It's an old Olympics story. Evictions are one of the less observed Olympic sports. In Tokyo it is estimated that up 2,000 households face eviction. In addition, when the Olympics come to town homeless people are among those who are shoved out of the way as in Atlanta where homeless people were simply put on buses and taken out of the city. Meiji Park is the site of Tokyo's Olympic stadium so the homeless people who have been living in the Park for years now face being evicted by the forces of the State. Matters have come to a head as the tweets below demonstrate....

A film by Hamburg filmmaker Marlene Wynants on the legacy of the London 2012 Olympics - in English with German subtitles

they still seem to be forging ahead with their efforts to make London a world class centre of excellence for rough sleeping:
Number of people sleeping rough in London doubles in past five years

Convergence is coming, that long anticipated regeneration supernova is starting to explode:

There must be something in the water! After years of the old industrial sites in the Lea Valley being written off to justify their compulsory purchase and demolition to make way for the London Olympics the LLDC's Sweetwater web page now advertises the area as:

'One of the most important industrial sites in London, the area around Sweetwater has seen some of the UK’s most important innovations.

In the 19th century, the area was home to the East London Waterworks Company, but it was during the late 19th and early 20th century that it really came into its own with the growth of chemical, confectionery and petroleum industries taking off in the area.

Petrol was first registered for a patent by the company Carless, Capel & Leonard in the area around White Post Lane and a company based on White Post Lane first introduced the French process of dry cleaning to the UK.

A German V1 rocket and heavy bombing damaged many of the buildings in the area during World War Two, but industrial development continued from the 1950s onwards with confectionary, fur trade, engineering and fruit businesses, as well as timber yards and warehouses continued to make the area a real hive of activity and industrial innovation.'

Popular London2012 miracle stories keep cropping up, often in an academic context. Recent examples were provided at the ongoing UEL seminars held at the LLDC headquarters in the poshly named Montfichet Road at Stratford City. The upmarket de Montfichet was a Norman baron who founded Langthorne Abbey in Stratford back in the early 12th Century. Another classy name thrown up by recent events to inject an estate agent inspired aristocratic ambience in the E20 zone is Chobham Manor, the new address of the former rather down at heel Clays Lane.

Antipode Vol. 00 No. 0 2014 ISSN 0066-4812, pp 1–21
© 2014 The Author. Antipode © 2014 Antipode Foundation Ltd.

By Any Means Necessary: Urban
Regeneration and the “State of
Exception” in Glasgow’s

To cite this article: Neil Gray & Gerry Mooney (2011) Glasgow’s new urban frontier: ‘Civilising’ the
population of ‘Glasgow East’, City: analysis of urban trends, culture, theory, policy, action, 15:1,

By @FocusE15

Oh what a lovely Legacy! The media are long gone but the scandalous treatment of the Manor Gardens Allotments Society (MGS) at the hands of the Lee Valley Regional Park Authority (LVRPA), Waltham Forest Council and the London Legacy Development Corporation LLDC) continues.

As part of the deal stitched together to prevent the MGS’s return to the Queen Elizabeth Aftermath Olympic Park (QEOP) at Eton Manor following their temporary relocation to Marsh Lane Fields, now ludicrously named The Jubilee Park, a Section 106 agreement had to be drawn up by the three conspiring ‘authorities’. The purpose of this was to provide plots at the now permanent allotment site at Marsh Lane in lieu of those no longer to be provided at Eton Manor and to divide up the costs of creating a meadow in their place at Eton Manor.

The LVRPA voted this agreement through without telling anyone, including the MGS, in May of this year. The text of the document presented to the Executive Committee states:

It is understood some kind of ‘understanding’ was reached between the London Development Agency (LDA) and the MGS in 2007 to ensure that following the Games the MGS would return to a site allocated for allotments somewhere on QEOP’.