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124Security of tenureAt least 2 millionpeople are victims offorced evictionsevery yearForced evictions areoften accompaniedby the use ofexcessive force …,such as arbitraryarrests, beatings,rape, torture andeven killingsTable 5.4A selection of majorurban eviction casessince 1985Source: COHRE(www.cohre.org/evictions);Davis, 2006a, p102section outlines the scale and impacts of three majorcategories of evictions: forced evictions; market-basedevictions; and expropriation and compulsory acquisition.The categories are not mutually exclusive, and the realcauses underlying the evictions may be very similar. Forexample, many cases of so-called ‘expropriation for thecommon good’ may well be a convenient way of getting ridof communities who are considered as ‘obstacles to development’.Three major causes of large-scale evictions are alsodiscussed below.Forced evictionsLarge-scale forced evictions and mass forced displacementhave been part and parcel of the political and developmentlandscapes for decades as cities seek to ‘beautify’themselves, sponsor international events, criminalize slumsand increase the investment prospects of internationalcompanies and the urban elite. As recognized by the GlobalCampaign for Secure Tenure, most forced evictions share arange of common characteristics, including the following:• Evictions tend to be most prevalent in countries or partsof cities with the worst housing conditions.• It is always the poor who are evicted – wealthier populationgroups virtually never face forced eviction, andnever mass eviction.• Forced evictions are often violent and include a varietyof human rights abuses beyond the violation of the rightto adequate housing.• Evictees tend to end worse off than before the eviction.• Evictions invariably compound the problem that theywere ostensibly aimed at ‘solving’.• Forced evictions impact most negatively upon womenand children. 30Forced evictions are the most graphic symptom of just howlarge the scale of tenure insecurity is and how severe theconsequences can be of not enjoying tenure rights. Table 5.4charts a portion of the eviction history during the last 20years, revealing that forced evictions have often affectedliterally hundreds of thousands of people in a single evictionoperation. The three most common types of large-scaleforced evictions – urban infrastructure projects, internationalmega events and urban beautification – are discussedlater in this chapter. Other types of forced eviction may beYear(s) Location Number of people evicted1986–1992 Santo Domingo (Dominican Republic) 180,0001985–1988 Seoul (Republic of Korea) 800,0001990 Lagos (Nigeria) 300,0001990 Nairobi (Kenya) 40,0001995–1996 Rangoon (Myanmar) 1,000,0001995 Beijing (China) 100,0002000 Port Harcourt (Nigeria) nearly 1,000,0002001–2003 Jakarta (Indonesia) 500,0002004 New Delhi (India) 150,0002004 Kolkata (India) 77,0002004–2005 Mumbai (India) more than 300,0002005 Harare (Zimbabwe) 750,000carried out in connection with efforts to reclaim occupiedpublic land for private economic investment. Conflict anddisaster, as well as urban regeneration and gentrificationmeasures, can also be the source of eviction. The mostfrequent cases of forced evictions, however, are the smallscaleones: those that occur here and there, every day,causing untold misery for the communities, households andindividuals concerned.While forced evictions are certainly the exception tothe rule when examining governmental attitudes to informalsettlements, it is clear that this practice – though widelycondemned as a violation of human rights – is still carriedout on a wide scale in many countries. Despite the repeatedcondemnation of the practice of forced evictions, millions ofdwellers are forcibly evicted annually, with hundreds ofmillions more threatened by possible forced eviction due totheir current insecure tenure status and existing urban andrural development plans that envisage planned forcedevictions. In the vast majority of eviction cases, proper legalprocedures, resettlement, relocation and/or compensationare lacking. The Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions(COHRE) has, over the last decade, collected informationabout eviction cases from all over the world (see Table 5.5).Its data is not comprehensive since it collects data from alimited number of countries only, and only on the basis ofinformation received directly from affected persons andgroups and where the cases at hand are particularly noteworthy.Yet, the data indicates that at least 2 million people arevictims of forced evictions every year. The vast majority ofthese live in Africa and Asia.Despite the numerous efforts by those in the internationalhuman rights community to prevent evictions, themany initiatives to confer secure tenure to slum dwellersand the simple common sense that forced evictions rarely, ifever, actually result in improvements in a given city orcountry, this practice continues, and is often accompaniedby the use of excessive force by those carrying out theevictions, such as arbitrary arrests, beatings, rape, tortureand even killings. In a selection of forced evictions in onlyseven countries – Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia,Nigeria, South Africa and Zimbabwe – between 1995 and2005, COHRE found that over 10.2 million people facedforced eviction during this ten-year period.While all regions have faced large-scale forcedevictions, Africa has perhaps fared worst of all during recentyears. A new study reveals that the practice of forcedevictions has reached epidemic proportions in Africa, withmore than 3 million Africans forcibly evicted from theirhomes since 2000. 31 Some of the cases highlighted in thatand other studies include the following: 32• In Nigeria, some 2 million people have been forciblyevicted from their homes and many thousands havebeen made homeless since 2000 (see Box 5.9). Thelargest individual case occurred in Rainbow Town, PortHarcourt (Rivers State) in 2001, when nearly 1 millionresidents were forcibly evicted from their homes. InLagos, more than 700,000 people have been evictedfrom their homes and businesses since 1990. 33