Sporting mega-events in Rio de Janeiro, including the 2014 World Cup and the upcoming 2016 Olympics, employ particular tactics of spatio-temporal scale-making to produce a utopic atmosphere of global camaraderie, modern urban development, and sporting revelry. However, these spectacular representations simultaneously work to obscure the recognition of the violence of infrastructural development, as securitization and privatization facilitate the mass displacement of residents of Rio’s urban slums. This article traces the implications of both material and discursive processes associated with privatization, militarization, and development as they are articulated in the lives of residents living in Rio de Janeiro’s squatter communities. I argue that the present mega-events in Rio are part of a regime of neoliberal governance, in which the restructuring of urban space articulates and reproduces the rational interests of private capital. I suggest that practices of spatio-temporal scale-making, and the production of visibility, are in Rio constitutive of forms of everyday violence. Finally, I examine the roles of visibility and recognition in concurrent modes of local and trans-regional subversion and resistance.
An overwhelming change in the distribution of human settlements across space has occurred in the acceleration of migration to cities during the past century. Over the last one hundred years, the proportion of the world’s population living in cities has risen from only 10 percent to over half; by 2050 it may well be 75 percent (Perlman 2010:8). Most of this urban growth will take place in cities of the “Global South” (Asia, Africa, and Latin America), and most of it will be concentrated in ‘informal settlements,’ squatter settlements, and slums (Davis 2004). The increasing concentration of dwellings in improvised and legally precarious urban spaces is dramatically apparent in the rise of shantytowns in Latin American cities.
Among them, the urban slums of Brazil have been an object of particular fascination to Western philanthropists and social scientists. They are taken as icons of the dramatic violence of drug trafficking, and as sites of poverty as a particular kind of temporal ‘failure’ of modernity. They are also popularly portrayed as the loci for capitalist development, as well as of ingenuity and perseverance in the face of structural injustice. These urban ‘squatter settlements’, termed
favelas, are found in the metropoles of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, in addition to smaller cities including Belém, Salvador, and Brasília.
The favela has become something of a ubiquitous icon of Brazilian economic inequality, emblematizing the uneven growth of capitalism during Brazil’s rise to power as an influential nation-state. In spite of the rise of political democracy following the dissolution of the 1964-1985 military dictatorship, favelas have remained zones of dramatic social inequality relative to the gated and alarmed homes of Brazil’s (predominately white) ruling classes.
As a part of the popular imagery of Brazil at home and abroad, favelas have appeared in numerous feature films as places of tumultuous urban squalor, narcotrafficking-fueled violence, and state neglect. Elsewhere, they have been variously deployed as the sites of corporate sustainability, video game villains, and empathic pop music videos.
The multiple forms of spectacle surrounding the favela are implicated with its formation as a national commodity. It has developed into a zone of prime interest for tourists venturing to Rio, as police occupation and gentrification beginning in the 1990s increasingly expands accessibility to the foreign pedestrian. Since the announcements of the Olympic games in 2009, a surge of tourists have flocked to Rio’s most centrally located favelas, staying in hostels and riding newly installed cable cars to the top, while residents are forced out as rent increases geometrically.
When I travelled to Rio de Janeiro in January 2011, I was stunned by the dramatic proximity between the plush life of wealthy tourists and businessmen in Rio’s Downtown, and the highly visible operations of military police. At the time, a major operation was underway in the favela Complexo do Alemão (“German town”) just up the hill from major tourist attractions. The area was being described in the news as a ‘war zone’, a Latin American ‘Gaza strip’. As a tourist, however, I was told I could rest assured of my safety from traffickers in this militarized zone of the city, thanks to the overwhelming effort being poured into the creation of the city as a ‘safe environment for capital’ in anticipation of upcoming sporting mega-events.
As the host city of the 2016 Olympics, and as one of 12 host cities of the 2014 FIFA World Cup, Rio de Janeiro is in the process of undergoing a massive and permanent overhaul of its urban landscape. Blocks are being razed, new rapid-transit systems are being installed, and whole zones of the city are being redesigned with the aesthetic and commercial interests of the upcoming mega-events in mind. Up to thirty thousand urban poor are being displaced due to construction projects and gentrification, at the same time that claims by international human rights organizations excoriate the exploitation and abuse of the poor. Simultaneously, ongoing grass-roots protest movements are organizing against particular policies of development, calling for the inclusion of the poor in the benefits of economic investments connected to the mega-events.
This seemingly contradictory desire for civic participation reflects a central focus of this study. I ask: how can we make sense of the production of desires for global connection and civic participation in mega-events, in the context of their simultaneous condemnation as structural forms of exploitation and violence? It is my intention to offer, in part, an account of the dramatic disjuncture between triumphalist economic discourses of global development through sport, and, on the other hand, accounts of the mega-events as forms of overt class violence. By historicizing contested discourses of civic inclusion and urban integration that accompany the mega-events, I aim to illustrate the conditions under which these discourses co-exist and are reproduced.
Further, I interrogate complex processes of contestation that are elided by a simple dualism of rich and poor. I suggest that in order to unpack the seemingly dramatic disconnect of these discourses, we must analyze both the imaginary and material production of infrastructural development, and its concomitant socio-spatial effects of forced removal, police occupation, and marketization. I proceed by drawing together an analysis of urban space as immanently socially produced, with a structural analysis of neoliberal government in which the state comes to function as a technology of the market. I offer an account of the conditions under which a simultaneous integration and fragmentation of urban space is taking place, both discursively and materially. I finally suggest that the cultural politics of citizenship and visibility are key to the production of multiple and competing regimes of spatial practice in the city, and in global discourses of mega-events.
The ‘suffering slot’ has been noted as a common trope in contemporary cultural anthropology, especially by its critics, wherein charitable or sympathetic analysis may lead to victimization or de-agentification of the poor (see Robbins 2004). Moving beyond such an easy reading of neoliberal development as a unilateral form of class-warfare, or as structurally foreclosed upon by capitalist regimes, I intend to bring into critical praxis both political-economic, materialist readings of structural violence, and specific discursive and cultural forms of interruption, contestation, and ambivalence.
Contemporary anthropological accounts of globalization and its effects wrestle with the critique of social science’s claims to ‘objectivity’. At the same time, they themselves rely upon forms of empirical data in their efforts to complicate easy readings of specific and often contradictory human experience (Keane 2003). Thus, a classic problem presents itself in the navigation of the contradictory territory between a political economic analysis of ‘global processes’ of institutions, markets, and nation-states, and ethnographic accounts that foreground local specificity and heterogeneity.
Tsing’s (2005:271) use of the concept of the ‘fragment,’ or “anti-holism,” serves as a starting point for my navigation of this quandary. I suggest that it is useful as a way of understanding how an analytic of space can be used to repeatedly undermine the settling of a static relationship between analytic objectivity and intimacy. Such fragments stop short of endorsing holistic structural accounts, opting instead to elucidate moments of encounter that interrupt received ideals of globalist scale-making projects.
Tsing also advocates for a form of scalar analysis which does not bifurcate the local and global, or the material and discursive. Rather, it seeks to specify the sites, or channels, through which an otherwise ubiquitous and vague ‘flow’ of capital, and its accompanying ideologies and processes, makes its presence felt. This means locating the specific moments in which scales of the global overlap and interact with those of the local, and the sites where scale-making projects like ‘globality’, ‘locality’ and ‘integration’ find their ground of contestation and reproduction.
My project foregrounds such moments of contestation and scalar interruption within hegemonic discourses of development, and in the scalar production of urban and global participation. I do not, however, wholly eschew the structural in favor of the ‘fragment’. Rather, I suggest that discursive and material practices of development and infrastructure collude in ways that are, if elusively, structurally patterned. I suggest that this patterning is particularly pertinent in forms of day-to-day violence.
The meanings and modes for the transmission of this violence, however, are in flux. While pointing out the ways in which spectacle and modernist development serve to pattern violence, I illustrate interruptions to their scale-making processes as not part of a globally united front against neoliberalism or sporting mega-events, but rather as specific moments of engagement that constantly complicate and erode seemingly rigid structures of hegemony. Herein, triumphalist narratives of mega-events and infrastructural development portray mega-events as successes of modernity, and as rational economic regimes for well-being. At the same time, local and trans-regional ambivalence, subversion, and resistance constitute moments of discord whose potency is radically contingent upon their visibility and recognition.
My analysis attempts to go beyond sociological arguments (as in Horne and Manzenreiter 2006) that seek mostly empirical data of demographics and statistics, by articulating the historical intersection of discourse and material. I argue that the ambivalence and resistance of residents of Rio’s urban slums to police occupation, privatization, and demolition turns upon destabilizing hegemonic scale-making projects of global capital as universal progress. By way of dismantling the monadic image of ‘global neoliberalism’, I look to the sites where ideology and practice fail to match up, and in which local and trans-regional experiences of ‘neoliberal’ techniques or modes of governance have come to contest scale-making projects of modernity.
I suggest that the analytic of space, as an epistemological category that always occurs in both the realms of material and discourse, provides a critical locus for illustrating constant interruption of received political-economic truths, or notions of objectivity. Herein, I employ Lefebvre’s (1991) neo-Marxist understanding of space as socially produced, reflecting a dialectic between concrete and abstract practices as the interplay of discourse and materiality. An important part of my study is thus understanding political economy and governance as immanently spatio-temporal scale-making processes. I understand favelas as spaces of neglect, integration, or fragmentation as produced, rather than negative spaces of state absence or passive exclusion.
It is necessary to comment on the secondary nature of many of my sources in this work. In addition to the work of a diverse set of ethnographers in Brazil, I’ve attained the interview data in this work from non-profit investigative journalism sites, as well as through news and social media forums including Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. In the absence of substantial opportunity for participant observation, these indirect and often highly interpolated avenues of information amplify the challenges of balancing ‘intimacy’ and ‘objectivity’ in ethnographic writing. Preliminary conclusions reached in this paper are based upon the combination of these resources, alongside my own brief experience in the city of Rio de Janeiro. While limited to the data on hand, the theoretical components of this paper are based as much as possible in the reported local, specific experiences of Rio’s residents during ongoing preparations for the Olympic games.
The 2016 Olympic Games and the 2014 World Cup are accompanied by deeply felt material and social impacts in Rio De Janeiro, and represent twin movements that share the center of a world spectacle. The vast majority of construction, infrastructural, securitization, and privatization projects associated with the Olympics will take place within Rio de Janeiro and its outlying areas, while the World Cup involves stadiums and facilities in a dozen cities across Brazil. Thus, it is the former that receives the bulk of my attention. While I do not wish to underemphasize the significant impacts of the World Cup on Rio de Janeiro’s spatial and cultural politics, their more dispersed effects place them farther from the focal point of my study, which emphasizes the close associations of mega-events with spatial and cultural patterns of change taking place in the city.
Several important themes run throughout my analysis of Rio’s present restructuring of urban space. First, the contestation of the scale and meaning of visibility are crucial to my arguments. In the production of spectacle, the generation of spatial-scale, and the normalization of state violence, I suggest that visibility and the politics of recognition appear as crucial loci of both hegemonic practice and its subversion or resistance. Another important analytic lies in the role of spatial production as both a concrete and discursive practice. Finally, neoliberalism as a set of ideologies and practices of government appears repeatedly, as an organizing principle of the state and institutional structures of upcoming mega-events. I approach neoliberalism as being constantly produced, and never simply the taken-for-granted condition of modernity.
The two chapters are closely related, but deploy distinct analytics as their central foci for understanding mega-events and the neoliberal production of space. Chapter one takes as its central analytic the construction of spectacle, and the role of images in generating regimes of value specific to cultures of capitalism. The chapter details the history of sporting mega-events in the twentieth century and their recent impacts in Brazil, a well as a history of the favela, providing the context for a multi-scalar analysis.
In doing so, it engages with both broad historical trends in ‘slum upgrades’ and urban renovation and the roles of ‘modernity’ and ‘globality’ as spatio-temporal scale-making processes. I foreground the experience of demolition as a moment of rupture and dissonance against globalist triumphal discourses, which is at the same time drawn into and constitutive of modernist desires for development. I explore the development of the imagery of global sport as intimately entangled with globocentric neoliberal ideologies, alongside the question of the utility of neoliberalism as an analytic in itself. I explore also the role of institutions and government in the planning process of the games, and the undemocratic moment of the games themselves as a form of what Agamben (2003) has called a ‘state of exception’.
Chapter two theorizes the production of structural modes of violence in Rio, and the role of visibility and invisibility in making them practical and thinkable. I propose here that Auyero and de Lara’s (2012) analytic of infrastructural violence proves useful in understanding the systemic and locally specific impacts of development projects associated with recent and upcoming sporting mega-events in the city.
I discuss the role of citizenship and civic participation as loci for making visible racialized urban violence. I seek to understand the spatio-temporal projects of urban modernization and ‘slum upgrades’ as part of a social production of space and time, which turn, in part, upon the politics of visibility and recognition. I focus also on the uses of privatization and police securitization as discourses and techniques for transforming public resources into means of private profit, at the expense of residents whose visibility is compromised. I conclude with a discussion of protest and practices of subversion, and the use of social media to attain new scales for the recognition of violence and resistance.
In October 2009, the announcement of Rio de Janeiro’s upset win of the 2016 Olympic bid was accompanied by televised images of a massive crowd erupting into celebration. Barely-clad women frenetically danced the samba across a massive stage at Copacabana beach, as confetti and Brazilian flags flew in the air. The scene followed a two-year bid campaign by the Brazilian Olympic Committee (BOC), which culminated in Rio’s defeat of Madrid by a final round vote of 66 to 32. Calling it the end of Brazil’s ‘street-dog complex’, economic analysts have described this victory as laying to rest popular notions of Brazil as lacking in the institutional and organizational potency to compete with other Western industrial powers.
A State government-sponsored special advertising supplement in the November 2011 issue Foreign Policy boasts, “Sweet Victory! Rio Invests Heavily to Receive the World, Promising Peace and Comfort.” The tearful President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva remarked, “Today, Brazil became a citizen of the world; we proved that we have the competence to hold the Olympics.” Indeed, the Olympics serve as a spectacle that is intimately entangled with global geopolitics, and turns upon the capacity of its image to produce particular forms of desire.
Lula’s claims of competence turn on the promise of massive expenditures and development projects in association with the games, occurring via the national Programs for Growth Acceleration (PACs). The Maracaña stadium (Fig. 1), one of the largest venues for sporting and ceremonial events and located in the heart of Rio de Janeiro, has in the past served as an iconic image of Brazilian soccer, and is a centerpiece for both the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. It is currently undergoing major renovations, including the expansion of its seating capacity, and the addition of a 10,000-car parking garage and shopping mall. Costs of construction have ballooned to almost R$1 billion (US$503 million), making it one of the costliest single construction projects of the games (Carvalho and Benedicto 2011).
The price of infrastructural development aside, its practice has led to widespread and sometimes violent socio-spatial impacts in the city. Practically in the shadow of the Maracaña, hundreds of residents of the Metrô-Mangueira favela have been evicted, and their homes destroyed, in order to make room for the massive commercial expansion of the stadium complex. They are promised the keys to new houses, but such compensation has largely failed to materialize. Protesting the removals, residents complain that they are frequently evicted illegally, relocated to neighborhoods far from their communities, or forced into unaffordable and untenable housing.
What is compelling about these mega-events as sites of contested meaning is not just the disjuncture between the stories being told by the rich and poor. Rather, the mega-event also serves as a site for the explication of particular ideologies of national identity, civic participation, and global linkage that attempt to crosscut divisions of race and class. These ideologies are expressed in the form a spectacle that works, with partial and fraught success, to transcend and minimize distinctions between rich and poor, global North and South, and “black and white,” through images of racial democracy, global linkage, and Brazilian national productivity.
Fig. 1. View of Maracaña stadium from Metrô - Mangueira favela c. 2011
The proximity of the neighborhood to the stadium has made it the target of numerous forced evictions in connection to Olympic development projects. It has been under military police occupation since November 2011 (Rio Radar 2013).
In this chapter, I address the interaction of symbols of national progress, civic identity, and global connection as they are deployed in sporting mega-events. I first locate the favela historically and spatially within Rio de Janeiro, and outline the ways in which the approaching mega-events might be understood as exemplary of what recent theorists have termed “neoliberal governmentality” (Ferguson 2010). While the games facilitate and explicate certain forms of structured violence, I challenge the presentation by activists of the games as a simple attack against the poor.
Rather, I suggest that the invocation of powerful imagery of national and civic ritual performs work that cannot be glossed as merely propaganda, or the locus of Marxian “false consciousness.” I instead understand the branding of the games as deeply imbricated with not only ‘global’, but also distinctly locally-produced ideologies of civic and global participation that find their roots in collective identities linked to place, race, and class. I suggest that the image and the significance of the sporting mega-event are being positively produced in ways that find their historical roots in Rio’s favelas, and longstanding desires of citizens for inclusion and constitutional ‘rights to the city’. Finally, I suggest that a key element in the prevailing success of these mega-events as neoliberal spectacle, and the extension of unprecedented institutional power, is found in their claim to special status as a moment of exceptional development in which, so it seems, anything is possible.Continued on Next Page »
“2010 Census: 11.4 million Brazilians (6.0%) live in subnormal agglomerates.” Dec. 21 2011. Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística. http://www.ibge.gov.br/english/presidencia/noticias/noticia_impressao.php?id_noticia=2057=1.
Agamben, Giorgio. 2003. State of Exception. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Albro, Robert. 2005. “ ‘The Water is Ours, Carajo!’ Deep Citizenship in Bolivia’s Water War” In Social Movements: An Anthropological Reader. Blackwell 2005.
Amann, Edmund, and Baer, Werner. 2002. "Neoliberalism and its Consequences in Brazil". Journal of Latin American Studies. 34 (4): 945-959.
Amin, A. 2004. Regions unbound: towards a new politics of place. Geografiska Annaler. B 86, 33–44.
Anderson, Benedict R. O'G. 1991. Imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. London: Verso.
Appadurai, Arjun. 1990. Disjuncture and difference in the global cultural economy. Middlesbrough: Theory, Culture and Society.
Aquino, Jessica. and Andereck, Kathleen. Nov 14, 2012. "NGOs and Volunteer Tourism: A Look at Volunteer Tourism in Favela (Slum) Communities of Rio de Janeiro"Paper presented at the annual meeting of the ARNOVA Annual Conference, Hyatt Regency Indianapolis, Indianapolis, IN, http://citation.allacademic.com/meta/p581841_index.html
Arias, Enrique Desmond. 2004. "Faith in Our Neighbors: Networks and Social Order in Three Brazilian Favelas". Latin American Politics &Amp; Society. 46 (1): 1-38.
---. 2006. "The Myth of Personal Security: Criminal Gangs, Dispute Resolution, and Identity in Rio de Janeiro's Favelas". Latin American Politics and Society. 48 (4): 53-81.
Auyero, J. 2010. Visible fists, clandestine kicks, and invisible elbows. Three forms of regulating neoliberal poverty. European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies 8: 5–26.
Auyero J., and de Lara A.B. 2012. "In harm's way at the urban margins". Ethnography. 13 (4): 531-557.
Bale, John, and Mette Krogh Christensen. 2004. Post-Olympism? questioning sport in the Twenty-first century. Oxford, Eng: Berg. http://public.eblib.com/EBLPublic/PublicView.do?ptiID=243520.
Bazely, Oliver. August 3 2010. Favela Living: A Vidigal Viewpoint. The Rio Times. http://riotimesonline.com/brazil-news/rio-real-estate/favela-living-the-view-from-vidigal/
Benmuri, Leandro D. 2012. Housing Development: Housing Policy, Slums, and Squatter Settlements in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil and Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1948-1973. Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation. University of Maryland.
Camus, Marcel, et al. 1999. Orfeu negro (Black Orpheus). [Irvington, NY]: Criterion Collection.
“Brazil announces phase two of the Growth Acceleration Program” (Press Release). March 29, 2010. Portal Brasil. http://www.brasil.gov.br/para/press/press-releases/march/brazil-announces-phase-two-of-the-growth-acceleration-program/br_model1?set_language=en
Brisolla, Fabio. Transl. by Tatiana Jardim. Feb 21 2013. “Favela resident is ‘super plugged’ into the Internet, research says.” Rio on Watch. http://rioonwatch.org/?p=6847
Caldeira, T.P.R. 2000. City of walls: crime, segregation, and citizenship in São Paulo. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Caldeira T.P.R. and Holston J. 1999. Democracy and violence in Brazil. Comparative Studies in Society and History 41(4): 691–729.
Carvalho, F. S. and Benedicto, J.L.L. October 4-6, 2011. Os Jogos Olímpicos e a Copo do Mundo: Impactos nas Favelas do Rio de Janeiro, Brasil. Powerpoint Presentation. Grupo consolidado de investigación MEDAMERICA, Universitat de Barcelona.
Carvalho, Maria A.R. de et al. 1998. Cultura política e cidadania: uma proposata de metodologia de avaliação do programa Favela-Bairro. Unpublished mss. Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Universitário de Pesquisas do Rio de Janeiro.
Clark, T. J. 1985. The painting of modern life: Paris in the art of Manet and his followers. New York: Knopf.
Clarke, Felicity. Jan 7 2013. “Barreira do Vasco Seeks Sanitation Improvements from Morar Carioca.” Rio on Watch. http://rioonwatch.org/?p=6478
Collier S. 2005. The Spatial Forms and Social Norms of “Actually Existing Neoliberalism”: Toward a Substantive Analytics. International Affairs Working Paper. New York: New School University.
Comaroff J and Comaroff J. 2001. Millennial capitalism: First thoughts on a second coming. Public Culture 12(2):291–343
Comissão de Moradores Atingidos Pela Transoeste. Dec 17, 2012. O Legado Somos Nós: A História de Francisca. Witness. Video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=02aM4yWyRB4#.
Comite Populario. “A CIDADE É NOSSA! Veja as imagens do ato noMaracanã” March 19, 2013. Comite Populario. http://comitepopulario.wordpress.com/2013/03/19/a-cidade-e-nossa-veja-as-imagens-do-ato-no-maracana/
Cosentino, Renato. Transl. by Rachel Fox et al. Feb 26, 2013. “Largo do Tanque: One More Summary Removal for the Rio Olympics.” Rio on Watch. http://rioonwatch.org/?p=6980.
Davis, Mike. 2004. Planet of slums. New Left Review 26: 5–34.
Davis, Mike, and Daniel Bertrand Monk, eds. 2007. Evil paradises: dreamworlds of neoliberalism. New York: New Press.
DOW Chemical Company. October 2012. Rio Sustainable City Project. Video. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Ny6WRzGq1A
Duncan, Nancy. 1996. “Renegotiating Gender and Sexuality in Public and Private Spaces,” in Nancy Duncan, (Ed.), Bodyspace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality. New York: Routledge.
Egozi, Arie. 9 Dec 2010. “Brazil selects Elbit's Hermes 450 UAV.” Flightglobal.com. http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/brazil-selects-elbits-hermes-450-uav-350793/
Elyachar, Julia. 2005. Markets of dispossession: NGOs, economic development, and the state in Cairo. Durham: Duke University Press. Escobar, Arturo. 1995. Encountering development: the making and unmaking of the Third World. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Ferguson, James.1994. The anti-politics machine: "development," depoliticization, and bureaucratic power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
---. 2010. "The Uses of Neoliberalism". Antipode. 41 (Supplement): 166-184.
---. 2012. “Structures of Responsibility” Ethnography. vol. 13 no. 4.
"Finance". February 16, 2009. Rio de Janeiro 2016 Candidate File. Brazilian Olympic Committee. Accessed March 10, 2013. http://urutau.prodrj.gov.br
Fischer, Brodwyn M. 2008. A poverty of rights: citizenship and inequality in twentieth-century Rio de Janeiro. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.
Foucault, Michel. 1995. Discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. New York: Vintage Books.
Foucault, Michel, and Michel Senellart. 2008. The birth of biopolitics: lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-79. Basingstoke [England]: Palgrave Macmillan.
Freire-Medeiros, B. 2009. "The favela and its touristic transits". Geoforum. 40 (4): 580-588.
Friedman, Thomas L. 2005. The world is flat: a brief history of the twenty-first century. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Gaffney, Christopher. 2010. "Mega-events and socio-spatial dynamics in Rio de Janeiro, 1919-2016". Journal of Latin American Geography. 9 (1): 7-29.
Goldstein, Donna M. 2003. Laughter out of place : race, class, violence, and sexuality in a Rio Shantytown University of California Press.
Graeber, David. 2001. Toward an anthropological theory of value: the false coin of our own dreams. New York: Palgrave.
Greene, S. J. 2003. 'Staged cities: mega-events, slum clearance, and global capital', Yale Human Rights and Development Law Journal 6: 161–187.
Hall, C. Michael. 2006. "Urban entrepreneurship, corporate interests and sports mega‐events: the thin policies of competitiveness within the hard outcomes of neoliberalism." The Sociological Review 54, no. s2: 59-70.
Harvey D.1985. The urbanization of capital: studies in the history and theory of capitalist urbanization. Baltimore, Md: Johns Hopkins University Press.
---. 2005. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press.
---. 2008. “The Right to the City.” New Left Review 53.
Haussmann, Georges Eugène, Françoise Choay, Bernard Landau, and Vincent Sainte Marie Gauthier. 2000. Mémoires. Paris: Editions du Seuil.
Holston, James.1989. The modernist city: an anthropological critique of Brasília. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
---. 2008. Insurgent citizenship: disjunctions of democracy and modernity in Brazil. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Horne, John, and Wolfram Manzenreiter. 2006. “An Introduction to the sociology of sports mega-events.” In Sports mega-events: social scientific analyses of a global phenomenon. Horne J., and Manzenreiter,W. ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub./Sociological Review.
Huggins, Martha. 1998. Political Policing: The United States and Latin America. Durham: Duke University Press.
Jackson, Michael. 1996. They don't care about us. New York: Epic.
Jeter, Jon. 2003 “Death squads feed terror in Rio slums.” Seattle Times, October 27.
Joyce, P. 2003. The Rule of Freedom: Liberalism and the Modern City. London: Verso.
Kaiser, Anna.“ Feb 7 2013. ‘The most important fight in our community is being recognized as normal people’ — an interview with Iara Oliveira of City of God.” Rio on Watch. http://rioonwatch.org/?p=6768
Keane, Webb. 2003. "Self-Interpretation, Agency, and the Objects of Anthropology: Reflections on a Geneology," CSSH.
Klein, Naomi. 2007. The shock doctrine: the rise of disaster capitalism. New York: Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt.
Kumar, Ashok. April 12, 2012. “Want to cleanse your city of its poor? Host the Olympics.” Ceasefire. http://ceasefiremagazine.co.uk/olympics-opportunity-cleanse-city/
Latour, B. 1988. How to write The Prince for machines as well as machinations. In B. Elliott (ed.), Technology and social process, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh.
Lefebvre, Henri. 1991. The production of space. Oxford, OX, UK: Blackwell.
Pirez, P. 2002. Buenos Aires: Fragmentation and privatization of the metropolitan city. Environment and Urbanization 14(1): 145–158.
Maciel, Fernanda. February 2013. “White Flow.” http://www.fernandamaciel.es/en/white-flow/
MacKay, Duncan. Dec 6, 2010. “Wikileaks document expose US fears for Rio 2016 Olympics.” Inside the Games. http://www.insidethegames.biz/olympics/summer-olympics/2016/11270-wikileaks-document-shows-us-fears-for-rio-2016
Marinho, G. and Flor, K. 2013. “The Favela Today is the Soul of Business.” Rio on watch. Accessed March 10, 2013. .
Marinho, Roberto. Transl. Rachel Fox. Dec. 4, 2012. “The Story of a Family From Morro da Providência.” Rio on Watch. http://rioonwatch.org/?p=6104
Mazzarella, William. 2003. Shoveling smoke: advertising and globalization in contemporary India. Durham: Duke University Press. McFarlane C and Rutherford J (2008) Political infrastructures: Governing and experiencing the fabric of the city. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 32(2).
Mellen, Tom. “Rousseff slams 'failed' neoliberal doctrines.” Jan. 21 2012. http://morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/114697
Mendes, Wilson. June 25, 2012. “Moradores do conjunto habitacional Bairro Carioca, em Triagem, terão transporte na porta de casa.” Globo. http://extra.globo.com/noticias/rio/moradores-do-conjunto-habitacional-bairro-carioca-em-triagem-terao-transporte-na-porta-de-casa-5306411.html
Merrifield A. 2002. Metromarxism: A Marxist Tale of the City. New York: Routledge.
Mier, Brian. 2013. Rio Militarises Its Favela Slums in Preparation for the 2014 World Cup. Vice Magazine (online). Accessed March 8, 2013. http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/rio-militarizes-its-favela-slums-in-preparation-for-the-2014-world-cup
Mollo Maria L.R., and Saad-Filho, Alfredo. 2004. “The Neoliberal Decade: Reviewing the Brazilian Economic Transition.” http://actuelmarx.u-paris10.fr/m4mollo.htm#_edn1
Morris, Rosalind C. 2001. “Modernity’s Media and the End of Mediumship? On the Aesthetic Economy of Transparency in Thailand.” In Comaroff, Jean, and John L. Comaroff. Millennial capitalism and the culture of neoliberalism. [Durham, N.C]: Duke University Press.
Neri, Pricila. August 13, 2012. The Debating Chamber - Brazil residents face evictions ahead of 2016 Olympics. Witness. http://www.trust.org/alertnet/blogs/the-debating-chamber/brazil-residents-face-evictions-ahead-of-2016-olympics-witness/
Novelli, J.M.N., Galvão A. 2001. "The Political Economy of Neoliberalism in Brazil in the 1990s". International Journal of Political Economy. 31 (4): 3-52.
Nuijten, Monique. 2013. “The perversity of the ‘Citizenship Game’: Slum-upgrading in the urban periphery of Recife, Brazil.” Critique of Anthropology vol. 33 no. 1 8-25.
Oksala, J. 2011. Violence and Neoliberal Governmentality. Constellations, 18:474–486. doi:10.1111/j.1467-8675.2011.00646.x
Oliveira, Ney dos Santos.1997. Race, class and the political mobilization of the poor: ghettos in New York and favelas in Rio de Janeiro. Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholoars.
---. 2002 “Direito dos negros: distribuição racial, pobreza e moradia na região metropolitana do Rio de Janeiro,” in Anais XXI Encontro e VI Congresso Arquisur. Salvador: Faculdade de Arquitetura, Universidade Federal da Bahia.
Padilha, José, et al. 2008. Tropa de elite (Elite squad). [New York, N.Y.]: Weinstein Co. Home Entertainment.
Perlman, Janice E. 2010. Favela: four decades of living on the edge in Rio de Janeiro. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ponce, Leonel. July 10, 2011. “Cable Car System Crowns Urban Revitalization Project in Rio de Janeiro's Alemão Favelas” Inhabit. http://inhabitat.com/cable-car-system-crowns-urban-revitalization-project-in-rio-de-janeiros-alemao-favela-complex/pac-alemao-rio-de-janeiro-infrastructure-01/#sthash.ui6naw9N.dpuf
Pun, Ngai. 2005. Made in China: women factory workers in a global workplace. Durham [NC]: Duke University Press.
‘Relatório da União acusa operação policial no Rio de "execução sumária"” Folha Online, January 11 2007. Relatório da União acusa operação policial no Rio de "execução sumária" http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/folha/cotidiano/ult95u341949.shtml
‘Rio de Janeiro: Gearing up for the Games.” (Advertising Supplement) 2011. Foreign Policy. Peninsula Press. www.foreignpolicy.com/files/fp_uploaded_images/brazilnew.pdf
Rio Lei Organica do Município. [Lei Orgânica (1990)] 2010. Rio Lei Orgânica do Município. - 2. ed. rev. e ampl. - Rio de Janeiro: Centro de Estudos da Procuradoria-Geral do Município.
Rio Prefeitura. “Today, Tomorrow, and Forever.” Cidade Olímpica. Accessed March 5, 2013. http://www.cidadeolimpica.com.br/en/today-tomorrow-and-forever/
“Rio to Stage 2016 Olympic Games.” October 2 2009. BBC. http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/olympic_games/8282518.stm
Robbins, Joel. 2004. Becoming sinners: Christianity and moral torment in a Papua New Guinea society. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press.
Roche, M. 2000. Mega Events and Modernity. London: Routledge.
Rodgers D. 2012. "Haussmannization in the tropics: Abject urbanism and infrastructural violence in Nicaragua". Ethnography. 13 (4): 413-438.
Salles, Walter, et al. 2003. Cidade de Deus (City of God). [São Paulo, Brazil]: O2 Filmes.
Sassen, Saskia.1991. The global city: New York, London, Tokyo. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
---. 2000. Cities in a world economy. Thousand Oaks, Calif: Pine Forge Press.
Scheper-Hughes N and Bourgois P (eds). 2004. Violence in War and Peace. Malden, MA:
Scheper-Hughes, Nancy. 1992. Death without weeping: the violence of everyday life in Brazil. Berkeley: University of California Press.
---. 1995. "The Primacy of the Ethical: Propositions for a Militant Anthropology". Current Anthropology. 36 (3): 409-440.
Schwambach, Karin. 2011. Mega-events in Rio de Janeiro and Their Influence on the City Planning. 15th International Planning History Conference.
Steiker-Ginsberg, Kate. March 22 2013. “Vila Autódromo Under Pressure from City to Accept Resettlement Housing.” Rio on Watch. http://rioonwatch.org/?p=7832
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2005. Friction: an ethnography of global connection. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Twine, France Winddance. 1998. Racism in a racial democracy: the maintenance of white supremacy in Brazil. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
“UPPs do Jacarezinho e de Manguinhos serão inauguradas nesta quarta-feira.” Jan 15 2013. O Dia. http://odia.ig.com.br/portal/rio/upps-do-jacarezinho-e-de-manguinhos-ser%C3%A3o-inauguradas-nesta-quarta-feira-1.535901
Vanwynsberghe, R., Surborg, B., and Wyly, E. 2012. When the Games Come to Town: Neoliberalism, Mega-Events and Social Inclusion in the Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympic Games. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research. doi:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2012.01105.x
Vargas, João. 2006. "When a Favela Dared to Become a Gated Condominium". Latin American Perspectives. 33 (4): 49-81.
---. 2012. "Gendered antiblackness and the impossible Brazilian project: Emerging critical black Brazilian studies". Cultural Dynamics. 24 (1): 3-11.
Walker, Lucy, et al. 2011. Waste land. [London]: Almega Projects.
Zaluar, Alba and Marcos Alvito (eds.). 1999. Um século de favela. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Fundação Getúlio Vargas
Endnotes
- I.e., Orfeu Negro (Black Orpheus; [1959]); Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad; 2007); Cidade de Deus (City of God; 2002)
- I.e. Waste Land (2011), a look at a favela in Rio built by catadores (trashpickers)
- I.e.,“Rio Sustainable City Project” (2012). The video was produced by DOW Chemical Company, a major sponsor of the 2012 London Games and a contractor for present infrastructural development projects in Rio.
- Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, a popular console video game, features a sequence in which players raid a favela, shooting ‘terrorists’ and arms dealers.
- I.e., Michael Jackson’s controversial music video “They Don’t Care About Us.”
- I.e., Arias 2004, 2006; Caldeira 2000; Carvalho 2011; Fischer 2008; Freire-Medeiros 2009; Gaffney 2010; Holston 1989, 2008; Goldstein 2003; Nuijten 2013; Oliveira 1997, 2002; Perlman 2010; Scheper-Hughes 1992, 1995; Schwambach 2011; Twine 1998; Vargas 2006, 2012; Zaluar 1999
- The role of the Olympic bid as mode of jockeying for geopolitical status of Rio as a city, and Brazil as a nation, are apparent in a leaked memo from Lisa Kubiske,Deputy Chief of Mission of the United States Mission in Brazil. Rio’s status is here produced not only by concrete economic forces, but also through the production of its reputation and perceptions of ‘primacy’ (Mackay 2010). Citing then president Lula’s remark that Brazil has ended its ‘street dog complex’, newly assured of its status as an important country, the memo remarks on the importance of IOC recognition of a city and a nation for perceptions of its ability to ‘deal with the global financial crisis’ and to compete with North American, European, and Asian cities who lost the Olympic bidding process, itself a long and cost-intensive process for the competing nations.
- As I later illustrate, the APO is made up of a group of businessmen and politicians, appointed by the IOC to oversee the entirety of the Olympic process. This includes the distribution of national and municipal funds, marketing of the events, and coordination with state-controlled military police securitization.
- The consistent use of female images as the font of Brazilian eroticism portrays part of a broader culture of patriarchy machismo, in which the interests and sexual preferences of heterosexual males are seen to take political precedence.
- A woman working as a live-in maid at my hosts’ house in São Paulo explained her carioca origins as the source of her distinct mannerisms, appearance, and accent, as compared to paulistanos. A degree of related civic chauvinism was apparent on the part of my middle-class hosts. Once when I had difficulty understanding the maid, mainly due to my poor Portuguese, their daughter interjected, “She’s carioca;, of course no one can understand!” This comment in fact probably had much more to do with class, and this woman’s origin in Rio’s favelas, than it did the intelligibility of carioca accents in general, as much of the national news and media is based in Rio and bears its vernacular and accent.
- Related videos feature children of varying ethnic backgrounds and gender, iconizing Brazilian nationalist discourse of ‘racial democracy’.
- Mazzarella (2003) suggests that the rise of global communications technology in the twentieth century has been key to the production of novel forms of branded commodities, designed to iconize specific places of origin within a universal circulation of goods and images. The effect of Olympic events as branded entities has also been coincident with the rise of ‘Olympic TV’ as a ‘sharable global community experience’ that includes a sense of ‘simultaneous co-presence’ (Roche 2006:34).
- Collier (2005:35), in his analysis of post-Soviet engagements with capitalist markets in the early 1990s, points to the importance of distinguishing ‘neoliberal technical mechanisms’ from a broader political-economic project, which takes the form of structural transformations (‘marketization’) or the ‘political orientations and goals of key actors’. The post-socialist context presents a compelling comparative locus for studying the diversity of cultures of capitalism.
- The term morador means in Portuguese ‘resident’, or ‘dweller’. It is a term those living in favelas frequently employ to describe themselves.
- According to Ney dos Santos Oliveira’s studies of a favela in Niteroi, just outside of Rio de Janeiro, whereas Niterói has about 70 percent white and 30 percent black residents (“including self-denominated blacks and browns”), the favela has about 70 percent black and 30 percent white residents (Oliveira 2002; in Vargas 2006).
- This exclusive focus might seem to suggest that favelas are the only zones experiencing securitization, gentrification, and violent upheavals based in the conflicting motives and goals of powerful elites with those of the urban poor. However, it is not my goal to marginalize the experiences of the urban poor that do not reside in favelas. I find the term useful as a common identifier of the neighborhoods I study, and a marker for the specificity of particular localities that I wish to foreground in this thesis.
- The term ‘favela’ is also considered in some contexts to be a pejorative term. The the use of “morro (hill), communidade popular (popular community), or simply communidade” are common alternate terms used for the favelas by those who live within them (Perlman 2010).
- Perlman (2010) argues that the meaning of ‘becoming gente’ is fluid, and an indicator of urban status relations that beyond simple differences in economic earnings. It is used as a term of respect in diverse contexts (i.e. ‘gente boa’; a good person). She suggests, “Being gente is not a static state. It is a relational condition that may vary for a single person over time…It is part of the urban condition of the underclass, a way the affluent distance themselves from those less fortunate and reinforce their sense of being above the rules” (2010: 319)
- If organized by a group such the Landless Workers Movement (MST), as has often occurred in other cities, it may be termed an ocupação or invasão - occupation or invasion.
- Mega-events in the neo-liberal era have entailed urban displacements of astonishing scale. A report by the center on housing rights and evictions (COHRE.org) claims that prior to the 1988 Seoul Olympics, 720,000 urban poor were forcibly relocated in connection with the events; they place the number of peripheral residents in Beijing displaced in connection with the 2008 Olympics at around 1.25 million.
- While photos from these investigative journalists’ reports are strategically framed to tell a certain story, I include them here as (situated) tokens of the material conditions of evictions and demolition.
- The film portrays her life after the forced removal, where she is shown as taking on extra work (including 18 hour days) in order to make up for the loss of the home. The precise nature of the city’s compensation of her home is not treated – we as the viewers are left to surmise that whatever the promises made, they have not prevented her from having to undergo hardship including the loss of their family’s downstairs carpentry business. She and her husband, after living with family for three months, have since built a new home together in Fontela, in a different area of the city.
- Friedman’s innovations were first tested under the rule of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, leading to sweeping free market reforms that had devastating economic effects on millions of Chilean poor (Klein 2007:7), alongside the despotic use of state violence.
- Harvey (2001:285) emphasizes the necessity of getting beyond the use of space as merely a ‘metaphor’ employed to describe the ‘new cosmopolitanism’ of a globalized world, critiquing Shapiro (1998) as guilty of a kind of banal reduction of the importance of actively produced geographies.
- This marked the beginning of a long streak of violence that included the bombing of a shopping center as well as the 2009 downing of a police helicopter.
- In recent weeks, the privatization of the Maracaña has been placed under increased doubt under public pressure and allegations of corrupt bidding processes. Its fate is currently uncertain (May 2013).
- A classic challenge to the universality of formal economics occurred in the post WWII formalist-substantivist debate. This debate pitted classical economic theory against Polanyi’s conception of markets as ‘embedded’ within locally specific social forms (see Graeber 2001).
- These discourses were also in play in the 2007 Pan-American games, and occurred in many ways in contradiction to empirical evidence of event practices. Gaffney(2006: 24) writes, “Ironically, the majority of the facilities built for the Pan 2007 were constructed on wetlands in Barra de Tijuca. The majority of the housing and sporting infrastructures were built on concrete pylons that had to be sunk 45 meters into the subsoil. Additionally, the highway and subway projects envisioned for the Olympics will pass through existing neighborhoods and under park space, lessening water quality and disturbing natural habitat. The majority of Rio’s Olympic installations will be built on the wetlands of Barra de Tijuca.”
- Vargas (2006:70) also points to the potential fruitfulness of transnational, diasporic alliances formed through social media, in this case with former U.S. Black Panther militants in which contact “has had a transcendental quality that has generated optimism and confirmed the Afro-Brazilians’ will to endure the struggle” (2006:70).
