As a politically active student at St Bonaventure School, just east of the designated site, Amuzie was involved in local campaigns to reduce street violence after a series of local stabbings, earning his position as ambassador to the young council mayor’s team. . When the offer of Olympiacos was announced in 2003, he directed all his energy towards strengthening the local support for the games, based on the fact that it would bring jobs, safer roads and the opportunity, one day, to someone like him to rent or even to buy my own house. “This would not be just a sporting event, with developers making a lot of money,” Amuzie told me. “It was about our future.” When London won the offer in July 2005, its supporters described it as an innovative moment. The previous Olympics had done so much damage to the host cities, leaving behind useless spaces, unleashing property speculation and social displacement. But London’s offer was different. He vowed to be “a model of social inclusion”. His legacy would be “the regeneration of the area for the immediate benefit of all who live there.” Sebastian Coe, chairman of the London Organizing Committee, has promised that the redevelopment of the area in and around the Olympic Park will produce 30,000-40,000 new homes, much of which will be ‘affordable housing’ available to key workers, such as nurses. or teachers “. . Receive award-winning extensive Guardian readings sent to you directly every Saturday morning Ten years after the patriotic competition that brought the nation together to enjoy the opening ceremony of director Danny Boyle, with his pastoral vision for a happy England and inviting NHS nurses, just 13,000 homes have been built on and around the Olympic venue. Of these, only 11% are really accessible to middle-income people. Meanwhile, in the four boroughs of the site – Newham, Tower Hamlets, Hackney and Waltham Forest – there are nearly 75,000 households on the municipal housing waiting list, many of whom live in desperate poverty. Thousands of former residents have also been housed outside the area since the Olympics. It’s not the legacy Amuzie fought for. At the windswept corner of Fortunes Walk, in London’s new E20 Olympic neighborhood, where Celebration Avenue meets Cheering Lane, Victory Plaza’s twin towers skyrocket. Their concrete facades frame a private rooftop garden, safely elevated from the street, while the empty windows below advertise the promise of “luxury life in the East Village” – the former athletes’ village, now renamed with Manhattan-scale ambitions. Nearby, another pair of towers welcomes residents to its fenced “green village” – where dogs, ball games or unattended children are not allowed. Both projects were built by a development arm of the Qatari royal family and neither includes a single financial home. Rents start at 7 1,750 a month for a studio and go up to more than £ 4,000 for a penthouse. The development of East Village in the Olympic Park in East London. Photo: Oliver Wainwright “It feels like a huge betrayal,” said Amuzie, who now works as a community organizer for Citizens UK, a charity that helps local families living in overcrowded accommodation and still shares an apartment in Newham with his mother and his two younger brothers. “It may seem like the area has changed for the better, but it has not changed for most existing residents,” he added. “They have brought a new community and they are reaping the benefits. There is no way I or my friends can rent a new home or afford to buy a shared house, despite the fact that we campaigned for the Olympics to come here. “On the contrary, heritage simply meant gentrification on an industrial scale.” In the eyes of many who have been involved all these years, the result is a bitter failure. Nick Sarman was director of operations at the London Development Agency, whose mission was to buy land for the Olympics and evict local businesses. Most recently, in his role as Labor Advisor for Hackney, he spent six years on the planning committee of the London Legacy Development Corporation (LLDC), the body in charge of delivering on the promises made at the time of the offer. He has come to the conclusion that the original ambitions have almost been abandoned. “There is no longer any pretense that the legacy is trying to have a positive effect on the East Enders,” he told me. “It is guided by a total market ideology, dressed with some good ambition, with some trinkets being thrown out to keep the locals happy, while mainly serving the rich. It’s a huge failure at every level. “ A former member of the company’s legacy board has similar doubts. “There are some pockets of brilliance,” he said, “but overall the project has not improved the chances of people living in the area. We built a new community and brought it down to the Olympic Park, creating a huge gap. “ Speaking to those who have served on the boards of the various Olympic heirs and to the officials in charge of carrying out their mandates, some key issues arise that explain all the missed opportunities and broken promises. At least part of the chaos can be traced back to the naivete and insult that characterized the original plan under London’s first mayor, Ken Livingstone. But most seem to agree that the moment the project seriously lost its way was in 2008, with the election of Livingston’s successor, Boris Johnson. The origins of the London Olympics had little to do with sport. Since his election as London’s first mayor in 2000, Ken Livingstone has focused on racing as a means of channeling cash into the renaissance in east London. “He was completely ruthless to win the Olympics,” Sharman said. “It simply came to our notice then. But what gave weight to the offer was that he sincerely believed that he would help the area “. Livingston has always been honest about his motives: “I bid for the Olympics because it’s the only way to get billions of pounds out of the government to develop the East End,” he said in 2008. In 2004, Livingstone designated the Lower Lea Valley as an “area of opportunity.” The ragged wedge, which crosses east London on the Thames, has long been a dirty backyard, where sewage pumping, gas plants, high-voltage wiring, car wrecking and food processing companies were concentrated around a tangle of floating boats. and railway lines. lines. For the offer, the toxic condition of the area was highlighted. This was a place that had been poisoned by industry, an illegal dump in the grid of the capital’s most run-down neighborhoods. It was “ripe for regeneration”, as the Olympic offer put it. In 2006, advising the Secretary of State on the mandatory αγορά 1 billion purchase of land from local businesses, planning inspector David Rose described it as a place of “environmental, economic and social degradation”. It needed to be cleaned before the developers and the Olympics were interested, with their ample budget for washing the ground, laying pipes, burying cables and building roads, it would just be the job. The promise of affordable housing was cited as the main justification for acquiring the land, with the goal of securing 50% “to serve the needs of the local population and provide a sustainable living opportunity in the area”. Demolition work on what would become the Olympic Park in 2007. Photo: Matt Cardy / Getty Images But the research of an academic architect presents a different picture than that of a desolate wilderness. Professor Juliet Davis, head of the School of Architecture in Wales at Cardiff University, recorded the site before the Games as part of her PhD for the Olympics. When mapping the area in 2006, Davis found more than 280 businesses employing about 5,000 people, in occupations ranging from belt-making to salmon smoking, wig supply to bun baking. He found a community living happily in low-cost cooperative housing – and a Ghanaian Pentecostal church with one of the largest churches in Europe. “This was not an omission of a rust belt,” he told me. “All of them relocated in the years after the bid was won, some far outside London, and many closed as a result. Many of the companies were already struggling, but instead of protecting them, the Olympic renaissance exacerbated the process of decline. “The so-called ‘financial’ workspace provided in and around the park is now not accessible by the types of companies that were there before.” A demographic survey in 2018 found that 80% of employees at the “employment hub” of the Olympic Park were white – compared to 31% in the local area. While the Olympics are often credited as the savior of this harmful quagmire that brings homes, jobs and glamorous shopping malls to the East End, what tends to be overlooked is that much of this development was about to happen anyway. In 2003, the largest design request since World War II was submitted by Chelsfield, Stanhope and London & Continental Railways for the east side of what became the Olympic venue. Stratford City was to become the new Canary Wharf, a dazzling metropolitan center with 5,000 homes and 30,000 jobs, the complex of high-rise towers that would connect Europe with a new “international” station. (Eurostar has never stopped at Stratford International to date.) In July 2005, when London won the Olympic bid, the plans underwent a critical change. To save time …
