By IPS Correspondents
LONDON, Oct 23 2004 (IPS)

Addressing people’s rights to the places they inhabit is one of the new challenges of growing urbanisation, both in developed and developing countries.

While in the developing world families struggle to have a roof over their heads, in industrialised countries events like the Olympic Games can threaten inhabitants’ rights to a decent living. Both challenges are part of a single struggle, say citizens’ associations.

In the last decades urbanisation has accelerated. One-half of the world’s population – around three billion people – now live in cities and towns. The figure is expected to grow by as much as 65 percent by 2025, the World Bank reports.

One-third of the world’s urban dwellers live in slums or are homeless, according to the United Nations programme for human settlements UN-Habitat.

“Have achieved by 2020 a significant improvement in the lives of at least 100 million slum dwellers” is one of the targets of the UN’s development goals.

But “the challenge is more than improving housing conditions of a part of the inadequately housed; it must also include socio-economic policies to diminish poverty and homelessness,” says the International Alliance of Inhabitants (IAH).

“The city is a collective space owned by its inhabitants. The right to the city is the possibility for all residents to enjoy human rights: a decent housing, healthy living and a secure environment,” Cesare Ottolini from IAH told IPS.

“All people living permanently or temporarily in a city have the right to the city – including migrants and nomads,” added Ottolini.

Citizens’ associations and community activists launched the World Charter on the Right to the City at the first World Social Forum (WSF) in Porto Alegre in 2001. It is still a work in progress – the latest version was presented at the European Social Forum in London in October.

The charter is based on the principles of sustainability and social justice. “We go beyond the concept of private property. We support the idea of a social function of property. The social interest of citizens predominates over the property of a few,” Ottolini said.

The international campaign “Zero Evictions”, launched by the IAH at the WSF in Mumbai last January, contributed to preventing the eviction of more than 500,000 families in Nairobi, Kenya, says the group.

“Our next aim is the conversion of international debts of developing countries into social politics. We want to create a ‘popular fund for the right to land and housing’ controlled by citizens: the money resulting from the cancellation of the debt can be used to finance housing policies,” Ottolini said.

But it is not only poverty that threatens people’s right to a decent living. Events like the Olympic Games have been blamed for drastically altering the faces of host cities without considering their inhabitants’ real needs.

For example, behind the glamour of the 2004 Olympics in Athens were repression, workers’ deaths, corruption and environmental destruction: all done for the sake of big business, according to the Greek Social Forum.

“The Games were a lost opportunity for community development,” said the Forum’s Eleni Portaliou. “The Olympics were used as an excuse to regenerate Athens. But we did not need that kind of giant infrastructures, which destroyed our landscape,” she added in an interview.

Some Londoners also feel threatened. Their city has bid to host the Olympics in 2012. The decision will be taken by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in July 2005. The city’s government has launched a campaign to invite Londoners to “back the bid.”

“We do not want the Olympic Games in London. It is all about sponsorship and making money from it,” Anne Woolett from the British association Hackney Environment Forum said. “Any Olympic development will have a privatisation follow-up. We will face a progressive enclosure of public spaces,” she told IPS.

In Beijing, China, tens of thousands of people have been forcefully evicted to build installations for the 2008 Olympics, Human Rights Watch reports.

“The IAH is mobilising against those evictions. Citizens must have the right to oppose all measures threatening their quality of life,” said Ottolini.

(* Corrects paragraph 12, number of evictions prevented should be 300,000.)

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