Displacement and the Racial State in Olympic Atlanta 1990–1996Seth Gustafson

Southeastern Geographer, Volume 53, Number 2, Summer 2013, pp. 198-213(Article)

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southeastern geographer, 53(2) 2013: pp. 198–213

Displacement and the Racial Statein Olympic Atlanta

1990–1996

SETH GUSTAFSONThe University of Georgia

Recent contributions to critical race theory and

refugee studies can sharpen and extend analyses

of urban displacement in aspiring global cities,

especially with respect to how these cities demo-

graphically envision themselves. In the six years

immediately preceding the 1996 Olympic Games,

the city of Atlanta displaced many Atlantans from

neighborhoods and public housing, while illegally

arresting thousands more, thus moving many of

the homeless to the city jail. Using David Theo

Goldberg’s The Racial State alongside the work of

Peter Nyers in Rethinking Refugees, this paper

proposes that Atlanta’s municipal government

and its civic allies, in a pursuit of ‘‘authentic’’

global city status, exhibited characteristics of an

urban racial state predicated on the image of the

displaced and their absence.

Contribuciones recientes a la teoría crítica racial

y estudios de refugiados pueden pulir y extender

los análisis de desplazamiento urbano en ciu-

dades globales emergentes, especialmente con re-

specto a cómo estas ciudades se visualizan demog-

ráficamente. En los seis años inmediatamente

precediendo los Juegos Olímpicos de 1996, la

ciudad de Atlanta desplazó muchos pobladores de

vecindarios y vivienda pública, a la vez que ilegal-

mente arrestaba miles más, a su vez, moviendo

muchos habitantes de la calle a la cárcel de la

ciudad. Utilizando The Racial State de David

Theo Goldberg junto con el trabajo de Peter Nyers

sobre Rethinking Refugees, este ensayo propone

que el gobierno municipal de Atlanta y sus aliados

cívicos, en su afán por el estatus de una ciudad

global ‘‘autentica’’, exhibió características de un

estado urbano racial predicado sobre la imagen

del desplazado y su ausencia.

key words: displacement, urban development,

racial state, Atlanta

plabras clave: desplazamiento, desarrollo

urbano, estado racial, Atlanta

‘‘Did you happen to see any of those‘guides to Atlanta’ they published for theOlympics? Big, thick things, some ofthem, regular books, and I couldn’tbelieve it at first. It was as if nothingexisted below Ponce de Leon other thanCity Hall and CNN and Martin LutherKing memorabilia. The maps—themaps!—were all bobtailed—cut off atthe bottom—so no white tourist wouldeven think about wandering down intoSouth Atlanta. They didn’t evenmention Niskey Lake or CascadeHeights.’’

‘‘I’m not too sorry about that,’’ saidRoger.

‘‘I’m not either,’’ said Wes, ‘‘But youget the picture, don’t you? How do yousegregate white tourists from black

Displacement and the Racial State in Olympic Atlanta, ∞ΩΩ≠–∞ΩΩ∏ 199

people in a city that’s 70 percent black?You render the black folks invisible!’’

—Tom Wolfe, A Man in Full(1998, p 185)

introduction

On April 3, 1991, Atlanta City CouncilPresident Marvin S. Arrington publicly an-nounced a plan that called for the demo-lition of Techwood Homes, the UnitedStates’ oldest federally subsidized housingproject. After over four years of conten-tious political wrangling and the displace-ment of Techwood’s residents, on 12 May1995, Atlanta Housing Authority officialsbegan demolition amid protest from for-mer residents and despite a projection bysome protestors that Techwood could lastanother sixty years (Keating and Flores2000; Beaty 2008). In addition to Tech-wood, city leaders during these years tar-geted several other areas near the city’scenter for a dramatic overhaul in prepara-tion for the impending 1996 SummerOlympic Games. In these instances, dra-matic overhaul meant the destruction ofother large public housing projects tomake room for Olympic venues, to cleanup the city’s neighborhoods around venuesites and to remove the city’s homelesspopulation from the emerging Olympiclandscape (see Figure 1). Forced evictionsand destruction of affordable housing pre-sented an acute problem for the city’sthousands of poor residents, no less thanthe removal of homeless Atlantans via un-lawful arrest and detention or one-waybus rides to locations outside the city lim-its, yet these efforts can be argued to havebeen part of the Olympic preparation. Inall, roughly 30,000 Atlantans were evictedor displaced by other means between 1990

and 1996, and approximately 9,000 illegalarrests of homeless people occurred in1995 and 1996 (Beaty 2007). Olympicprojects and preparations, as well as urbanredevelopment projects more generally,significantly altered Atlanta’s urban cul-ture, neighborhoods, and the lives of itsinhabitants (Davis 1996, 2008; Eisinger2000; Roche 2000; Andranovich and Hey-ing 2001; Beaty 2007, 2008; Burbank etal. 2000; Center for Housing Rights andEvictions 2007).

The goal of the Olympic projects, how-ever, was not simply to upgrade old infra-structure with new, as is a common statedgoal of many Olympic cities. Instead, I ar-gue here that the Olympics-related dis-placement worked to create a particulardemographic image of the city, one with-out the homeless, public housing resi-dents, and other low-income Atlantanswho were also predominantly racial mi-norities. It was only by strategically dis-placing these residents from Olympicareas of downtown that Atlanta couldcreate an image of itself as a prosperous,authentically global city. In some ways,this displacement is tragically unsurpris-ing because Atlanta is among many globalcities who have used Olympic-related ap-propriation of urban space to displace un-wanted inhabitants; indeed, estimates ofthe displaced and forcibly evicted as a re-sult of Olympic development since theSeoul Olympics of 1988 now numbers overtwo million, with the 2008 Beijing Olym-pic preparations alone adding an addi-tional 1.5 million (COHRE 2007a). Add-ing to research and scholarship on urbanmega-event crises is the burgeoning bodyof global city literature that mass displace-ment is often an integral part of global cityformation (e.g., Sassen 1991; Brenner

Figure 1. Some of Atlanta’s Olympic geography and other landmarks.

Data Source: U.S. Census Bureau; Georgia Department of Transportation.

Displacement and the Racial State in Olympic Atlanta, ∞ΩΩ≠–∞ΩΩ∏ 201

1999; Marcuse and van Kempen 2000;Purcell 2003a; Short 2004; Massey 2007;Gonzalez 2009). Furthermore, while At-lanta’s municipal government and its civicallies have a long history of displacing itsresidents through urban redevelopmentinitiatives, the 1990–1996 Olympic histor-ical moment is unique in that Atlanta’s gov-erning regime had not yet combined dis-placement with their explicit desire tobecome a global city (Greene 1996; Grady-Willis 2006).

The argument of this article is that onegoal of the processes and logic of strategicdisplacement in aspiring global cities isthe production of a constituency visible tovisitors that has particular demographiccharacteristics. In Atlanta, displacementwas less about removing people entirelyfrom the city, and more about relocatingthem out of particular Olympic relatedareas of town. Rather than relying on clas-sic urban studies of displacement to inter-pret the Atlanta case, I turn to displace-ment in other contexts to shed new lighton the logics of urban displacement. Inparticular, I rely on the literatures of refu-gee studies and critical race theory to illu-minate the case of Olympic-related urbandisplacement in Atlanta between 1990and 1996. Though their work operates atthe level of the nation state and is con-cerned with topics typically unassociatedwith urban displacement, Peter Nyers’ Re-thinking Refugees (2005) and David TheoGoldberg’s The Racial State (2002) areboth useful in reconsidering urban dis-placement in terms of refugees and racialhegemony.

Much insightful urban scholarship cri-tiques the problems of anti-homeless sen-timents, displacement via gentrification,uneven development and grievous out-

comes of capital accumulation, and thedisproportionate allocation of urban re-development projects on marginalized ur-ban populations, even in Atlanta (e.g.,Smith 1994; Rutheiser 1996; Smith 1996;Keating 2001; Ley et al. 2002; Mitchell2003; DeVerteuil 2006; Harvey 2006;Walk and Maaranen 2008). My argument,however, unbundles displacement fromother social processes and notes how citiesuse it to create particular constituencies.Global cities not only represent themselvesto visitors through these constituencies,but they also demographically actualizethe narratives of prosperity, cosmopolitan-ism, and multiculturalism that accompanyglobal city formation.

The paper unfolds in several sections.First, I discuss my methodology before Iargue that Goldberg’s The Racial State andNyers’ Rethinking Refugees present a com-pelling framework for understanding thelogics of displacement in urban settings.Secondly, I empirically show how the dis-placement of some Atlantans from Olym-pic spaces was intimately related to theidea of Atlanta becoming a global city. Fi-nally, I conclude the paper by suggestingfuture implications of this research andframework, including a reflection on otherOlympic cities, the future of mega eventsand displacement, and, briefly, some ofthe outcomes of those displaced.

a brief statement of methods

The goals of my research were to learnhow Atlantans involved in the Olympic-related displacement thought of their cityas a spatial construct during the Olympicyears, especially with respect to Atlantabeing a global city. This paper attempts toaccount for how displacement became an

202 gustafson

integral part of the city’s search for authen-tic global city status. I conducted researchon the Atlanta Olympics from spring Janu-ary 2008 to early January 2009. In thetwelve to eighteen intervening years be-tween the 1990–1996 Olympic prepara-tions and my research, many of the key pol-iticians, Olympic organizers, activists, andother significant figures had moved fromAtlanta and even from Georgia. This madecontacting potential informants difficult,but I was able to conduct twenty interviewswith various stakeholders living in andaround Atlanta. I asked mostly open-endedquestions about their experiences and mem-ories. Because the twelve to eighteen yearshad no doubt changed how my intervieweesremember the Olympic moment, triangulat-ing their interviews with primary sourcedocuments from 1990–1996 was particu-larly important. I augmented these inter-views with historical research, drawing onpersonal and public archives, includingthose of activists and homeless advocates,as well as the extensive archives located atthe Atlanta History Center. The online ar-chives of the Atlanta Journal-Constitutionalso proved to be quite helpful.

the racial state and

rethinking refugees

My contention here is that cities use dis-placement to produce a constituency withparticular demographic characteristics.Urban displacement is often neither an ac-cident nor a simple consequence: it is anintentional project of the racial state withits own set of overlooked consequencesand outcomes. Producing the displacedthrough racial projects creates a particulardemographic that corresponds to the aspi-rations of a state (or city in this case). Gold-

berg’s and Nyers’ respective analyses illu-minate similar patterns of displacement in-itiated by cities.

Goldberg argues that the idea and prac-tice of nation-statehood is dependent onracial categories; that every nation-state is‘‘a state or set of conditions that assumesvaried racially conceived character in dif-ferent sociospecific milieus’’ (2002, p 2). Ina further explication, Goldberg notes:

that race is integral to the emergence,development, and transformations(conceptually, philosophically, mate-rially) of the modern nation-state. Racemarks and orders the modern nation-state, and so too state projects, more orless from its point of conceptual and in-stitutional emergence. The apparatusesand technologies employed by modernstates have served variously to fashion,modify, and reify the terms of racial ex-pression, as well as racist exclusions andsubjugations (2002, p 4).

Race, then, is a demographic marker ofthose who properly belong and do not be-long to the state. Similarly, Omi and Wi-nant (1994) also note the importance ofracial projects in state formation. Theseprojects create the makeup of the state it-self as it manages, polices, and creates ra-cial categories. The goal of these racial cat-egories is a particular demography thatmodern states hotly pursue by ‘‘squeezingout the different, the very heterogeneitywhich modernity’s logic of spatio-temporalcompression has been instrumental para-doxically in effecting’’ (Goldberg 2002, p250). Racial projects—whether actualizedthrough urban planning, law, public healthpractices, educational initiatives, or anyother state project—aim to administra-tively create a particular racial polity.

Displacement and the Racial State in Olympic Atlanta, ∞ΩΩ≠–∞ΩΩ∏ 203

Though he focuses on race throughoutThe Racial State, Goldberg explicitly notesthat the state’s interest in demography ismore than racial and extends to other so-cial categories. (Goldberg 2002). In otherwords, the racial state is not simply racial,but instead is interested in a range of de-mographic traits. Other critical race schol-ars have noted that state projects manag-ing race are co-articulated with class,gender, and other categories (Haney Lopez1996; Roediger 1999, 2005). Cazenave’srecent work (2011) catalogues the machi-nations of the urban racial state in some20th century U.S. cities, noting that munici-pal governments have long regulated andracialized a range of social interactionswithin their boundaries. These works em-phasize that varying qualities of state ra-cial projects are historically and geograph-ically contingent, meaning the expressionsof demographic ideals vary widely. Thestate’s interest in demography is beyondsimple racial categorization and is insteadan image of all bodies properly included inthe constitution of the state itself at a par-ticular place and time.

Nyers’ Rethinking Refugees (2005) com-pliments Goldberg’s argument by illustrat-ing the contingency of producing particulardemographics in the context of refugees,while also clarifying how Goldberg’s logic ofthe racial state is practically enacted. Hefocuses particularly on how the category of‘refugee’ is intimately bound up with estab-lishing state power. Nyers, drawing largelyupon Agamben, writes:

[T]he relationship between the refu-gee’s identity and political subjectivityis not merely oppositional; the refugeeis not simply excluded from the politi-cal realm. Rather, the refugee’s rela-

tionship to the political can be de-scribed as a kind of ‘‘inclusive exclu-sion.’’ Refugees are included in thediscourse of ‘‘normality’’ and ‘‘order’’only by virtue of their exclusion fromthe normal identities and orderedspaces of the sovereign state. . . . Tobanish is also to capture, according tothe logic of the sovereign relation ofpower (2005, p xiii).

A person rendered unfit for belongingin the state is not simply excluded, as iscommonly thought, from political realms.Instead, certain demographically markedpersons that are made to be refugees areactually useful to the state because theirexclusion ultimately serves to reinscribestate power. Displacing these persons,then, can actually be seen as part of thedemographic logic that drives state power.

In relation to the racial state’s pursuitof a particular demography, the displace-ment of refugees is a state project of man-aging social categories par excellence. Thevery category of refugee not only impliesdisplaced persons, but also creates the cat-egories of belonging in the state’s bodypolitic. This does not mean that the imageis only one category or another. It insteadis predicated on a host of intersecting cate-gories and identities. The exclusion of par-ticular demographics, while including oth-ers, produces a desired demography andNyers’ point is that displacement is ameans by which a state achieves such ademographic constitution.

To be clear, I do not wish to assert thatpersons displaced in Atlanta as a result ofthe 1996 Olympics were refugees per se.There are, of course, important and in-commensurable differences between refu-gees and displaced Atlantans. The refugee

204 gustafson

is a category created by international gov-ernance organizations and NGOs and isusually reserved for those displaced bywar, famine, and other international is-sues. My argument instead is that thesame logic of displacement noted by Nyerswas used in Atlanta. The state produced aparticular demography via displacement,though in Atlanta it was done for globalcity ambitions. This urban demographywas complex; indeed, it was predicated onparadoxical notions of biracial coopera-tion, multiculturalism, unity, and pros-perity. Though Atlanta’s white businesselite, black elected officials, burgeoningblack middle class, and prosperous whitesuburbs are together uncommon amongmajor U.S. cities, belonging to these nicheswas essential for demographic inclusion inthe Olympic spaces and places. Those At-lantans not having these demographiccharacteristics—mostly (though not exclu-sively) black public housing residents andthe homeless—often faced erasure fromthe urban landscape via displacement,eviction, and unlawful imprisonment.

atlanta and the olympic

moment

In the years leading up to the 1996Olympic Games in Atlanta, the city em-barked on several redevelopment and con-struction projects that involved directlyand indirectly displacing residents. I arguethat these projects were not only racial-ized like many others in Atlanta’s history(Omi and Winant 1994; Rutheiser 1996),but also aimed to produce a specific urbandemography for the Olympic moment. At-lanta’s politics and demographics had longbeen driven by an uneasy biracial govern-ing regime (Stone 1989), but the Olympic

preparations represented a shift both inhow the city presented itself to visitors andhow the city constituted its own demogra-phy. Through a dramatic intensification ofthe closure of public housing, the busingof homeless persons out of the city, anti-homeless ordinances, forced evictions anddisplacements, and the construction ofOlympic infrastructure, the city of Atlantashaped the image of its demography to fita carefully crafted image of prosperity,progress, and pluralism. This image wasmade possible by the erasure of particularAtlantans from the landscape.

A heightened emphasis on civic image,however, was not a novelty for Atlanta.These central districts of Atlanta had beenhighly contested for decades; thus, the city’sattempts to remake the space were notnovel. Historically, boosters relied on the re-naming of the city from Marthasville to At-lanta to conjure coastal images of a tradeport on the Atlantic Ocean, invoking hyper-bolic phrases like ‘‘The City Too Busy toHate’’ and ‘‘Among the Trees There Grows aCity’’ to characterize the political economyand ecology of the growing metropolis, andthe city booster’s nostalgia for the antebel-lum lifestyle as depicted in Gone with theWind (Rutheiser 1996). Furthermore, polit-ically powerful African-American leaderslike Andrew Young and Maynard Jackson,drawing on the legacy of Dr. Martin LutherKing’s Atlanta roots, helped the city pro-mote itself as racially harmonious, yet toooften concealed were the racial projectsmade possible by a biracial alliance of thecity’s black political elite and white businesselite (Stone 1989). Newman (2002) notesthat Atlanta’s downtown redevelopment,stretching from the 1960s into the 1990s,typically resulted in a negative outcome forthe city’s black residents, especially among

Displacement and the Racial State in Olympic Atlanta, ∞ΩΩ≠–∞ΩΩ∏ 205

the lower and middle classes. These racialprojects included bulldozing neighbor-hoods to make room for freeways, the con-tinual redevelopment of city blocks to at-tract tourists, the architectural redesign ofdowntown buildings to isolate those priv-ileged with access, and the regular refusalof residential loans to black borrowers,among others (Newman 2002). Inwood(2010), too, writes more specifically thatparticular redevelopment projects in At-lanta have commodified and radically al-tered an historically African-Americancommercial district in the city. Given thishistory, the emerging centrality of the de-mographic image and perception of thecity during the Olympic moment is not sur-prising. The years immediately precedingthe Olympics, then, represented a con-tinuation and heightening of the imaged-based and booster-led urban growth in At-lanta.

What was novel about this chapter inAtlanta’s history, though, was the inces-sant branding of Atlanta as an authen-tically global city. While non-global imag-inaries had been used to justify previousracial projects in the city, the notion of At-lanta as a global city in the Olympic mo-ment invigorated the biracial governingregime. It was not only the city’s gover-nance structure that was biracial, how-ever; the city had adopted an image of aprosperous and harmonious biracial de-mography, predicated on the absence ofpoverty and racial division. The city of At-lanta remade its highly visible areas into acomplex demography—biracial, prosper-ous, and cosmopolitan—so as to prove theauthenticity of its global city image.

Much like Berlin’s growth machine pro-jected an image of globality through the re-development of Potsdamer Platz (Lehrer

2006) or Milwaukee’s attempt to embodythe ‘‘genuine American city’’ (Kenny andZimmerman 2003, p 74), Atlanta projectedan image of globality through the urban re-development and creation of Olympicspaces of downtown Atlanta. The elite busi-ness world had been promoting Atlanta asan international city since the mid-1970s,but hosting the Olympics ratcheted up theglobal city rhetoric to unprecedented levels(Rutheiser 1996). President Jimmy Carterand U. N. Ambassador Andrew Young ele-vated the status of Atlanta during this time,as did the rise of Ted Turner as a media andbusiness mogul and the increasing promi-nence of Hartsfield-Jackson airport as a hubof global air travel.

Beyond these few examples, however,many saw Atlanta as decidedly un-cosmo-politan. Though transnational capital hadsurely transformed the city’s built environ-ment, ‘‘the globalist hype is so far ahead ofthe facts on the ground that even the shame-lessly boosterish Atlanta Constitution hashad to concede that the city is not reallyinternational’’ (Rutheiser 1996, p 4). Withthe glaring lack of evidence for an interna-tional city, constructing and projecting animage of such a city became even more es-sential for the regime’s success. As oneprominent Atlantan said, the regimespouted ‘‘the biggest lie they could possiblythink of and [ran] around the world tellingeverybody about it until it [came true]’’(quoted in Rutheiser 1996, p 66). TheOlympic-led global hype was unrelentingand it provided reason to displace particulargroups of Atlantans from strategic locationsthroughout the city. Homeless persons andresidents of public housing projects andlow-income African American neighbor-hoods all became targets for displacementand eviction.

206 gustafson

displacement

Displacing the HomelessThe first of the two methods of displace-

ment affecting the homeless population ofAtlanta involved passage of anti-homelessordinances and the subsequent arrest ofthose who violated these laws. Passed inthe years between the awarding and host-ing of the Olympic Games, Atlanta cityordinances concerning the homeless in-cluded prohibitions of public urination,panhandling, public camping, reclining inparticular places, loitering, blocking side-walks, busking, and other activities city of-ficials associated with homeless popula-tions (Lenskyj 2000, p 136). Making lifemore complicated for the homeless in At-lanta was the fact that the city had no pub-lic toilets and an Olympic-related initiativeto create them had been sidetracked in1995 (Davis 2002). Up until 1995, ‘‘re-maining in a parking lot’’ was prohibited byAtlanta city ordinance (Lenskyj 2000, p243), while the state legislature in 1993attempted to forbid removal of any itemfrom a public trash container (Lenskyj2000, p 139). ‘‘Spitting on a sidewalk’’ or‘‘being in an abandoned building’’ also be-came legal infractions during this period ofpreparation (Lenskyj 2000, p 138).

These pernicious ordinances enabledthe city to displace the homeless from thecity at-large to the new city jail, also con-structed during this time. Because of thearrests of homeless persons, the City re-ceived a Federal Court Order resultingfrom Williams v. City of Atlanta to ‘‘ ‘ceaseand desist’ the pattern and practice of ar-resting homeless people without probablecause’’ (Beaty 2007, p 4). Furthermore,Atlanta police carried mass-produced tick-ets with the pre-printed words ‘‘African

American, Male, Homeless,’’ indicating ademographic specifically targeted for dis-placement (Beaty 2007, p 32). This is anotable practice of displacement becausethe timing correlated with that of the visitsof international Olympic officials (Beaty2008; Davis 2008). Homeless advocatesaround the city began to notice periodi-cally marked drop-offs in the number ofmeals served at soup kitchens and freeclinics (Davis 2008; Loring 2008). Thiscontinued for months; after comparing ex-periences, advocates noticed that thesedrop-offs nearly always occurred in thedays leading up to a visit from out-of-townOlympic officials. The displacement ofhomeless persons to jail meant that therewould be no visual evidence of their pres-ence for the officials, thereby using dis-placement to produce the image of theglobal city for the visiting class (Eisinger2000).

The second of the two methods for thedisplacement of homeless people was tobus them out of the city. Local governmentofficials used thousands of public dollarsin collaboration with Project HomewardBound, a Fulton County-funded non-profitorganization, to provide one-way ticketsfor the homeless out of the city (Beaty2007, p 32; Lenskyj 2000, p 139). ‘‘Callscame to the [Metro Atlanta Task Force forthe Homeless] from Birmingham, Alabama,and towns in Florida asking why homelesspeople were arriving in those places askingfor help and saying they had to leave At-lanta’’ (Beaty 2007, p 32; Beaty 2008). Thecollaboration of local governments with lo-cally based non-profit groups makes the dis-placement even more insidious because ofthe decentered power behind the displace-ment and veneer of community-supportbacking the displacement.

Displacement and the Racial State in Olympic Atlanta, ∞ΩΩ≠–∞ΩΩ∏ 207

Displacing the HousedFor those impoverished Atlantans who

did have a residence prior to the Olympics,public housing often presented the onlyviable alternative to homelessness. Thou-sands of these residents were displacedwhen three of Atlanta’s oldest public hous-ing developments, Techwood Homes, theneighboring Clark Howell Homes, and EastLake Meadows, were demolished in prepa-ration for the Olympics. While these publichousing projects were considered by someto be derelict, unsafe, and crime-ridden(Day 1998), other research showed thatTechwood/Clark Howell was a viable com-munity characterized by longevity of resi-dency and social support networks (Keatingand Flores 2000). The average residency forTechwood residents was nearly eight yearsand roughly one-third of families stayedthere for longer than eleven years. Most resi-dents of Techwood wanted their communityto be preserved. Although Techwood hadvery serious problems with drugs and vio-lence, residents valued their community tieswith one another.

Immediately south of Techwood Homesand Clark Howell Homes was a seventy-acre(28 ha) commercial area known as Tech-wood Park. Though viewed and referred toas a ‘‘slum’’ by many corporate interests andlocal officials, the district was actually aneconomically and culturally vibrant loca-tion. ‘‘Of the ninety-seven buildings in Tech-wood Park, only one was dilapidated be-yond repair, and only ten were deteriorated.More than seven-eighths of the buildingswere in good condition. According to the Ur-ban Design Commission, at least five hadhistoric value. . . . Forty percent [of the busi-nesses] were business-support enterprises,serving businesses and workers in the CBD’’(Keating 2001, p 188). Furthermore, Tech-

wood Park contained more than ten percentof Atlanta’s homeless shelter capacity alongwith low-income housing (Rutheiser 1996,p 260–263).

Removing Techwood Park and its eco-nomic functionality and necessary supportservices for some of Atlanta’s most vulner-able and least welcomed residents resultednot only in the removal of these residentsfrom a central location, but also the creationof an Olympic space catering to an entirelydifferent demographic. After TechwoodPark was razed, the Atlanta Committee forthe Olympic Games (ACOG), a public-pri-vate partnership established to manage theOlympics for the City, constructed Centen-nial Olympic Park, which consisted of nu-merous corporate sponsored spaces, an8,500-seat amphitheater, a television stu-dio, and other various entertainment andadvertising features. The formerly publicplace where some of the estimated 20,000homeless Atlantans found shelter prior toOlympic development had been trans-formed into a private, Epcot-esque land-scape with inadequate compensation forthe previous users. In addition, Rutheisernotes, ‘‘ACOG announced that the Centen-nial Park would be surrounded by a fence,‘to control the crowds and keep out theriffraff.’ Olympic security chief Bill Rath-burn was quite clear about the nature ofthe space: ‘This will not be a public park.We will establish conditions of admission’ ’’(Rutheiser 1996, p 268). Once displaced,the former occupants and users of Tech-wood Park became among those not per-mitted to access this space.

ACOG officials interpreted CentennialOlympic Park as a uniquely importantspace in producing Atlanta as an authen-tically global city. ACOG also selected Dr.Sherman Day, former interim president of

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Georgia State University, to lead the con-struction of the Olympic Park. Day has re-ferred to the Olympic Park as ‘‘the World’sGathering Place,’’ and referred to Tech-wood Park as ‘‘underdeveloped, under-utilized, and burned out’’ (Day 1998). Onthe supposed international space that Cen-tennial Olympic Park embodied, Day said:

. . . the first place [international visi-tors] want to go is the Park. We talkabout Atlanta being an internationalcity; if you go to the Park, you see realinternationalism. You’ll see flags of allthe nations, and the exhibits of thosewho participated in the Games [and]those that hosted the games. You seenames that we can’t spell or say whowon medals from a variety of coun-tries. I think it truly became interna-tional; the rings and their Olympicsignificance. So, I believe it is helpingAtlanta be seen as an internationalcity; as a place where international vis-itors all want to go. . . . So, I think [theOlympic Park] will continue to even bea greater asset to Atlanta (Day 1998).

Here, Day, as an agent of the state whooversaw the razing of Techwood Park andthe creation of Centennial Olympic Park, ar-gues that the Centennial Olympic Park is anintegral part of Atlanta’s global city charac-ter. This park is not, however, just a simplesubstitution of a park for a poor neighbor-hood. Instead, his juxtaposition of neighbor-hood poverty against the globality of thepark indicates that the erasure of the neigh-borhood is intimately related to the newpark itself. The production of this so-calledinternational space—a space that, in theminds of its creators, characterized Atlantaas an authentically global city—of course re-quired physical displacement of Atlantans

who used Techwood Park. More than this,though, the discursive power of the state toname a place as underdeveloped, under-utilized, and burned out provides the ra-tionale for displacement. While these kindof sentiments rest on assumptions of de-velopment and utility, they also frequentlyrepresent a coded sentiment toward thosewho occupy these spaces—often (and in thiscase) poor, racial minorities.

The remaining major Olympic projectrelated to displacement was the erectionof the Centennial Olympic Stadium in themidst of the Summerhill neighborhood(Newman 1999). In 1965, Atlanta-FultonCounty Stadium was built in the midst ofthese neighborhoods and a location adja-cent to the older stadium’s site was chosenfor the new Olympic Stadium, which wasto be given to the Atlanta Braves baseballteam at the end of the Olympic Games.These redevelopments in Summerhill re-sulted in the gentrification and later dis-placement of low-income residents ofthese neighborhoods. ‘‘[T]he constructionof new townhouses and single familyhomes and the renovations of street frontsled to an increase in land values and thedisplacement of 60 households. Whilesome of these residents were evicted, theirhomes remained empty during the Olym-pic Games’’ (COHRE 2007b). This rapidgentrification of the area surrounding theStadium represented not only a major dis-ruption for neighborhood residents, butalso the removal of poor, predominantlyminority residents from a highly traffickedand Olympic-related area.

conclusion

More than simple displacement for thesake of capital accumulation, the produc-

Displacement and the Racial State in Olympic Atlanta, ∞ΩΩ≠–∞ΩΩ∏ 209

tion of particular urban demographics viadisplacement reveals the urban state’s in-terest in its own demographic constitu-tion. By using scholarly literature examin-ing the displacement of refugees and otherstate theory linking state formation to ra-cial categories, urban demographics take acentral role in how the urban state notonly perceives itself, but also how it wishesvisitors, investors, and even its own deni-zens to perceive it. Atlanta’s Olympic mo-ment resulted in a complex but specific de-mography that was allowed to be seen inthe city and that conformed to a biracial,prosperous, and harmonious vision of it-self.

This framework for understanding dis-placement exposes a new facet to state-ledurban displacement. State projects of dis-placement are, of course, not limited toworld regions or situations popularly asso-ciated with refugees. From a Marxist urbanstudies perspective, for instance, the con-nection between displacement and urbanredevelopment seems clear: displacingbodies from a location allows for capital in-vestment and redevelopment of the nowunused space. This interpretation con-forms to The Limits to Capital, in whichHarvey (2006) notes that both the geo-graphic dispersal and concentration ofcapital relations works to the advantage ofcapital accumulation. Displacement ofpeople is interpreted as one step in thedrive for capital accumulation. Harvey’spoint explains a necessary element in thegeography of capitalist accumulation andurban redevelopment. This particular ex-planation and others like it, however, focuson displacement as an effect, byproduct, ornecessary precondition of capitalism ratherthan a state project of establishing its de-mography. It is not only to traditional polit-

ical economy that this intervention ap-plies: a tendency among urban scholars isto treat displacement as only an unfortu-nate and unjust byproduct or necessaryprecondition of other social formations,like racism, war, or a host of other causes.

Gentrification, for instance, is one formof displacement variously attributed in ur-ban studies to the growth machine, to thecultural preferences of young urban pro-fessionals, to the logics of capital, or othervarious processes and institutions (e.g.,Ley et al. 2002; Fraser 2004; Heidkampand Lucas 2006; Garcia Herrera et al.2007; Walks and Maaranen 2008; DeVer-teuil et al. 2009). This is not to say that theliterature on gentrification is monolithic;indeed, it is quite diverse in how it ap-proaches the rationale, origins, and out-comes of gentrification. The point here,though, is to show that the gentrificationliterature typically understands urban dis-placement as something other than a proj-ect essential to the demographic constitu-tion of the city itself. Other frameworksalso approach the question of displace-ment by focusing on the remaking of pub-lic space (e.g., Jacobs 1993 [1961]; Dear2002; Mitchell 2003). Much like the gen-trification literature, these other perspec-tives are diverse in how they theorize pri-vatization. My approach here, though,augments the existing urban displacementscholarship, including gentrification stud-ies and privatization of public space litera-ture, by focusing on the role of the racialstate and the particular bodies of thosedisplaced.

The implications of this argument pushurban scholars to reconsider projects ofdisplacement as those intimately related tothe state’s demography. The notion of ra-cial projects takes on new meaning, too, as

210 gustafson

the projects become tools of statecraft anddemographic management. While this pa-per has focused on a relatively brief momentin Atlanta’s history, it should be noted thatthe Olympics were an important chapter inthe city’s history of racialized politics (Bayor1996; Kruse 2007). In 2010, Atlanta be-came the first major U.S. city to eliminate allnon-senior-citizen public housing projectswithin its borders. Seen in this context,the Olympic moment was only a segment ofa longer historical trajectory of Atlanta’sracially-inflected attempts to reinvent itself.

This long history is not lost on the activ-ists, homeless, and poor of Atlanta whohave for years been involved in resistingdisplacement. While this account of Olym-pic Atlanta has attempted to trace the pro-cesses and logics of displacement in an as-piring global city, what is not present hereis a fuller account of the perspectives, ex-periences, and tactics of those who re-sisted displacement and from the dis-placed themselves. This is an obvious gapand it risks further marginalizing those al-ready marginalized in the historical mo-ment in question. To be certain, the re-sistance to the city’s attempts to displaceAtlantans was fierce, creative, and hadsome notable successes. Some scholarlyliterature has considered these perspec-tives (e.g., Rutheiser 1996; Burbank et al.2000) and some activists have publishedtheir stories in their own words (Gathje2002, 2006; Beaty 2007). These volumesare remarkable their clarity and for theprofoundly moving and enlightening his-tories they reveal. Future work will con-sider the motivations, actions, and strug-gles of these displaced Atlantans and theiradvocates during and after the Olympicmoment.

One of the difficulties in researching

displaced populations ranging from truerefugee populations to displaced urbanpopulations in Atlanta is the very fact thatthey are displaced. The displaced are oftenalready living tenuously. Their literal dis-location only complicates their living situa-tions, as well as advocacy and organizationefforts. Much less significantly, researchabout their lives is also more complicated.In this case, some interviewees speculatedthat many of the displaced stayed in andaround Atlanta for the long term, thoughwith their social support networks dis-rupted and having spent time in the countyjail. Indeed, it was only because of their re-turn to the city that the details of the dis-placements are known (Beaty 2008; Davis2008; Loring 2008). Since the Olympics,Atlanta has closed nearly all of their publichousing and is no longer required to re-build replacement public housing units at aone-to-one ratio. As a result, some of myinterviewees, especially those who workedspecifically with public housing neighbor-hood organizations, estimate that many ofthe former public housing residents havenow moved away from the city. Rutheiser(1996) notes that immediately before theOlympics, some public housing residentswere offered section VIII vouchers or spotsat other public housing locations, most ofwhich have been demolished since hiswriting. Even though those displaced in At-lanta are not refugees as such, their dis-placement, dispersal, and reconfigurationof social support networks are comparableto the consequences of displacement, whichare always severely disruptive regardless oftime and place.

Displacement in aspiring global citiesshows us that beyond the commonly un-derstood links of competition, training,and discipline that characterize the rela-

Displacement and the Racial State in Olympic Atlanta, ∞ΩΩ≠–∞ΩΩ∏ 211

tionship between human bodies and theOlympics, there exists a deeper and ulti-mately more significant facet to the rela-tionship. This relationship consists of theintricate ties between the Olympic indus-try, global city development, and the logicsof displacing particular bodies in Olympiccities in order to produce a particular ur-ban demographic. Indeed, in nearly everyOlympic city, one manifestation of the rela-tionship between human bodies and theOlympics has been various forms of dis-placement. This relationship is even morepressing because of the increasing push formega-events to be held in cities in the ‘de-veloping’ world, where displacements havebeen especially egregious and where in-frastructure and social services are mini-mal or non-existent. The 2010 World Cuphosted in South Africa, as well as the 2008Beijing Olympics and the 2014 World Cupand 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro, showthat cities more peripherally located areusing mega-events to boost their reputa-tion and exposure globally. These develop-ing world cities, like Seoul in 1988, for in-stance, have used these mega-events toattract the world’s attention and capital,but also for the purposes of large scale andhighly controversial urban makeovers. Forthe most vulnerable populations subject todisplacement and eviction related to theseprojects in cities everywhere, however, thequestion still remains: how will theseevents be used to further marginalize thealready vulnerable? Distressingly, massivedisplacement is the precedent set by At-lanta and other cities. Without a significantchange in how the Olympics are hosted—for example, by hosting the Games consis-tently in one city, by reimagining the mean-ing of belonging in cities, or other politicalchanges—displacement and other exclu-

sionary tactics will disastrously character-ize preparations and hosting of most mega-events for the foreseeable future.

acknowledgements

I am thankful for the generous guidance of

Nik Heynen, Steve Holloway, and Amy Ross dur-

ing the research and writing of this article. Ad-

ditionally, I thank my kind and thoughtful inter-

viewees as well as the archivists at the Atlanta

History Center. Two anonymous reviewers also

greatly improved the manuscript through their

helpful and insightful comments.

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seth gustafson is a Ph.D. Candidate in the

Department of Geography at The University of

Georgia, Athens, Georgia, 30602. Email:

sgus@uga.edu. His research interests include

critical social theory, urban geography, science

and technology studies, and urban political

ecology.