some of the aims were almost met. The existing public transport system was expanded and now copes better with the increasing numbers of passengers – something the economic development of the cities will also benefit from (Habacker 2010). It can be assumed that this infrastructural impulse given by the World Cup will have positive long-term effects. However, this optimistic appraisal is opposed to the educated guess that by no means all of the urban community will profit from the improvements in this area. The investments made in the transportation system also reflect a certain prioritisation: the focus was on the event's short-term demands and economic aims. Investments were primarily made in the modernisation of the existing rail network (including representative station buildings), in expensive prestige objects such as the Gautrain in Johannesburg, the expansion or new construction of international airports and the modern Bus Rapid Transit System. Street building was mainly concentrated on inner city projects, as well as airport links. Projects in peripheral districts were postponed for the time being. It can be suggested that the poorer sections of the population have profited comparably less from the transportation projects. The World Cup has not really aided urban development's ambitious political aim of overcoming the fragmented urban structure caused by apartheid.

Conclusion: a successful World Cup?

‘The 2010 World Cup was great!’ is probably what most of the world's football fans are saying. The doubts about (South) Africa's capabilities that were raised in the media (see Hammett in this issue) have since proven unfounded. With the blow of the first whistle, even the constant talk of ‘the dangerous World Cup’ (Korth and Rolfes 2010) was drowned out by the vuvuzelas. Apart from complaints about the latter, the ratings by FIFA, international visitors as well as TV viewers were consistently positive. The World Cup's preparation and execution were effective and targeted. In this respect, and in terms of its own logic, the 2010 FIFA World Cup was a ‘great success’.

The interests of (inter)national sports associations, the host nation and the host cities lie behind the organisation of such a mega event. These dimensions are key to understand the ‘context of justification’ as well as the systematisation of important outcomes and side effects of the first football World Cup in Africa. This paper has shown that the host nation followed the far-reaching foreign and domestic political interests while FIFA, as content provider, principally targeted profits. As a result, the aim to stage a successful, outwardly oriented tournament was shared. This constellation of interests is critical to the understanding of the urban policy effects of mega events. The powerful alliance of global-economic and national political interests limits the scope of the host cities' urban policies and the potential to capitalise on an event in terms of their own development aims: the immense exertion of external influence reduces planning's steering capacities.

The aspects that we have discussed (housing, informal trade and transport) clearly support the assumption about the reinforcement of existing urban development trends as outlined in the festivalisation hypothesis by Häußermann and Siebel (1993) and Häußermann et al. (2008). With regard to the greatest post-apartheid urban planning challenge – the breakdown of inner city disparities – the 2010 FIFA World Cup has not made a positive contribution. On the contrary, the event further intensified the fragmentation and marginalisation of already disadvantaged groups. The infrastructural improvements were not aimed at the integration of marginalised areas either, and the developments in the housing sector confirm once again that mega events contribute to displacement, segregation and housing shortages. With this in mind, there are considerable doubts that the event was a real success for the majority of the host cities' populations.

Many of the hopes stirred up by FIFA and the government regarding the economic and social consequences of ‘Twenty Ten’ remain unfulfilled. Whether the ‘social agenda’ was just political lip service (Pillay and Bass 2008) or the cities' capacity to act was too weak vis-à-vis national political interests or the profit targets of external players remains unanswered. It is certain, however, that inhabitants of marginal settlements will suffer most from state austerity measures induced by the previous mega spending. As recent protests against the Zuma government have shown, the cuts are not being taken quietly. It is becoming apparent that the ‘feel-good effect’ of the tournament will not counterbalance social tensions in the long term.

The 2010 FIFA World Cup is only one example of the current trend in event hosting, and further empirical studies – especially from an ex-post perspective – are needed to comprehend aspects of the transnational streaming of urban policy and urban development through mega events. This requires a comparative approach – a comparison between South Africa and the next World Cup in Brazil would be appropriate. The arguments made in this paper could form the starting point for a conceptual expansion of social science-based urban research with regard to a more comprehensive understanding of mega events in the Global South.

Notes

1. These words, often quoted in relation to the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, stem from a letter from the then South African president to the FIFA president Sepp Blatter; the letter was part of South Africa's bid book.

2. ‘Ke Nako’ ( = Sesotho/Setswana) means ‘It's time.’

3. The report commissioned by the South African government in 2003 and conducted by the international economic advisory agency Thornton and Feinstein as part of the bid process came to the conclusion that by hosting the World Cup South Africa could achieve noticeable effects in material and immaterial areas, the value of which would significantly exceed the government's investment volume. They assumed a GDP increase of 31.3 billion Rand. In addition, the consulting firm forecast a tax income of 7.9 billion Rand and 159,000 additional jobs, which would in turn lead to a relief for the national social system (Thornton and Feinstein 2003).

4. For the EXPO 2010 in Shanghai, the resettlement of 400,000 people was announced, and New Delhi (India) wanted to become ‘slum free’ before the 2010 Commonwealth Games 2010 – 300,000 slum dwellers were compulsorily resettled between 2003 and 2006 (COHRE 2007).