Olympic Extrastagecraft: Spectacular Development and Dissent in Rio de Janeiro and New York City

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OLYMPIC EXTRASTAGECRAFT

SPECTACULAR DEVELOPMENT + DISSENT IN RIO DE JANEIRO AND NEW YORK CITY, 2016

A Thesis by Drew Vanderburg for the completion of the degree of Master of Science in Design and Urban Ecologies The New School, Parsons School of Design, May 2016

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Table of Contents 3 – Abstract 4 – Introduction: The Olympic Dilemma 6 – Chapter 1: The Olympic Oligarchy 9 – Characterizing the International Olympic Committee 11 – Cost/Benefit Analysis of the Olympic Hosting Process 16 – Chapter 2: Parallel Developments in Rio de Janeiro and New York City 17 – Rio de Janeiro Development Sites 23 – New York City Development Sites 27 – Rio and NYC: Linkages and Similarities 30 – Rio and NYC: Divergences 32 – Chapter 3: The Production of Counter-Spectacle 32 – Spectacle is the Olympic Commodity 34 – Defining Counter-Spectacle 35 – Democratization of the Camera 37 – Liquification of the Stage 39 – Overview of Extrastatecraft 41 – Inventing Extrastagecraft 43 – Mirroring the “Olympic Live Site” 46 – Chapter 4: A Taxonomy of Resistance Strategies and Tactics 46 – The Shifting Sands of Anti-Olympic Resistance 47 – Portraits of Selected Case Study Organizations 58 – Evaluative Methodology + Metrics 63 – Outcomes 66 – Findings, Conclusions, and Further Required Research 72 – Chapter 5: The Coalition for Olympic Design Alternatives 72 – From Research to Design 73 – Transnationalism: Why and How? 76 – CODA: The Vision and the Venture 81 – CODA: The Details 84 – CODA: Foundational Criteria and Precepts 86 – Mythologies of Citizenship and Inclusion 89 – Conclusion: Towards an Idealistic Mind 91 – “Gloss”ary 92 – Bibliography

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Abstract The Olympics are one of the most potent design-actors in the world today. They promote a vision of global culture through nationalist competition based in individual human achievement. Yet the reality of Olympic urban planning schemes is notoriously misaligned with the values of “world peace” and “harmonious development” that are stated in the Olympic Charter. Preparations for Olympic games are consistently marked by human rights violations, ecological destruction, and municipal debt. As a result of this “Olympic Dilemma,” local resistance movements are a constant companion to the Olympic games. This thesis proceeds upon the premise that resistance to mega-event development is desirable and necessary. The world needs a more ethical and sustainable Olympic movement!

Therefore, the central research question of this thesis is: what strategies and tactics are most effective to attain measurable outcomes in resistance to mega-event driven urban development? First, this paper characterizes the International Olympic Committee and describes the process by which mega-event development extracts wealth from cities. The research demonstrates the symmetries between the global forces at play in planning and constructing both the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro and the 2012 Olympic bid in New York City. Then this paper presents a taxonomy of effective resistance strategies and tactics aggregated from 18 activist organizations that opposed mega-developments in Rio and NYC. Finally, drawing upon the findings of the case studies, this paper explores opportunities to link local movements and build political leverage at the global scale. I include a theory of counterspectacular dissent called “Extrastagecraft,” and finish by proposing a trans-national organization to reframe and reform the Olympic project.

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Introduction

The Olympic Dilemma “Anything less than a paradox would be simplistic.”

- Allan Kaprow, The Blurring of Art and Life The Olympics are one of the planet’s most potent design-actors, capable of aligning the will, skill, and capital to drastically transform a city’s built environment. The power of the Olympic Movement comes from its universalist vision, one that upholds individual human achievement on national sports teams as the avenue to participate in a “global culture”. When imbued with values of world peace and painted as a celebration of human diversity, The Olympic Movement has attained a hallowed place in global politics. Sport anthropologist John Nauright identifies these broadly appealing values as “easily transferable between communities” which is why “the Olympic games are able to sustain a collective and unified veneer of support from one city to the next.”1 After all, with 205 member nations and an International Refugee Team, the International Olympic Committee is nominally the most representative governing body on Earth.

An organization with such clout in the international arena must have some guiding principles. Proclaiming these is the foundational document of the Olympic Movement, the Olympic Charter, amended annually since its first adoption in 1896. Fundamental Principle #2 of The Olympic Charter states: “The goal of Olympism is to place sport at the service of the harmonious development of humankind, with a view to promoting a peaceful society concerned with the preservation of human dignity.”2 To specify, Fundamental Principle 1.4 of the Olympic Code of Ethics (adopted in 1999) calls for: “Respect for international conventions on protecting human rights insofar as they apply to the Olympic Games’ activities and which ensure in particular: – respect for human dignity; – rejection of discrimination of any kind on whatever grounds, be it race, colour, sex, sexual orientation, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status; – rejection of all forms of harassment, be it physical, professional or sexual, and any physical or mental injuries.”3 This language reveals a misalignment between the goals and ethics of the Olympic Movement and the processes by which the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and its collaborators actually mount the Olympic games. Despite the stated Olympic ideals, communities in each and every Olympic host city have suffered a multitude of human rights violations as a byproduct of Olympic urban development processes. I call this rift between Olympism’s stated values and it’s actuated socio-spatial impact “The Olympic Dilemma.”

A 2015 report from Human Rights Watch enumerates the following common types of human rights violations endemic to the Olympic games: forced evictions without due process or compensation, abused and exploited migrant workers, silencing and arrests of protestors and journalists, and discrimination.4 Other common unharmonious results of hosting an Olympic John Nauright Culture, Political Economy, and Sport in the Globalised World of the 21st Century, (Third World Quarterly, vol. 25 no. 7, 2004), 1325-1336 2 IOC Olympic Charter, 2015 3 IOC Ethics Commission, Olympic Code of Ethics, 2014 4 Human Rights Watch World Report, Raising the Bar: Mega-Sporting Events and Human Rights, 2014 1

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games are diminished public funds and high municipal debt, poorly constructed and/or underutilized (infra)structures, and ecological destruction. To call all these effects a “byproduct” of development euphemizes them against more vitriolic claims that Olympic urbanization projects are but scapegoats for city governments to justify previously hatched (and often racially motivated) urban renewal agendas. I shall later present narratives that support such claims.

However, for the politically strategic purposes of this paper and project, we shall give the IOC the benefit of the doubt and assume that it indeed does value and desire the “harmonious development of humankind.” But the IOC is not successfully achieving its mission statement. In other words, the Olympics have a good idea but they need some help to get it done in an ethical and sustainable way. That is the type of designerly assistance that this thesis project intends to innovate. This thesis claims that for the Olympic Movement to achieve its vision, the planning and programming priorities of the Olympics need to shift from remaking the built environment of the host city to engaging the people who inhabit that city.

This paper will trace a trajectory from portraying a malfunctioning Olympic Movement to presenting proposals to bring about that movement’s reform. To be precise, this paper will 1.) identify the patterns and effects of Olympic urbanization, 2.) trace the linkages of Olympic development plans in Rio de Janeiro and NYC, 3.) theorize a counter-spectacular resistance strategy (aka Extrastagecraft), 4.) measure the effect of various extant resistance strategies and tactics, and 5.) present a proposal for a new trans-national entity, the Coalition for Olympic Design Alternatives.

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Chapter 1

The Olympic Oligarchy Every two years another intrepid city of the world assumes the role of hosting the Olympic games. The responsibility of hosting is decided by a bidding process, in which several cities submit competing proposals to the IOC and the IOC selects the destination it likes most.

The desire to host an Olympic games is produced by the desire to promote the “global image” of one’s city. Olympic scholar Jilly Traganou notes that “with the eclipsing of supernationalism in the years following World War II, Nationalist/Internationalist logic has been the dominant constellation within which Olympism operates today.”5 Dressed in the nationalistic rhetoric of sports tradition, cities vie for reputational primacy in an increasingly globalized world.

Globalization, not only of the economy but of the media, has fabricated the obsession with appearing as a global power on a perceived “world stage”. So cities vie to receive an extreme but temporary influx of athletes, tourists, and media hype. This is the product that the Olympics peddle to city governments.

This mediatized image product is but the bait that is obscuring a much more insidious and permanent hook. Years before the Olympics arrive, cities undertake vast urban transformations.

Usually these include the construction of new stadiums, infrastructure, and transportation systems. The sheer costs of such projects make the Olympic games magnets for international real-estate and construction investment. Private corporations in these sectors descend upon an Olympic host city as soon as it wins the bid for the games and strike deals with local governments to allocate land for development and to secure lucrative construction contracts. So while a “global image” of a “world-class city” or the dream of “sportive culture” to generate a “healthy” urban population begins the seductive rationale of an Olympic bid, promises of increased property taxes on the rising value of newly developed land will crescendo that sales pitch to a squeal. But basing an entire development plan on promises of future tax revenues is a myopic blunder of urban design. Referring to this “image manufacturing” paradigm, Sanchez and Broudehoux confirm that “Based on the projection of an illusory image of urban revitalization that will benefit all citizens, [production of the Olympic City] often results in a commodification of urban space and in socio-spatial exclusions that have an alienating effect upon local residents.”6 So, if the host city purchases a global image that ends up alienating its own population, who benefits? One answer, of course, is the global corporations who collude to produce the desire for this global image in the first place. It all begins with global media corporations. The Olympic games are primarily and increasingly funded by the broadcasting rights fees paid by companies such as NBC, BBC, Univision, and Globo. Figure 1 shows the parabolic increase of media broadcasting revenues from 1960 to today.

Jilly Traganou, Designing the Olympic City, Routledge, 2016 Fernanda Sánchez & Anne-Marie Broudehoux, Mega Events and Urban Regeneration in Rio de Janeiro: Planning in a State of Emergency, 2015 5 6

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NBC currently has an 8 billion dollar contract with the Olympic Broadcasting Company (the IOC’s media division) that guarantees it exclusive rights to air the Olympics in the United States until the year 2032.7 The media megacorps pay such astronomical fees because they in turn collect yet more astronomical advertising fees from a network of global Olympic sponsors, who also get brand exclusivity. (These so called TOP [The Olympic Partners] sponsors include names like McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Nike, Samsung, and Dow Chemical who each pay a price of 10 million USD per games to be a part of the program.8) And the destination of these media monies is increasingly centralized. Figure 2 shows the rising percentage of broadcasting revenues that the IOC has kept for itself over the years, rather than allocating those profits to national media agencies, thereby facilitating the leakage of city or state generated finances into trans-national bank accounts.

Andrew Zimbalist, Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting the World Cup and the Olympics, Washington D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2015), 90.

8 Zimbalist, Circus Maximus, 95.

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Beyond advertising revenues and brand sponsorships, the IOC keeps the ticket revenues from the games. Thus the IOC itself profits heavily from the Olympics. In the 2008 games, out of a total revenue of $2.4 billion, $383 million went to the IOC (tax exempt due to non-profit status). The rest of that revenue was funneled to other entities or initiatives of the “Olympic Movement” which may include the National Organizing Committees, International Sports Federations, other sub-contractors, etc. The final destination of most Olympic revenue remains mysterious, with no financial audits conducted and no executive salaries reported.9 Meanwhile, host cities are left with municipal bonds that will keep them paying debt service for decades, as in the case of Montreal whose 3 billion dollar cost overrun for the 1976 games was not paid off in full until thirty years later.10 Host cities (or whatever local managing agencies they can pawn the responsibility off to) will also pay maintenance and utilities costs for the structures and infrastructures that the Olympics built. By then, the real-estate interests and construction companies, media corps, and the IOC have long since walked away with their share of the Olympic profit. Christopher Gaffney phrases the problem thusly: “The cycles of megaevent production and consumption are dictated by international sporting organizations and multinational corporations who combine with the state to exploit the emotions associated with sport to take public monies in order to create a docile, disciplined, consumerist society.”11 I will henceforth refer to this alliance of media, sport, real-estate, and construction interests as the “Olympic Oligarchy.” But who are these people who get so much control over Jules Boykoff, "The Anti-Olympics", New Left Review 67, January-February, 2011.

CBC News, http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/quebec-s-big-owe-stadium-debt-is-over-1.602530, 2006 (accessed on 5/1/16) 11 Christopher Gaffney, Mega Events and Socio-Spatial Dynamics in Rio de Janeiro 1919-2016, (Journal of Latin American Geography, vol. 9, no. 1, 2010), 7-29.

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the production of our cityscapes? The “Olympic Oligarchy” moniker would seem heavy-handed if there was no proof of the IOC’s complicity with these very same industries. However, a survey of the business affiliations, past and present, of the 115 members of the International Olympic Committee, reveals members who have direct ties to private corporations in the industries of construction, insurance, aviation, tourism, media, advertising, manufacturing, global finance, and more. Notably, 15 of the members are currently sitting monarchs or royalty in their home nations, and another 7 are previously elected officials in their country’s top offices. Thus it is not an exaggeration to say that the International Olympic Committee is comprised of wealthy oligarchs who operate with ulterior industrial agendas and political conflicts of interest.

Nonetheless, a full 50% of IOC members are previous Olympic Athletes and 63% have backgrounds in sports administration. (This fact can serve to temper concerns that the IOC is so elitist that it may easily lose sight of the interests of common folk. At least insofar as the wellbeing of athletes is concerned, the IOC is qualified to make those judgements. It can be trusted as a body of governors who truly love sports. Yet that’s no reassurance that an emphasis on sports will not override other societal values.) The following visuals display the constituency of the IOC’s 2015-2016 membership, and the administrative structure of the Olympic Movement.

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At this point I’ll qualify my earlier assertion that the IOC is the most representative governing body on Earth by adding that its representationality is not democratic, but autocratic.

Although each of the 205 Olympic Ambassadors may represent their member nation at the annual Olympic convention, the IOC website is suspiciously declarative that these ambassadors are not elected by their citizenry but are selected by the IOC itself. And IOC members are all nominated and elected from within their own chambers. Subsequently, elected officials in hostcity governments cede power to these un-elected elites. This arrangement amounts to an appearance of democracy which is at once an avoidance of democracy.

Cost/Benefit Analysis of the Olympic Hosting Process Given the exorbitant costs in time, money, labor, energy, and materials, any good economist would ask: is the cost of hosting the Olympics outweighed by measurable benefits for host city economies or populations? This diagram attempts to visualize all of the financial flows of an Olympic hosting process, with a general trend of money flowing out of the city treasury and into the pockets of the Olympic Oligarchy:

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The above diagram shows more costs than benefits. Of each benefit that will hypothetically remain after the games, there is reason to be doubtful that they are worth the price host cities pay in money, time, land, effort, and opportunity costs. Let’s examine some commonly alleged benefits of hosting.

Renewed “Sportive Culture”: In terms of social mission, the Olympic Vision upholds athleticism as a seminal value. The Olympic matrix of responsibilities will often include some provision for lasting sports education meant to benefit a host city. But the actual social value of sport is a topic of debate. The Rio de Janeiro Organizing Committee justifies its (programmatic and economic) emphasis on sportive culture by saying that “it is through sport that young people and children learn to overcome obstacles, respect rules, work within a team and demonstrate solidarity. Values that come from the field of play help to encounter difficulties and provide strength to fight for a better life.”12 In Rio de Janeiro, after the 2016 games, the plan is for one of the Olympic stadiums to become an Olympic training center for future generations of athletic Cariocas.13 (Cariocas are Rio de Janeiro natives.) But it is crucial to question the true value and intent behind city funding of a new sports education program in preference to bolstering the already existing education system. Why should we value sports so highly? In summary of the anthropological critiques of the practice of sports, Eduardo Archetti frames sports as “an efficient state, and bourgeois, mechanism to indoctrinate youth in the values of sexism, nationalism, fanaticism, irrational violence, the culture of performance and competition, the cult of idols, and the uncritical acceptance of the central values of capitalism.”14 Pierre Bourdieu has also called Rio de Janeiro Olympic Organizing Committee website, (accessed on 5/1/2016) https://www.rio2016.com/en/organising-committee.

13 AECOM 2016 Olympic masterplan, (accessed on 5/1/2016) http://www.aecom.com/projects/2016-rio-olympicparalympic-games/ 14 Eduardo P. Archetti, “The Meaning of Sport in Anthropology: A View from Latin America”, (European Review of Latin American and Carribbean Studies, 65, 1998,) 91-103.

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the uncritical sports spectator a “caricature of militarism.”15 So we must be cautious of any statesponsored program that prescribes more sports as a solution to already existing social ills.

Tourism: Tourism is touted as the inevitable economic benediction that is used to justify Olympic development. Indeed, the Olympics are fundamentally a project of induced tourism, as the athletes and fans are inherently touring to attend the event. Some will say that tourism is the world’s largest industry, but quantifying the business of tourism and the ways in which it financially benefits a city requires amorphously complicated metrics. This data gets spun to warrant using public money for private projects. Andrew Zimbalist perceptively unpacks the tourism question in his book Circus Maximus: The Economic Gamble Behind Hosting The Olympics and The World Cup. He alleges that most financial tourism data is generated ahead of time based on predictions, rather than after the fact. In reality, Zimbalist identifies a “substitution effect” by which many non-Olympic tourists will not visit a country during Olympic season, and many residents will go out of town, thereby neutralizing Olympic tourism influxes.16 He also points out that additional revenues during Olympic season may be generated purely by price markups rather than by real value creation, and immediately get siphoned back out of the country to corporate headquarters abroad. Thus, an increase in tourism does not cause a meaningful increase in cashflow for the host city.

A “Global Image”: Do host cities attain the vaunted refurbishment of their global image that precipitates the whole Olympic bid process? And what is the real value of this image? It may be that the Olympics generate a heightened visuality of a city which can alter the global perception of that city, but it is only the belief imbued in this perception that alters actual global power structures. For instance, in his article “Playing Host is Hard to Do,” Benjamin Siegel claims that the 1964 Tokyo Olympics “cast Japan as a modernized debutante on the world stage.” And that the takeaway from the games “was an unmistakable shift of power eastwards.”17 This type of perceived power is often called soft power, because it is only a coercive social force for as long as the image that generated it is publically believed. In hosting the 2016 games, Rio de Janeiro has not had any soft power gains because it has not presented a positive image to a global audience, nor its own residents. Siegel had made this prediction for Rio in 2009 when his article was written: “the country’s planning efforts, focused on showy infrastructure investment and clunky security schemes, already seems destined to siphon away resources from muchneeded social services and intensify the resentment of the country’s urban poor.”18 As I will show in the chapter 2, this premonition has indeed come to pass.

So we can see, again and again, the empty promises of the Olympic city planning endeavor. History and data reveal that the Olympics games, in the manner that they are currently thrust upon cities, do not create wealth. They extract wealth. The process is a classic example of Neoliberalism, marked by the privatization of public assets, and the de facto valorizing of competition when collaboration could be an option.

This pattern can’t last. And signs point to a breaking point which is soon to be reached.

Despite the global economic slump between 2008 and 2011, cost overruns continued skyrocketing for each consecutive Olympics. This generates increasing scrutiny of Olympic Pierre Bourdieu, Questions de Sociologie, (Paris: Minuit, 1984).

Zimbalist, Circus Maximus, 95.

17 Benjamin Siegel, Playing Host Is Hard To Do, The Allure of the World Stage and Shiny New Stadiums, (World Policy Journal, Vol. 27, No. 4, Winter 2010/2011,) 59-66.

18 Siegel, Playing Host Is Hard To Do, 2010/2011 15 16

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budgeting and spending, (especially in the realms of planning and architectural design). Perhaps in response to constant reports of municipal debt and civil unrest for host cities, the amount of cities bidding for each Olympics has been in decline.

The above graphs show the contrapuntal trends of skyrocketing costs and a decreasing desire to bid for hosting duties. This has led the IOC to pitch the games to increasingly precarious host cities. Rio de Janeiro will be the first city in the so-called “global south� to host the games. Emerging cities in the southern hemisphere seek a piece of the imagined Olympic pie,

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but overpopulation, corrupt bureaucracies, and economic instability only worsen the Olympic Dilemma when the games approach these locales.

This perilous horizon bodes well for the burgeoning global resistance movement that seeks to reform the Olympics. The Olympics are ripe for re-design. In fact, in 2013, after costly instances of urban boosterism and allegations of bribery surrounding Olympic bids, IOC president Tomas Bach called for proposals to reform the Olympic bidding process.19 And the IOC’s Agenda 2020 declarations include calls for increased attention to environmental sustainability and worker’s rights in the production of Olympic cityscapes. Taken together, these pronouncements signal a willingness to change on the part of the IOC. Or at least a fear of global political repercussions if Olympic atrocities continue apace.

My intentions with this thesis project are to identify some avenues by which the Olympic movement can be ushered towards reform. In order to do so, I shall focus in on the exact context of the upcoming games in Rio de Janeiro in 2016, and compare the developments there to those that transpired in New York City related to the bid for the 2012 games.

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Zimbalist, Circus Maximus, 95.

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Chapter 2

Parallel Developments in Rio de Janeiro and New York City

Before we can begin our search for modes of resistance that can effectively oppose the activities of the Olympic Oligarchy, we must identify urban contexts that have bred such resistance movements. Rio de Janeiro, having hosted the 2007 Pan-American games, the 2011 Military World Games, the 2013 Confederations Cup, the 2014 World Cup, and now the 2016 Olympics provides an ideal case study for mega-event driven development and its accompanying civil uprisings. New York City provides similarly informative examples of resistance groups that are mobilizing against mega-development forces. As a result of a bid for the 2012 Olympic games, massive rezonings and luxury constructions have transpired even though New York did not win the bid. Each neighborhood or organization that has gone up against the monolithic mega-event monstrosity has its own story, but the players and patterns observable in both cities are suspiciously similar.

Below is a timeline to give an overview of the occurrences in both cities that will be referenced throughout the following discussion.

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This chapter depicts 5 localities that have been transformed by Olympic development agendas: 3 in Rio de Janeiro and 2 in New York City. Each site contains at least one pricey new entertainment construct and at least one long-standing but now jeopardized or displaced community. In each case the new development was funded (at least in part) with public tax dollars, begun without public approval, and has increased socio-spatial segregation in the area.

For all of the economic, political, cultural, and topographical distinctions between NYC and Rio, the similarities between their urban transformation at the hand of the IOC signal the truly global character of the Olympic planning regime. Not beholden to local laws or regulations, the Olympics operate with systemic impunity and immunity regardless of whose turf they're on.

Rio: Barra da Tijuca and Vila Autódromo The Olympic Village in Rio de Janeiro is in a neighborhood called Barra da Tijuca.

Biogeologically speaking, this area is a lagoon. Barra da Tijuca is roughly translated to “sandbank swamp.” Until the middle of the 20th century the area was largely green space and beachland, separated from the more densely populated old city of Rio by mountains of 800-1200 meters in height. But in 1969, concurrent with American trends of “top-down” urban planning, Lúcio Costa designed and enacted a masterplan replete with wide boulevards, commercial plazas, and vertical residential villages. Paired with the construction of the Lagoa-Barrio highway (cutting through the mountains) in the 1970’s, this spurred a population and development boom in the area that continues to this day. When Rio de Janeiro was awarded the Olympic bid in the year 2009, Barra da Tijuca was an obvious choice for the location of primary

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venues and facilities. Up until that year, a large racetrack occupied a verdant triangle of “greenfield” space. This triangle was selected as the site of the Olympic Village.

The “sportive constellation”20 for the 2016 games follows a master plan designed by AECOM. It is being built primarily by Dimensional Engenharia. The complex features 5 new world class stadiums, a giant media center, hotels, shopping facilities, new roads and bus stations, some parkland, and a relaxation zone for inter-event leisure called the “Olympic Live Site.” Individual structures are variously sub-contracted through public-private partnerships with Brazil’s biggest construction firms such as Odebrecht and Carioca Engenharia. The conditions of the public-private partnerships are that the costs are being covered by these private firms in exchange for title to the land when the games are over. Thus, in many cases, Olympic structures will be disassembled and luxury real-estate development will rise in their place.

Along the edge of this formerly verdant triangle is a strip of stucco and concrete homes that have been inhabited by a self-determined and self-employed community of fisherman and their families. Further up, the strip widens out into a curving slice of houses that make up the denser portion of the Vila Autódromo. Until about 2009, this community had continued without direct interference with the speculative real-estate and burgeoning commercialization of its immediate surroundings. But when the Olympic fever came to town, that began to change.

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Gaffney, Mega-Events and Socio-Spatial Dynamics, 2010

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As of the writing of this paper, of the 253 houses that once stood in Vila Autódromo, 41 remain.21 The strategies used by the Rio Prefeitura to coerce, silence, relocate, or evict the town have been truly exasperating. Despite renderings of the Olympic Village that showed the Vila Autódromo (at least the non-coastal section) remaining in place, plans were later changed to display a new connecting road for a Bus Rapid Transit route that would run right through the site. This would require the clearing of the land. Some call this a necessity for the smooth delivery of the Olympic games, but others call it an aesthetic cleansing so that wealthy tourists arriving in the area will not be confronted with the sight of the informal dwellings of Rio’s poor. Regardless of the real motive, the city has launched a targeted campaign of removals and relocations employing a cocktail of legalism, buyouts, psychological manipulation, and brute force.

The legalism is facilitated by a loophole in Brazilian land-use laws. The 1998 Federal Constitution confers legal land tenure to favela inhabitants who have occupied the spot for 5 years or more. But because many favelas are situated on hillsides prone to mudslides that could wipe away a home during the rainy season, the law stipulates that residents can be removed if their occupied terrain is deemed “environmentally hazardous.”22 Since Barra da Tijuca is a lagoon, prone to flooding, this was the rationale that was applied by the city to justify removal of the coastal Vila Autódromo residents. Of course, were the potential flooding of the zone an actual concern of the Rio Prefeitura, they would not have chosen Barra da Tijuca as the site for the Olympic City in the first place!

Buyouts are another tactic the city has been used. Over the years leading up to the World Cup and Olympics, numerous programs have been attempting to “urbanize” the favelas by integrating them into city infrastructures. One such program is Minha Casa Minha Vida, (“My House My Life”), which provides new housing for residents who agree to move out of the favelas. Financial incentives and the promise of new housing is often enough to convince favelados to move. However, few programs are in place to Rio On Watch, Vila Autódromo Invests in Remaining Public Spaces as Evictions Persist, (accessed on 5/1/2016) http://www.rioonwatch.org/?p=25400.

22 Edésio Fernandes, Constructing the ‘Right to City’ in Brazil, Social Legal Studies, University College, London, UK, 2007, vol. 16, no. 201(DOI: 10.1177/0964663907076529) 21

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ease the transition from the self-fabricated favela to the pre-fabricated housing complexes.

Attach the added demands of utilities bills and longer commutes (since the new housing is generally further from employment centers) and relocational projects like Minha Casa Minha Vida end up reinscribing the systems of poverty that they claim to abate. Knowing this, and/or simply preferring their current abodes, stalwart Vila Autódromo residents declined the buyouts that their neighbors took. This inspired the community’s galvanizing resistance slogan “Nem todos tem um preco.” “Not everyone has a price.”

When legal opportunism and bribery fails, the city resorts to skeevier activities.

Unannounced demolitions and “lightning evictions” have become commonplace, often leading to physical altercations with police. Even as media and activist groups have coalesced in support of the ongoing resisters in recent months, moves have been made to crush the spiritual and associational life of the village residents. On February 10th, 2016, returning to the site of a Candomblé religious center in the village, a priestess discovered that it had been surrounded by an expansion of the Olympic village’s fence. Days later, despite laws regarding the treatment of religious sites, the building was demolished by Olympic authorities.23 Then, on February 24th a swarm of shock troops entered Vila Autódromo with barricades and backhoes and demolished the Neighborhood Association building that had been the organizing hub for the resistance front.24 Responding in a valiant display of defiance and persistence, the community proceeded to spraypaint the words “neighborhood association” on the front of every remaining building.

It is clear that by demolishing the religious and administrative sites in the village and leaving piles of rubble where neighbor’s homes once stood, the city is attempting to create undesirable living conditions that will force residents out. The staunch resolve of the Vila Autódromo residents makes them heroes in the saga of anti-Olympic resistance.

Vila Autódromo’s residents generated an alternative plan for their community. They calculated that the redesign of their urban space would be 35% cheaper than the price of a full removal and demolition.25 And they delivered this plan handily to the Rio de Janeiro mayor’s office, who flatly disregarded it for months. Only in April 2016 did the city government concede to urbanize the favela. And yet, even though residents may be allowed to remain, nothing can be done to undo the damage that mega-event development has already caused.

Rio: Porto Maravilha, the Sambódromo, and the Samba Schools When the Olympics come to town, the city government signs off on a matrix of responsibilities to delimit what projects it will or will not undertake in preparation for the games.

The costly renovations occurring in Rio’s port zone are above and beyond the city’s matrix of responsibilities. Although it contains zero athletic venues, the Olympics have been used as a premise to advance already extant development agendas for the site. The Porto Novo Consortium is a public-private partnership formed for the renovation project comprised of Brazil’s hugest construction firms: Odebrecht, Carioca Engenharia, and OAS. These same companies had submitted a practically identical private-sector proposal for port development in 2009 which was

Rio On Watch, Candomblé Practitioner from Vila Autódromo Desribes the Terror of the Eviction Process, (accessed 5/1/2016) http://www.rioonwatch.org/?p=24295 24 Rio On Watch, SOS Vila Autódromo, (accessed 5/1/2016), http://www.rioonwatch.org/?p=27075.

25 Comitê Popular, “The Exclusion Games” Human Rights Violations and Mega Events Dossier, 2015.

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then transferred wholesale into the Olympic master plan.26 The port zone is now being developed into a luxury docking strip for this summer’s imagined cruise ships full of Olympic tourists.

A famous piece of entertainment infrastructure stands near the port as a reminder that the Olympics are just the most recent episode in an ongoing saga of racialized exclusion in the area.

The Sambódromo is the (Oscar Niemayer designed) stadium built, in 1984, to contain the street festivities of Carnival. The construction of this stadium was notoriously engineered by Rio’s tourism department, various crime syndicates, and Brazil’s major television networks. Thus began the ticketing and televising of the previously public and free spectacle. Samba schools became commercialized, and the price of costumes and tickets to the official Carnival quickly moved out of reach of the very communities that had originated its traditions. By 1990, the mostly poor and black sambistas of nearby Morro do Sangue Bom had “literally been priced out of their own parade.”27 In the “renovation” of Porto Maravilha today we see the continuation of this trend. With the spread of containerization in shipping, many of the area’s seaside warehouses have fallen into disuse since the Sambódromo’s construction. Due to their proximity to the Sambódromo, many Samba schools now operate out of those vacant warehouses, running rehearsals, constructing costumes, and storing supplies and floats from year to year. Some of these are highprofile samba schools that are sponsored by a Rio government program, and others are more informal arts collectives who squat the spaces under Brazil’s City Statute law.28 Either way, the Olympic redevelopment plan for the area does not bode well for the preservation of these art houses. A video released by the Rio Prefeitura and the Porto Novo Consortium shows the port warehouses being converted into malls, restaurants, and entertainment venues. They’ll be connected by a new streetcar and across from glassy towers that are slated to be owned by NYCbased real-estate interests like Tishman-Speyer and Donald Trump. The main promontory pier holds a new robo-white construct of Santiago Calatrava, the Museum of Tomorrow.

When not being subsidized directly with public funds through the Brazilian National Development Bank (BNDES), much of this development is being financed through the sale of CEPACs, Certificates of Additional Construction Potential. Essentially, these certificates signify the air rights to the low-rise warehouses in Porto Maravilha. After these certificates were furnished by the Porto Novo Consortium, the majority of these CEPACs were subsequently purchase by the national bank CAIXA, investing the money from the pension funds of Brazilian citizenry.29 This paves the way for the construction of dozens of high-density towers. And there is no plan for the preservation of the un-state-sponsored samba schools if and when those warehouses get repossessed. At this rate, it would have been more apt for Calatrava to have provided the area with a Museum of Yesterday.

Rio: The Maracanã, the Geral, and Favela do Métro The legendary Maracanã stadium in Rio de Janeiro may be the most famous sports and entertainment structure in the world. When Brazil hosted Uraguay in the 1950 World Cup final, Carolyn Prouse, “The Jock Doctrine”, Jacobin Magazine, October, 2014.

Robin E. Sheriff, The Theft of Carnaval: National Spectacle and Racial Politics in Rio de Janeiro, Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropological Association, 4(1):3-28, 1999.

28 Brazil City Statute, (accessed 5/1/2016) http://polis.org.br/wp-content/uploads/estatuto_cidade_compreender.pdf 29 Porto Maravilha Analysis, Workshop and report produced by PUC-Rio with Parsons School of Design, October, 2015.

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220,000 people squeezed into the Maracanã’s stands despite its official capacity of 190,000. That same stadium will host the opening and closing ceremonies of the 2016 Olympics, but today its capacity is only around 89,000. Much changed over those 66 years to make the Maracana a safer but more exclusive space, and this story is a suitable metonym for the trajectory of the Olympic games as a whole.

In his essay Mega-Events and Socio-spatial Dynamics in Rio de Janeiro, Christopher Gaffney describes the casual vibe afforded by the unregulated standing-room area of the old Maracanã: “The geral was a low-lying area of concrete that encircled the field. This ‘populist heart’ of the stadium was a functional and symbolic space that allowed for the inclusion of all social sectors in public life because of the low ticket prices.”30 However, in 2005 the space of the geral was replaced by additional seating and some upper seating was removed and replaced with luxury boxes. More recently the stadium has undergone further modifications to meet World Cup and Olympic specifications for sports, security, and surveillance. Over this time the minimum ticket price has risen from R$3 to about R$20.31 In effect the Rio city government has spent nearly R$1billion of the public’s tax money on Maracanã renovations over the past ten years32 in order to accomplish a sharp increase in ticket price and a sharp decrease in capacity.

These transformations in the Maracanã reflect a shift in the political economy of sport from one of popular participation to one of securitization and corporate profiteering. Gaffney also points out that “inclusion of a higher percentage of luxury boxes and seating only sections, shifts the culture of the crowd to one that is more oriented to consumption of rather than participation in the event.” The agendas of entertainment architects are increasingly aligned with the interests of merchandisers and vendors and not with the spectators themselves.

It is not only within the realm of the audience experience that the “pacification” of the Maracanã can be felt. Some Rio de Janeiro residents have lost much more than their standing room. Favela do Métro was a self-determined settlement that formed on a vacant parcel of land outside of the Maracanã. It was started in the early 1980s by laborers who were constructing the Maracanã’s metro station, (hence the favela’s name).33 By the mid-2000s it was home to nearly 700 families and a hundred informal businesses. Then, one day, the city stopped collecting the garbage. Next thing residents knew, their homes were infested with rats and the neighborhood was being visited by city officials taking photos, drawing blueprints, or marking structures for demolition. In 2010, after protests and protracted court struggles, the entire settlement was bulldozed. It was made into a parking garage for the Maracanã, catering to private automobile drivers despite the adjacent public transit that the now homeless workers had built 30 years earlier.34 We have now surveyed a selection of Rio de Janeiro sites that exemplify some common tragedies of Olympic development. Gaffney sums up the scenario thusly: “The transformations that mega-events wreak are permanent, impose temporary forms of governance that elide democratic institutions, install new and enduring surveillance and disciplinary mechanisms,

Gaffney, Mega-Events and Socio-Spatial Dynamics, 2010 Observatório das Metrópoles, Os Impactos da Copa Do Mundo 2014 E Das Olimpíadas, Letra Capital Editoria, 2015 32 Observatório das Metrópoles, Os Impactos da Copa Do Mundo 2014 E Das Olimpíadas, Letra Capital Editoria, 2015 33 Rio On Watch, Favela Do Metrô Terrorized Through Drawn Out Eviction, (accessed 5/1/2016) http://www.rioonwatch.org/?p=3638 34 Eli Jelly-Schaprio, “The Stands of Bereft People”, Transition No. 109 Persona 2012, 99-107.

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while both creating and exacerbating unequal geographies of power within the city at large.” 35 What’s more, there’s a systemic erasure of long-rooted communities and authentic cultural legacies in preference of costly new architecture that caters to a mobile population.

Now let’s track the same patterns in a different urban context: New York City.

NYC: The Olympic Bid and Hudson Yards To a seasoned New Yorker, the idea of hosting the Olympic Games in such a dense and crowded place seems so ludicrous that it’s easy to forget that it’s very much on the table. The history of this Olympic courtship goes back to 1994, when investment banker Dan Doctoroff observed the fervor of the fans at a 1994 FIFA World Cup match in Giant’s Stadium in New Jersey. Inspired, he approached then NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani with a plan to host the Olympics in the Big Apple. Giuliani supported his ambition by appointing a task force to plan a bid for the 2008 Olympic games. (Bids are placed 11 years before a games and awarded 7 years before.) But in 1997 the United States Olympic Committee denied a 2008 bid internationally,36 thereby shifting NYC’s bid to the 2012 games. Doctoroff founded the non-profit organization NYC2012, which would spearhead the bid.

In the ensuing years, the September 11th attacks came to pass, giving New York the urge to rebuild. Doctoroff’s coalition garnered support from the city’s major construction and realestate firms. When Mayor Michael Bloomberg was elected, Dan Doctoroff was appointed as Bloomberg’s Deputy Mayor for Economic Development and Rebuilding. This created the advantageous political atmosphere for Olympic development schemes to be fast-tracked through Gaffney, Mega-Events and Socio-Spatial Dynamics, 2010 Jere Longman, “Olympics; Bids by U.S. Cities Deferred Beyond 2008.” New York Times. New York. May 16, 1997.

Section B, Page 16, Column 1.

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the procedures of the City Planning Commission. (Such procedures involve land-use regulations and environmental impact reviews. Nearly 40% of the landmass of New York City was rezoned to facilitate new development during the Bloomberg administration.37) The plan that NYC2012 ultimately submitted to the International Olympic Committee included a half-dozen redevelopment projects including: the redesign of the Williamsburg/Greenpoint waterfront, the development of new residential in Hunter’s Point, Queens, the construction of a new Yankees Stadium and a refurbishment of the Mets stadium, a new stadium on the site of Brooklyn’s Atlantic Yards, the renovation of the High Line, the extension of the 7 train, and the construction of the official Olympic Stadium on the site of the Hudson Yards. Since the plan was submitted in 2001, literally all of the above developments have happened.

With one modification. When it was announced in 2005 that London had beat out New York to host the 2012 games, plans were scrapped for the new sports stadium on Manhattan’s West Side. (The plan had been unpopular anyway. Cablevision, who owns nearby Madison Square Garden, and a cohort of Broadway theater owners had campaigned against the idea, fearing competition and congestion.38) Instead, the six-square block train yard for the Long Island Railroad would be developed into a luxurious micro-city in the heart of the mega-city.

Hudson Yards, currently rising, is expected to contain some sixteen new buildings with over 17 million square feet of new residential, office, and retail space, complete with a performance venue, a school, a hotel, and a park.

The development of the site, by Related Companies and Oxford Properties, has been funded by a risky city borrowing scheme. Bloomberg created the Hudson Yards Infrastructure Corporation in 2006 to float 2 billion dollars worth of private bonds to the developers, free of tax for 19 years.39 The bonds will be repaid with the future tax revenues from projected land value increase in the area. This method of debt structuring represents “moral obligation” on the part of private companies rather than “public obligation” which requires taxpayer approval. Doctoroff’s office also furnished 14 million dollars in direct grants to Related to initiate groundbreaking on the site40 and another 328 million in tax breaks over time.41 A report from the Committee of New York City Affairs warns that the city may “have set a troubling precedent by adopting a financing plan…that minimized opportunities for public debate and governmental approvals…this financing method may be used again for other large-scale projects which arguably should receive greater public scrutiny.”42

WNYC, How New York, The Vertical City, Kept Rising During Bloomberg, (accessed 5/1/2016) http://www.wnyc.org/story/300641-how-new-york-vertical-city-kept-rising-during-bloomberg/ 38 Shawn Tully, NYC’s Hudson Yards Project Will Be An Entire City – On Stilts, Fortune Magazine, (accessed 5/1/2016) http://fortune.com/2014/09/04/hudson-yards-city-on-stilts/ 39 The Committee on New York City Affairs, The Financing of the Hudson Yards Development Project, The Record, 2007, Vol. 62. No. 2, pg 350 – 369 http://www2.nycbar.org/Publications/record/Vol_62_2/Financing_Hudson_Yards.pdf 40 Andrew H. Levin, No Olympics, No Problem: NYC’s Political Regime After the Bid for the 2012 Games, Northwestern University, (accessed 5/1/2016) http://library.la84.org/SportsLibrary/Books/No_Olympics_No_Problem.pdf 41 David M. Levitt, Bloomberg Technology, (accessed 5/1/2016) http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-1015/related-hudson-yards-gets-approval-for-328-million-tax-subsidy 42 The Committee on New York City Affairs, The Financing of the Hudson Yards Development Project, The Record, 2007, Vol. 62. No. 2, pg 350 – 369 http://www2.nycbar.org/Publications/record/Vol_62_2/Financing_Hudson_Yards.pdf 37

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And when Michael Bloomberg left the NYC Mayor’s Office, Dan Doctoroff became the CEO of Bloomberg, LP, where he continued to fund development of Hudson Yards until the buildings were ready for his own company, Sidewalk Labs, to set up its offices there.43 As Hudson Yards construction has progressed, a few buildings have been demolished and a few local businesses have been displaced. And it is likely that the Hudson Yards project will increase property values in the neighboring areas of Chelsea and Hell’s Kitchen, fueling gentrification. But public resistance to this project is not particularly avid. The West Side Neighborhood Alliance was formed to protest the Olympic stadium proposal, but now that development is surging ahead, protest falls on deaf ears (or can’t be heard over the sounds of jackhammers and cranes). That group’s mothership, Housing Conservation Coordinators, works in the area to preserve affordability and defend tenant rights. The work of these groups is included in chapter 4 of this report, but there is no highly visible resistance specifically against the Hudson Yards development. In NYC the struggle against real-estate manifests as multitudinous hyper-local initiatives in lower-income neighborhoods throughout the five boroughs.

NYC: The Barclay’s Center and Atlantic Yards/Pacific Park The zenith of recent community resistance to spectacular real-estate development is the case of The Barclay’s Center. This billion dollar multi-purpose entertainment venue stands on a triangle of concrete placed over the previously undeveloped Atlantic Rail Yards in a dense intersection near Downtown Brooklyn. Empire State Development Corporation was the statelevel agency behind the development, with the power to use eminent domain to override citylevel zoning and land-use laws that would have required public approval for the project. The same tax-exempt debt financing as Hudson Yards was used to finance the project. This was in addition to 205 million dollars from the city and another 100 million from the state in the 2007 city budget.44 The city also paid the MTA 100 million in air rights.45 The developer for the Atlantic Yards project was Forest City Ratner, owned by the tenacious real-estate mogul Bruce Ratner. Ratner had gotten his start as the consumer affairs commissioner for Mayor Ed Koch, and has been a player in the New York City political scene ever since. His firm was behind the construction of the huge mall at the Atlantic terminal in the 1990’s and the costly development of Brooklyn MetroTech in the 2000’s. When, in the NYC2012 Olympic bid proposal, a new stadium was envisioned on that notoriously embattled slice of land, Ratner became determined to make it a reality.

Ratner’s development plans were rife with scandal from day one. He spent millions of his own money to finance political campaigns and bribe public officials to secure approvals for the project. For the final political leverage necessary to push the project through, Ratner spent 300 million to became the part-owner of the Brooklyn Nets, who would make their home in the stadium.46 Other part-owners were Russian oligarch Mikhail Prokhorov, who would also manage the 2014 Sochi biathalon team, and Brooklyn-born hip-hop artist Jay-Z. Barclay’s Center (after an early design by Frank Ghery got thrown out) was designed by SHoP Architects and AECOM, CJ Huges, New York Times, Daniel Doctoroff Takes His Business to Hudson Yards, Square Feet, January, 2016.

Charles V. Bagli and Joseph Berger, New York Times, Nets Helped Clear Path for Builder in Brooklyn, September, 2012.

45 The City of New York, Adopted Budget, Fiscal Year 2007 http://www1.nyc.gov/assets/omb/downloads/pdf/cb7_06.pdf 46 Charles V. Bagli and Joseph Berger, New York Times, Nets Helped Clear Path for Builder in Brooklyn, September, 2012.

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the same group that designed Rio’s Olympic Village. Construction contracts for the stadium and its surrounding residential towers went to Hunt and Tishman, both subsidiaries of AECOM. And the stadium is managed by AEG, the same LA-based firm that manages the Maracanã in Rio.

Forest City Ratner repeatedly altered its timelines and did not meet promises about public amenities it claimed it would construct, especially affordable housing. The lack of environmental impact studies, the use of eminent domain, the collusion of the MTA in the project, and the disparate impact on communities of color each sparked a series of lawsuits47 from Brooklyn’s civil society. After the financial crisis of 2008 and protracted legal battles delayed construction, Ratner was forced to cut a deal with Greenland Group, Shanghai-based developers who are now majority shareholders in the site. The condominiums (now re-named Pacific Park) that continue to rise, by virtue of their new ownership, are largely unaccountable to previous agreements with the community.

To provide some context, Brooklyn’s housing market at the time saw thousands of affordable units transitioning to market rate, with air pollution, traffic congestion, and density at all-time highs and economic inequality exacerbating along racial lines.48 Ratner’s new stadium and pricey condominium complex would clearly not help these issues. Thus, understandably, a vocal array of local resistance groups rose up in opposition to this plan or some aspect of its ongoing effects. The movement included FUREE, Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn (DDDB), Brooklyn Speaks, 5th Avenue Committee, The Illuminator, and Not An Alternative, all of which are detailed and evaluated later in this report.

Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, Required Reading/Legal Documents, (accessed 5/2016) http://dddb.net/php/reading/legal.php 48 Susan Fainstein, Mega Projects in New York, London, and Amsterdam, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2008 47

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Also, crucially, an alternative urban design plan was developed participatorially during the Atlantic Yards ordeal. The “Unity Plan” was spearheaded by NYC-based urban planners Tom Angotti and Ron Shiffman, but sought to include a wider cross-section of Brooklyn constituencies in the visioning process for the Atlantic Yards site. To quote the Unity Plan’s website: “Since the FCR plan did not go through the city’s ULURP [Urban Land Use Review Proces], local stakeholders, elected officials, and the city’s planning authorities had no leverage to reshape the project. If the project moves forward as conceived, it does so at the expense of the surrounding community— whose voices could have been instrumental in planning a better project.”49 The Unity Plan presents a vision for the site in which every building is designed by a different firm, traversing streets on the larger Brooklyn grid are not interrupted, and affordability for the existing community is paramount. Perhaps it goes without saying that the Unity Plan was never considered by Forest City Ratner or their city/state government actuaries.

Rio and NYC: Linkages and Similarities Now that we have discussed the specific sites, let’s verbalize some formal linkages between the Rio and NYC Olympic planning regimes. The diagram below visualizes the entire matrix of contracts, affiliations, and partnerships in this system.

Architecture and Construction: AECOM is the architectural firm behind both the Barclay’s Center and the 2016 Olympic City master plan. It would be tempting to suggest, since the Olympic master plan had been chosen by a design competition that AECOM won in 2011,50 that it is just a coincidence that AECOM got both contracts. However, AECOM had crafted its Rio proposal with help from a subsidiary British firm Davis Langdon who had also consulted on UNITY stands for: Understanding, Imagining, and Transforming the Yards, http://www.unityplan.org/home.html.

Kelly Minner, AECOM Wins International Competition for Master Plan of Rio 2016 Olympic Park, (accessed 5/1/2016) http://www.archdaily.com/162510/aecom-wins-international-competition-for-master-plan-of-rio-2016-olympic-park/ 49

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the masterplan for the 2012 Olympic Park.51 AECOM also got help from Rio de Janeiro architect Daneil Gusmao who had also recently won a competition to design the Rio “Anexo” building for the BNDES (Brazilian National Bank) which also subsequently would underwrite the Olympic Park. So, though there’s no evidence of a rigged competition, there’s a basis to claim favoritism nay elitism. (Next, AECOM will be acting in an advisory role for the 2020 Olympic park in Tokyo.) Another obvious linkage in this category are the towers that are rising on the Porto Maravilha, not only because of their aesthetic similarity to the towers of Hudson Yards but because they are owned by Tishman-Speyer and Donald Trump, two NYC-based real-estate behemoths. Finally, as if his structures were Olympic gold medals, Santiago Calatrava is the starchitect of both the R$230 million Museum of Tomorrow in the Porto Maravilha and the 4 billion USD “Oculus” transit hub near the new World Trade Center (also built by Related Companies and Tishman) in NYC.

Contestations of Land-Use Policy: Whether it’s environmental law, competing ownership claims, or squatter’s rights, land is a divisive issue in the Olympic undertaking. As demonstrated in both the Atlantic Yards and the Porto Maravilha cases, the use of eminent domain is a common mode of land appropriation on the part of Olympically-ensconced governments. So too is environmental policy invoked, either by the city as an excuse for evictions (such as in Vila Autódromo) or by resistance groups as a basis for legal plaints (such as in Atlantic Yards or Rio’s Olympic Golf course, discussed in chapter 4). Rio and New York both have active local practices of spatial occupation and squatting which can eventually confer legal rights to residents through “adverse possession”. But both cities have also seen forced evictions that are in violation of tenant’s rights. Negation or circumnavigation of land policy has been the lynchpin of Olympic development. Regardless of the style of land repossession, the result is an increasing privatization of previously public land or property. This in time results in rising real estate prices, which has certainly been the case in both Rio and NYC. Romullo Barrato, Primero Lugar No Concurso Nacional Para O Anexo do BNDES, (accessed 5/1/2016) http://www.archdaily.com.br/br/756401/primeiro-lugar-no-concurso-nacional-para-o-anexo-do-bndes-daniel-gusmao 51

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Tenant Harassment: Both cities, it must be said, experience cruel practices of harassment upon their residents from land-grabby interests in the marketplace. Offers of cash payments are not unusual, but market-rate compensation is rare. And in both cities (but especially in New York where many low-income residents do not speak the primary language of city government), legalism is used as an intimidation tactic to bully residents out of their homes or keep them in the dark about their options. Psychological stressors such as ongoing construction, removal of public services, or next-door demolitions are also common occurrences.

Security: The business of Olympic securitization is a prime example of symmetries between Rio and NYC. The governor of the state of Rio de Janeiro from 2007 to 2014 was Sergio Cabral, who vocally praised New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s “zero tolerance” policy.52 It followed that, before the World Cup, in search of “best practices” for mega-event security, the Rio Prefeitura signed a consultancy contract with the NYPD. This contract is facilitated by the fact that the Anschutz Entertainment Group (AEG) is the managing entity of both the Barclay’s Center and the Maracanã. But the policing tactics transferred go far beyond stadium security. They extend into the favelas, where UPPs (Police Pacification Units) have been practicing their new skills on Rio’s urban poor in an unsettling déjà vu of “broken windows” policing. Rio’s military police have also subsequently gotten a sponsorship contract with Austrian weapons manufacturer Glock to provide them with the “official” handgun of the Olympic games.53 Glock provides the standard-issue handguns for the NYPD as well.

Alignment of Political Power: Both cities have been able to push through their development agendas due to an alignment of political ideology at the city, state, and national level. In New York’s case, the Bloomberg administration was politically aligned with the second Bush administration, who favored reconstruction after 9/11, and the governorship of George Pataki, who okayed the land grants and funding for the development projects in question. They were all Republicans. As for Rio de Janeiro, the PT party of Presidents Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff and the PMBD party of Vice President Michel Temer, Governor Luiz Pezão, and Mayor Eduardo Paes were each part of a ruling coalition known as Para o Brasil Seguir Mudando (For Brazil to Keep On Changing),54 which espoused urban development and Keynesian economics. So, each city was able to fast-track Olympic projects thanks to a centralization of decision making power which did not rely on the usual democratic mechanisms to determine public spending. This is literally the opposite of including the public in the planning process.

Alternative Proposals: But the public wants to be included! Urban citizens want their voices to be heard! Inhabitants seek greater control over the systems that produce urban space!

My research in Chapter 4 will show that inclusion in urban decision making processes is a common demand of local resistance groups. Vila Autódromo produced a “People’s Plan.” City University of New York produced a “Unity Plan.” Though neither plan was expressly considered by the city government, the political significance of releasing one’s own plan is huge. Alternative participatorially-generated proposals are a cornerstone of my recommendations in Chapter 5.

Monte Reel, Rio’s New Governor Takes Aim At Old Problems, Washington Post Foreign Service, 2007 (accessed 5/1/2016) http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/23/AR2007052301643.html 53 Flavie Halais, Spectacle and Surveillance In Brazil, (Open Democracy, London, 2013).

54 This coalition was renamed Coligação Com a Força do Povo (With the Force of the People) in 2014 and has split as of 2016 after a recent corruption scandal, which I describe on page 64.

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Rio and NYC: Divergences Key differences exist in the Olympic development processes of New York City and Rio de Janeiro, and these must be listed here to ratify this section of my report. There are innumerable distinctions between the metropolises, but the following selection pertains to the viability of resistance tactics that are commonly employed.

Asymmetry of housing and land-use policy: There is no architectural or legal equivalent to favelas in New York City today. In theory, every resident of a housing unit on NYC land has either a lease, mortgage, or deed for that residence. But in Rio, where a huge percentage of the citizenry lives without legal land tenure, the housing market is more fraught with instability and violence. Forced evictions and demolitions are much more common in Rio than in New York.

The distinction can be shown by contrasting Naomi Klien’s Shock Doctrine55 to Mindy Fullilove’s Root Shock.56 Whereas a favela might be swept suddenly by “lightning evictions,” New York’s process of displacement is a “slow violence” that displaces people through the means of the market, (though it also sees its fair share of forced evictions). A few other land-use laws differentiate Rio and New York. Because Rio de Janeiro’s entire land mass is within the historical bounds of the Mata Atlantica rainforest, a set of federal environmental preservation laws encompass swaths of the terrain. This provides a legal framework to oppose development which is unavailable in NYC because it has no rainforest to protect. Furthermore, in Brazil the 2001 City Statute Law enshrines the “Right to the City” as a legal right. Though in practice this law is not enforced nor observed, the actual existence of the law on the books provides a defensible reason for people (such as the squatters of the Porto Maravilha warehouses) to occupy vacant space if they can claim that it is not serving a “social good.” In the United States there is no such law.

Function of courts and police: I have no quantitative evidence for this claim, but nearly every Brazilian I spoke to in the qualitative data collection phase of this project cited corruption as a top cause of Rio de Janeiro’s current problems. 2016’s headlines are alight with the corruption of Brazil’s political elite, but the trouble is that the corruption doesn’t stop there. The courts themselves, the judges, the lawyers, and the individual police are all corrupt as well. It is conventional wisdom in Rio that even if you call a cop or file a lawsuit, you can not necessarily expect a fair hearing without furnishing a cash bribe to grease the wheels of justice. This unjust justice also skews according to the color of your skin. Thus, Rio’s poorest residents face the city’s autolycan policies and practices without being able to depend on any legal recourse. In New York City, despite distrust of the NYPD, there is a functional legal system beholden to the “rule of law” that is often (but by no means always) able to unseat corrupt politicians and defend the rights of the people.

Demographic distribution over topology: Rio’s unique topology manifests a notoriously prominent spatial segregation between rich and poor, with favelas on the hills and wealthy neighborhoods in the flat zones. In America, elevated mountainside architectures in the forest are considered luxurious and bourgeois while the grid of urban street space is the terrain of the proletariat. Convexly, Rio has bejeweled every beachside bench and gated every two-car garage, Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine, The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, Metropolitan Books, Henry Holt and Company, New York, 2001 56 Mindy Fullilove, Root Shock: How Tearing Up City Neighborhoods Hurts America, and What We Can Do About It, One World/Ballantine, 2004 55

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while its bumpy lumps of jungle are plastered with cheap housing. Plus, a dearth of public transportation discourages mobility between these biomes. In short, Rio de Janeiro is planned topoillogically. This creates an obstacle when it comes to garnering upper-class support for lower-class struggles. Unlike in New York, where a suspiciously vacant building or a controversial construction site can clutter the corneas of rich and poor alike, Rio’s elite and its visiting tourists can remain oblivious to the squalor that is wrought upon low-income Cariocas

by Olympic enforcement. Though it would require additional study to fully describe how topographic dynamics play out in terms of streetscape resistance tactics, it surely does have an effect.

Above, I have listed just a few of the cultural and spatial divergences between my two urban case studies. I have not controlled for these variables in my ensuing analysis. Thus, admittedly, all of the research in Chapter 4 regarding the effectiveness of resistance strategies and tactics in each city must be taken with a proverbial grain of salt. All the same, there are sufficient linkages and similarities between the conditions of mega-event development in both cities to justify a search for transferrable resistance techniques, and to declare solidarity between both populations.

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Chapter 3

The Production of Counter-Spectacle “Does the field resound with the cries of the communities the stadium displaced?

Or does the spectacle of the completed stadium – the spectacle of its edifice and the spectacle of the events it stages – obscure the social and political conditions of its construction?”

- Eli Jelly-Schapiro, The Stands of Bereft People Olympic planners use urban restructuring and aesthetic manipulation to compose and market a city’s image. The aforementioned undesirable instances of ecological destruction, forced evictions, and public debt merge with the presumably desirable displays of architectural gigantism and awe-inspiring athletic achievement to generate an undeniably impressive spectacle. The concept of the spectacle forms the basis for the theoretical framework of this thesis project. I propose that the primary commodity that is actually packaged and sold by the Olympics is not sports, tourism, or urban development, but spectacle itself. Therefrom emanates the relentless seduction of the Olympic movement. At this point, it is necessary to take a detour into the realm of post-modern spectacle theory in order to frame the research and design proposals presented in the second half of this paper.

Spectacle is the Olympic Commodity Sporting mega-events such as the Olympics are the world’s premiere example of mediatized spectacles that act as vehicles for consumer culture. In Chapter 1 I noted the primacy of broadcasting rights fees in funding the Olympic games, and subsequently the role of media networks to deliver the games to humanity’s screen. In the process, the infusion of corporate advertising and state propaganda folds economic and political functionality into an already alluring entertainment commodity. What results is a sensorial experience in which the technology, architecture, nationalism, and theatrics are as attractive (if not moreso) than the sporting events themselves.

This entertainment experience is the modern day spectacle. Analysis of this phenomenon as a product (and tool) of globalized capitalism began with the Situationists, an avant-garde collective of thinkers in 1970’s France. In his notorious text The Society of the Spectacle, their godfather Guy Debord states that “The spectacle is the moment when the commodity has attained the total occupation of social life. The relation to the commodity is not only visible, but one no longer sees anything but it: the world one sees is its world. Modern economic production extends its dictatorship extensively and intensively.”57 This commodity fetishism is endemic to the Olympics. It empowers the Olympics to occupy their prominent place in Earth society.

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Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, (Detroit: Black and Red, 1970) #42

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When the last word in an explanation for human rights infractions is the looming deadline of the Olympic games, society’s devotion to the production and consumption of global spectacle has usurped considerations of everyday local life. Jean Baudrillard calls this phenomenon “massspectacle effect,” the “totalizing” idolatry of the commodity and a celebration of its consumption.58 Misgivings about the Olympics in society’s conscience are overruled by a reverence to the amount of labor, materials, and money that are required to mount them. Debord writes: “The spectacle is the developed modern complement of money where the totality of the commodity world appears as a whole, as general equivalence for what the entire society can be and can do. The spectacle is the money which one only looks at, because in the spectacle the totality of use is already exchanged for the totality of abstract representation.”59 This “exchange” of “use” for “abstract representation” is the process by which humans proxy actual participation (such as playing sports) with an act of consumption (such as buying the swag of your favorite sports team). So too do cities proxy actual urban development with the hosting of an Olympics.

The ritual of consuming a spectacle has become more valuable than the spectacle’s content.

In the Olympic instance, the primary physical space in which this spectacular commercial seduction plays out is the stadium. The multi-billion dollar construction projects are veritable cathedrals of capital, designated sites of (overpriced) consumption, totems of state power and corporate finance. Within these places, the consumption of spectacle is condensed and multiplied. Athletes, those custodians of local hero-worship and national pride, have also been engulfed by the spectacle. In his essay The Stands of Bereft People, Eli Jelly-Schapiro reminds us that “in the globally popular sport of soccer, companies such as Canon, Sharp, and Carlsberg sponsor teams and have their names emblazoned on their shirts, making the players epiphenomena of transnational capital.”60 This trend sings ridiculous overtures in the practice of naming stadiums after the banks and corporations who have paid the highest premiums. Thus, by engulfing both spectators and their heroes, alleges theorist David Boje, the spectacle tricks spectators into trusting it. “Spectacle is increasingly a corporately orchestrated performance, a display intended to persuade the masses of spectators from a distance that its global corporations have implemented moral codes of conduct, and therefore merit public trust.”61 When game time comes, even though public trust in the Olympics is eroding at present, audiences will fill the stands and the airwaves to follow the enthralling personal stories of valiant Olympic athletes and teams. Whether they are forgiving, forgetful, or ignorant of the injustices the games cause, the truth is, people just love watching the Olympics. The continuing commitment of public eyeball-time makes the Olympic brand impervious to the vitriol of any portion of the public who refuses to watch. This clash of public opinion illuminates the factious nature of the “public” itself.

It would be too simple to chock the disjuncture between Olympic lover and Olympic dissenter up to the common situationist discourse of “passive” versus “active” spectators. Debord writes on: “The concept of the spectacle…involves a distinction between passivity and activity and consumption and production, condemning passive consumption of spectacle as an alienation from human potentiality for creativity and imagination.”62 Here Debord presents a false 58

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Beaudrillard, Jean, Simulacra and Simulation, Editions Galilee, 1981.

Guy Debord, Society of the Spectacle, (Detroit: Black and Red, 1970) #49.

Kellner and Best, Debord and the Postmodern Turn, New Stages of the Spectacle, UCLA, 1997.

David M. Boje, Carnivalesque Resistance to Global Spectacle: A Critical Postmodern Theory to Public Administration, Administrative Theory & Praxis, Vol. 23, No. 3, 2001, pp. 431-458.

62 Kellner and Best, Debord and the Postmodern Turn, New Stages of the Spectacle, UCLA, 1997.

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dichotomy. There is a full spectrum of ways to participate both actively and passively.

Furthermore, there is no rubric to determine whether passivity or activity is more or less desirable in any given situation. Ultimately, it is up to individuals to select their mode of engagement. If that’s watching sports at home with a bucket of popcorn, jumping out of the grandstands and onto the field, or starting your own team, so be it. The challenge is designing an Olympic movement in which all these levels of engagement are acceptable, accessible, safe, and welcome. There must not be one totalizing spectacle, but a multitude of spectacles from a plurality of publics.

Defining Counter-Spectacle For urban theorist Alessandro Angelini, what is lacking in the Situationist discourse is “an attention to the historicity of the spectacle itself and to its differential constituencies.” He suggests, “by observing its very constructedness, to see the spectacle rather as a space of contestation, negotiation, and indeed play.”63 This requires us to examine what he calls the “counter-spectacles” that exist within, in parallel to, or behind-the-scenes of dominant (massmediated) spectacles.

No doubt, the Olympic Spectacle creates a media frenzy that raises a city’s global visibility for a period of time. Often, media coverage of Olympic host cities will refer to “the global spotlight.” Rio’s Mayor Eduardo Paes touted “O Momento Rio” (“Rio’s Moment”) to drum up popular support for the Olympic bid.64 Since so much visibility is conferred by Olympic media, there’s a potent opportunity for that visibility to be co-opted by Olympic dissenters. And, as shown in Chapters 1 and 2, there is much cause for local populations to dissent. Thus, there always arises a local public that reacts against the Olympic spectacle with alternative “counterspectacles.” For the purposes of this paper, any action designed to counter-act, co-opt, obstruct, critique, or spin the dominant Olympic Spectacle will be classified as a counter-spectacle.

But a “counter-spectacle” is not only an act; it is a positionality. My use of the term draws upon the work of urban theorist Marion Young. She uses “counter-public” to delineate the associational embodiment of a subordinated or oppressed population of a society (such as exploited migrant workers, repressed protestors, or evictees, in the Olympic context). Urban imaginaries propagated by the Olympics to compose a “global image of the city” tend to invisibilize the very local publics that are being caused to suffer as the games are installed. When a public is excluded from a prominent portrayal of “publicness” (such the cheering fans of an Olympic tournament) and then sets about asserting its own visuality, this population can be said to constitute a “counter-public.” Counter-publics “function as places where members of subordinated groups develop ideas, arguments, campaigns, and protest actions directed at influencing a wider public debate, often with the goal of bringing about legal or institutional change.”65 Counter-publics in the neighborhoods of Olympic Games are constituted by their own exclusion from the games. Such exclusion can take many forms, from not being able to afford a ticket to the games, to having lost your job thanks to their arrival, to having lost your home in Alessandro Angelini, Ludic Maps and Capitalist Spectacle in Rio de Janeiro, (Geoforum, Vol 64, 2015,) pp. 421-430.

Fernanda Sánchez & Anne-Marie Broudehoux, Mega Events and Urban Regeneration in Rio de Janeiro: Planning in a State of Emergency, 2015 65 Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy, (Oxford University Press, 2000).

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their wake (thereby also being excluded from any general patina of enthusiasm towards the games or the Olympic movement). I would argue that since the games are intended to “foster a feeling of inclusion and unity,”66 anyone who feels excluded from the games actually is. In Rio de Janeiro’s case, to advocate for the political and spatial inclusion of counter-publics such as favela dwellers and Afro-Brazilian communities, resistance movements are deploying “counterspectacles” against the forces of Olympic development.

To combine Angelini and Young’s terminologies, I propose that the very visibilizing of a counter-public can constitute a counter-spectacle. Beyond repudiating dominant spectacular narratives, counter-spectacles are new narratives devised by the counter-publics themselves to open debates that include those counter-publics. Marginalized groups can thus self-visibilize, asserting their right to be seen and claiming space by proudly being seen in it.

Counter-publics stand apart from the “mainstream” public that views the Olympic games uncritically. These critical sectors of citizens prefer to think and see for themselves. In “The Spectacle of Visual Culture” Garoian and Gaudelius exhort us to “resist the monocular regime of spectacle seduction” in pursuit of a “plurality of scopic regimes” that would provide “a framework for an inclusive democracy.”67 To build such a plurality requires a thinking public that is skeptical in its consumption of spectacle. Such a skepticism runs contrary to accepted practices of the docile audience member who normally supplies the theater director’s classic scapegoat: a willing suspension of disbelief. The audience who has successfully suspended their disbelief will allow themselves to believe that the pyrotechnics atop the stadium during an Olympic opening ceremony are at best the breath of dragons flying just beyond the bunting or at least the evidence of a virile national regime. The audience who refuses to suspend their disbelief may still be enthralled by the flames, but will simultaneously ponder the budget of the production and ask which oil company supplied the petrol for the rockets. While most commercial spectacles, from the Olympics and World Cup to much of Broadway, Hollywood, and TV, desire the audience whose disbelief is suspended like a mosquito in sap, counterspectacles beckon to a firmly disbelieving audience.

If well designed and well timed, a counter-spectacle shatters the fourth wall of a totalizing spectacle and reveals the prismatic striations of human diversity and inequality behind it. But how are counter-spectacles composed? What are the modern techniques that resistance movements can use to co-opt the visibility and visuality of the Olympics itself in order to spread their messages? In what follows I argue that counter-spectacle is primarily achieved through the mediums of film and theater. Thanks to the democratization of the camera and the liquidification of the stage, both forms of art lend increasing visibility, agility, and immediacy to counter-spectacular social movements.

The Democratization of the Camera Since the concept of spectacle was reviled by the Situationists, an important technological advance has created new opportunities to shift societal power structures. Namely, rapid proliferation of camera technology has moved spectacularity from a tool of only the International Olympic Committee, The Olympic Charter, (accessed 5/1/2016) www.olympic.org/Documents/olympic_charter_en.pdf.

67 Charles R. Garoian and Yvonne M. Gaudelius, The Spectacle of Visual Culture, Studies in Art, Vol 45., No 4., Summer 2004, 298-312.

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moneyed entertainment and advertising businesses. Cameras and screens are now an everyday item, and this has broad implications for the role of spectacle in today’s society. Whereas in decades past the media could create an indisputable image of the world it sought to market, the citizenry can now co-construct its own infinitely pixelated image of the world.

Of the seductive direct-address of a photograph, Roland Barthes said it best: “Inasmuch as photography is an ellipse of language and a condensation of an ‘ineffable’ social whole, it constitutes an anti-intellectual weapon and tends to spirit away ‘politics’ (that is to say a body of problems and solutions) to the advantage of a ‘manner of being’, a socio-moral status”68 This describes how the power of photography is constantly utilized by Olympic designers to convey the universality of the Olympic “good.” It is impingent upon citizens and communities seeking to resist or reform the Olympic movement to harness this same photographic power. This power can be harnessed not only by citizen content-creation that presents alternative narratives, but by citizen surveillance that captures alternative truth. A camera is both a window and a door.

Camera technology is empowering a “plurality of scopic regimes” by multiplying the total amount of scopic content on Earth. More cameras means more photographs, more films, more TV shows, more music videos, and more room for experimentation with film styles, film lengths, and filmmaking techniques. In combination with web technology, access to this diversity of content is also enabled cheaply and without strict regulation. Though the internet is surely not yet available to everyone, the fact remains that a perpetual font of videography from around the globe is at the fingertips of a gigantic portion of humanity. It is now possible for billions of people to tell their own stories, through do-it-yourself videography and photography, and for billions to view it with a click or a swipe. Thus, the camera-smartphone-internet fusion has profoundly shifted the dynamics of storytelling.

Smartphones have also shifted the dynamics of surveillance as a tool of social control.

The pre-internet surveillance age could be represented the concept of the panopticon. In the dark years of psychiatric medicine the wards were constructed in a cylindrical layout at the center of which sat the guard, with a circular sightline into the cell of each patient. Even if the guard may not have been looking at your cell, the thinking goes, the possibility that he could be looking at any time would deter the patients from misbehaving. This model is the ancestor of the surveillance systems that have deployed cameras throughout our cities by the millions, supposedly deterring crime.

The Olympics, accordingly, have become increasingly securitized and surveilled.

Baudrillard surmises that surveillance and security are a part of the spectacle as well, not present to truly police the event but to further augment its spectacularity. “Repression become deterrence is nothing but an extra sign in the universe of persuasion. The circuits of surveillance cameras are themselves part of the decor or simulacra. A perfect surveillance on all fronts would require a heavier and more sophisticated mechanism of control…It would not be profitable.”69 But, from the smartphones in our pockets, the “perfect surveillance on all fronts” may have emerged sooner than Baudrillard could have imagined. Nowadays there has been a structural inversion of the surveillance system. Since any citizen could be equipped with a camera and an internet connection, personages of authority now come under surveillance as well.

The panopticon has become a synopticon in which the psych patients turn their gazes upon the guard. The people turn their smartcameras upon the police. The democratization of camera 68 69

Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. (New York: Hill and Wang), 1991.

Jean Baudrillard, Mass. Identity. Architecture. John Wiley & Sons Ltd., 2003.

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technology has formed a panoptic/synoptic loop that infinitely refreshes the contest for control of urban space.

Evidence abounds of the effectiveness of this photographic inversion in practice. The proliferation of video technology, for both content-generation and surveillance, has been a driver of current social justice movements. The Black Lives Matter movement in the United States gained global visibility after street demonstrations reacting a YouTube video that “went viral” in mid-2014. The video shows the murder of Staten Island resident Eric Garner by officers of the New York City Police Department. Because Mr. Garner was black and because the fatal choke hold used by the white NYPD officer did not fit the minor crime of selling loose cigarettes, this incident became a symbol of unjust police violence against people of color nationwide. Similar videos have continued to surface, shot and uploaded by random bystanders, fueling the movement by laying bare America’s pandemic of racially skewed violence. The camera is the weapon of the movement. It is used offensively, with videos being shown in court as testimony, or defensively, with protestors filming during protests as a way to deter police from behaving violently towards them.

The videographic innovations of Black Lives Matter have fundamentally altered the spatial strategies of resistance groups. Armed with social media communications unbound by geographical scale, movements can operate more suddenly and impulsively. Protestors can confuse, evade, or embarrass authorities by renegotiating protest sites or parade routes on the fly, mobilizing ardent, rhizomatic crowds in minutes, and attracting international press (even without any press corps onsite). And protestors need not be present in the street or plaza to have a hand in the action. In fact, the built environments designated for protest are being made obsolete by the internet. Traditional repertoires of protest in public space are no longer as effective as their techsavvy hybrids. The spectacle is now liberated from, or overflows, architectural space thanks to mobile video technology.

I call this phenomenon the liquification of the stage.

The Liquification of the Stage In the digital era, video may actually be better positioned to expose the truth of human life to the masses than live action spectacles are. Theater director and critic Baz Kershaw calls it the “miniaturization” of spectacle. “The technology of film, especially through close-ups, allows the commonly human to be placed firmly—actually and metaphorically—at the center of the spectacle, and this is an effect that live spectacle finds extremely difficult to create.”70 This points not to an obsolescence of the performing arts but to a trans-substantiation of them. Since film has supplanted theater as the best tool for placing the “commonly human” at the center of the spectacle, theater innovators have increasingly sought to place the spectacle at the center of the “commonly human.” This keeps the theater relevant, but it fractures the artform and disperses its constituent parts throughout other realms of socio-spatial life. The theater is no longer only a category of art that takes place in a designated stage space, but a mode of behavior that theatricalizes situations regardless of, (or in spite of), physical place.

Kershaw goes on: “Mediatization is a key process for dispersing performance through culture: the eye of the camera, the ear of the microphone, the body of the keyboard, the extra finger of the mouse, tend to reposition everything as performance for someone else and, 70

Baz Kershaw, Curiosity Or Contempt: On Spectacle, the Human, and Activism, Theatre Journal, Vol. 5, No. 4, 2003.

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crucially, for ourselves.”71 So everything and everyone becomes filmworthy. This invites a valuation of “being seen”, which confers the right to be seen, which affirms the right to exist. So the spread of camera technology has in effect delivered the empowering instrument of live performance to every cubic millimeter of the world. Film and theater have swapped saliva for so long that they can’t tell each other’s tongues apart. No longer must audiences buy tickets to a proscenium or amphitheater to find spectacle. Now spectacle is revealed in the nooks and crannies of the everyday world. The mundane becomes beautiful, the obscure becomes popular, the common becomes cool. To quote theater director Peter Brook: “it is most of all dirt that gives the roughness its edge; filth and vulgarity are natural, obscenity is joyous: with these the spectacle takes on its socially liberating role, for by nature the popular theatre is antiauthoritarian, anti-traditional, anti-pomp, anti-pretence.”72 In a world where falsitude reigns, truth becomes shocking. Revelations inspire revolutions.

A desirable byproduct of the liquification of the stage is the erasure of the division between performer and spectator. Since everybody is now the star and the director of their own show, we see again the meaninglessness of the dialectic of “passive” and “active” audiences.

Since the spectacle engulfs and penetrates us, we are all spectactors, simultaneously performing the show and watching it.

I give you Augusto Boal: “Spectator is a bad word! The spectator is less than a man and it is necessary to humanize him, to restore him his capacity of action in all its fullness. He too must be a subject, an actor on an equal plane with those generally accepted as actors, who must also be seen as spectators. All these experiments of a people’s theater have the same objective the liberation of the spectator, on whom the theater has imposed finished visions of the world.”73 The Olympic precept of universality imposes such a “finished” world vision. But the world is not finished. When Olympic opening and closing ceremonies, for example, present theatricalized visions of the culture of the host city or nation, these visions often exclude large portions of that culture or the history that created it.74 Even if an attempt is made to present ethnic diversity or indigenous heritage within the national context, the result can be romanticizing or tokenizing. Perhaps this is because the visualization of myriad identities within a theatrically homogenized one would require the visualization of a history of oppression, violence, and racism. This is a story that most nations are unwilling to tell, most TV networks unwilling to air, and most viewers unwilling to watch. The conundrum of Olympic spectacle producers is to depict a fluid and inclusive vision of a world through an identifiable vocabulary of nationhood.

Fluid visions of the world (aka that vaunted “plurality of scopic regimes”) are more possible thanks to the liquification of the stage. This is why bringing carnivalesque political protest to the street has remained so essential to resistance strategy. Critical theorist David Boje opposes carnival to spectacle, calling the carnivalesque “the use of theater to parody and resist spectacles of global corporate hegemony,” after Mikhail Bakhtin. So, he delineates a new politics of conflict between spectacle and carnival that leans heavily on the use of theatricality and information technology. He points out that carnival is a set of “sign systems that compete for representational authority…Not only spectacle, but carnival is being digitized and virtualized, transferring the social-movement tactics of trespass and blockade to the Internet.”

Baz Kershaw, Curiosity Or Contempt, 2003.

Peter Brook, The Empty Space, (New York: Touchstone, 1968).

73 Augusto Boal, Theater of the Oppressed, (New York: Theater Communications Group, 1985).

74 Joseph K. Adajye, Reimagining Sports: African Athletes, Defection, and Ambiguous Citizenship, Africa Today 57 (2).

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It has been recommended time and again that Carnival itself is an appropriate revolutionary tactic. In keeping with Bakhtin, it could be put forth that the carnivalesque is the ideal theatrical manifestation of liberation.75 But such hedonistic theatrical tactics have no traction towards securing social reforms. A critique of carnival as a counter-spectacular resistance tactic is given by Kershaw: “just as the source of its energy is a multiplicity of creative voices, the people’s pleasures unleashed, so it has no immediately overt political direction, as it operates centrifugally, dispersing itself in excess.” Also, according to Angelini, in its only temporary and purely symbolic inversion of Brazilian spatial hierarchies, Carnival can also serve to “obfuscate rather than destabilize social inequalities.”76 Regardless, with digitization, spectacle will no longer be tamed and controlled by entertainment architecture. Indeed, specially-designed spaces for the production of spectacle quash its truly liberating, cathartic, power. “…the disciplinary mechanisms of the theater [showbiz] have automatically undermined the extreme force of the powers…that spectacle is designed to carry.”77 By transporting spectacle into the street, movements can unleash spectacle’s truly revolutionary potential.

Boal refers to stage director Bertolt Brecht, characterizing his theatrical intentions: “Brecht contends that the popular artist must abandon the downtown stages and go to the neighborhoods, because only there will he find people who are truly interested in changing society.” These people, in the “neighborhoods,” are the commonly human counter-public, whose spaces, faces, bodies, and habits are visualized in counter-spectacle. Thereby, the theater, film, and photography of artistic activist movements does not stand as a spectacle to be consumed and contemplated, but as a catalyst to action. This action may take many forms at many scales over many durations, but the essential bit is that the visuality originates from the oppressed population itself. Therein lies the key distinction between a spectacle and a counter-spectacle.

That said, any clean binaries between spectacle and counter-spectacle, oppressed and empowered populations, or even stadium and street would be unfair. It is, in fact, in the grey areas, the infrastructures, the disjunctures, and the holes between such perceived wholes that real political traction can be gained. To unpack this further, I will invoke an excellent new concept that will be laced throughout the remainder of this thesis: Keller Easterling’s Extrastatecraft.

Overview of Extrastatecraft In Chapter 6 of her 2014 book Extrastatecraft, cultural critic Keller Easterling remarks on the oft impotent efforts of activism to combat the powerful players in the “engine room of globalization.” She notes that “activists who show up at the barricade…with familiar political scripts sometimes find that the real fight or stealthier forms of violence are happening somewhere else.” 78 In lieu of the well-worn rituals of resistance such as street protest, petitions, and boycotts, Easterling recommends “an expanded activist repertoire in infrastructure space.”

This 11 point list of “auxiliary” resistance tactics frees the activist from “binaries of enemies and innocents” while taking “stances that are both harder to target and less interested in being right.”

Easterling’s clever and unorthodox menu of insurgent behaviors adds fresh rhetoric to any Mikhail Bakhtin, Carnival and Carnivalesque, 1968.

Angelini, Ludic Maps, 2015 77 Baz Kershaw, Curiosity Or Contempt, 2003.

78 Keller Easterling, Extrastatecraft, The Power of Infrastructure Space, Verso Press, 2014.

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revolution and, perhaps, some strategic advantages. Therefore, I have included Extrastatecraft tactics in the analysis of Rio and NYC resistance groups that appears in the next chapter. I shall briefly define each tactic.

Gossip/Rumor/Hoax – Everybody knows these common styles of verbal trickery. Whether true or false, these tactics function as multipliers of messaging and can destabilize or consolidate political power.

Pandas – These are gifts that can’t be refused. The name comes from the example Easterling gives: China gifted two Pandas to Taiwan as a cute, fluffy signifier of a non-existent reconciliation. Gifts are publically legible ways to convey subliminal messages.

Exaggerated Compliance – Sometimes, rather than breaking the law, obeying it to a ridiculous degree can deliver political punch. With Exaggerated Compliance, activists raise fundamental questions about a law’s existence, while leaving authority slackjawed.

Doubling – Doubling is Easterling’s word for mimicry, caricature, dressing up, copying.

This could be imitating a figure of power, or doubling a space or situation to fracture or confuse an audience. Extrastatecraft is itself a doubling of traditional statecraft.

Comedy – From blowing off steam and releasing tension to voicing hard truths in a palatable way, comedy is a useful political tool. It reaches a broader audience than anger or intellect.

Remotes – When activists design interventions to function politically while the people themselves can stay hidden or distant, these are remotes. These could be design objects planted covertly in space, or robotic or technological proxies like drones or malware.

Distraction/Meaninglessness/Irrationality – These terms are obvious, but their value is not. Often some plain old wackiness can go a long way towards unraveling undesirable political agendas or buying time to implement preferred ones.

Hackers/Entrepreneurs – Cutting edge knowledges that spur innovation in technology and business can be a crucial leg up in a battle against less agile corporate power.

Inadmissible Evidence – Speaking the unspeakable, showing the unshowable. Even if it wouldn’t hold up in court, a juicy tidbit of scandalous truth can tip the scales of justice on the street or in the media. It encourages controversy and embraces dissensus.

English – Easterling borrows the term “English” from the expression “put some English on it,” from billiards. It means “spin”. Flipping the script, converting narratives to serve the needs of a movement, and being able to anticipate the spins of your adversaries.

Knowing How – Beyond the technical knowledge bases that can prepare an act of resistance, there’s the magical quotient of just “knowing how” to get the job done. This ephemeral ingredient keeps activists nimble and confident. Even without knowing what they will have to do, they trust that they will know how to do it when the moment comes.

The Extrastatecraft recommendations that Easterling has given us seek to expose a “hidden transcript,” and read it out loud. The “hidden transcript” is a concept found in James C. Scott’s Domination and the Art of Resistance. Beyond the mediatized landscape of popular protest, there lies an “unobtrusive realm of political struggle” that Scott calls infrapolitics. This “disguised resistance,” takes place in private, in kitchens, between friends, informally,

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ephemerally. It “is the silent partner of a loud form of public resistance.”79 As opposed to the public transcript that usually reads as obedience and consumption, the hidden transcript contains the anger that people feel and the subversive behaviors that they enact on a daily basis. Over time, the hidden transcript manifests as collective resistance to dominant power structures.

An example, in the Rio de Janeiro context, could be the practice of siphoning electricity in the favelas. Everybody knows that some favelados are using electricity without paying for it.

The dominant transcript is that this is illegal and they should pay up or unplug. But the hidden transcript is the resentment that is felt over years of infrastructural neglect of favelas by the government, and the systemic racism which is that neglect’s source. So the practice of electrical siphoning is as much resistance as it is thrift.

Keller Easterling’s Extrastatecraft deploys a politics of aesthetics to make the hidden transcript legible to the masses. “The politics of aesthetics involves a multiplicity of small ruptures, of small shifts, that refuse the blackmail of radical subversion.”80 Extrastatecraft liberates by visualizing a reality that the majority already feels but has not publicly pronounced.

Thanks to the aforementioned democratization of the camera and the liquification of the stage, the politics of aesthetics are an expanding terrain for political participation and dialogue, playable even to those citizens who do not take to the streets.

The hidden transcript of the Olympic games is the Olympic Dilemma that I articulated in Chapter 1 of this paper, namely, the miscalibration between Olympic values and Olympic practices. The ideological friction-points abound throughout the Olympic experience. Even as people deride the Olympics, they love them. A futebol viewer cheers on his players when they score even though he paid more for his ticket to cover the stadium renovation. Even after grumbling about the wasteful practice of producing fake snow, an environmentalist watches the ski jumping and is thoroughly impressed. These moral incongruences are a virtual minefield of potent theatrical material. I propose that Extrastatecraft strategies can and should be applied in Olympic resistance. But since the spectacle is the Olympic commodity, Olympic resistance must target not only the state spaces that produce the Olympics but the stage spaces, both physical and virtual, that deliver them. We critique the politician by critiquing the podium. I call this theatrical manifestation of Easterling’s concept Extrastagecraft.

Inventing Extrastagecraft Extrastagecraft is the application of Keller Easterling’s Extrastatecraft to mediatized spectacular space. By crafting extra stages that are outside of, against, behind, or adjacent to mass entertainment infrastructures, we reveal the constructedness of spectacle itself and defy its homogenizing effects. These extra stages can be anywhere, virtual or physical, as long as they are unabashedly visible. Extrastagecraft harnesses the audacity of visibility.

The Olympics are the ideal topic/target for such theatrical politics. While official political proceedings generally avoid evocative visuality by being staged in boring administrative settings with actors costumed in generic business attire, the Olympics present flashy aesthetics that are inherently politicized. In the architecture of the arena or stadium, the foci of an epic human mass can be unified on a central point: a ball moving through air or a singer in a spotlight. The James C. Scott Domination and the Art of Resistance, Yale University Press, New Haven: 1990.

Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, Continuum International Publishing Group, New York/London: 2000/2004.

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political subtext, the concentration of gazes, and the adrenaline glut of competitive sports create an explosive environment to deploy counter-spectacle.

In the following passage from his chapter Emphasis on Sport, Bertolt Brecht provides an argument for us to consider The Olympics as a theatrical opportunity: We pin our hopes to the sporting public.

Make no bones about it, we have our eye on those huge concrete pans, filled with 15,000 men and women of every variety of class and physiognomy, the fairest and shrewdest audience in the world. There you will find 15,000 persons paying high prices, and working things out on the basis of a sensible weighing of supply and demand. You cannot expect to get faire conduct on a sinking ship. The demoralization of our theatre audiences springs from the fact that neither theatre nor audience has any idea what is supposed to go on there. When people in sporting establishments buy their tickets they know exactly what is going to take place; and that is exactly what does take place once they are in their seats: viz. highly trained persons developing their peculiar powers in the way most suited to them, with the greatest sense of responsibility yet in such a way as to make one feel that they are doing it primarily for their own fun. Against that the traditional theatre is nowadays quite lacking in character.

Brecht envies the commodification of the sport-going experience. Like the dependable ubiquity of a can of Coke, the Olympic Spectacle delivers “oomf” that is difficult to disdain.

Everyday life, (the elusive “real” that so many theater artists have died trying to capture onstage), is much harder to predict, and thus to present. This is the work of Olympic Extrastagecraft. When the spectacularity of Olympic athleticism, nationalism, and urbanization can be juxtaposed with the counter-spectacularity of the everyday inhabitants of the host city, a potent rift is torn in the Olympic fabric. This is an aesthetic rift between the excesses of corporate enterprise and the squalor of impoverished citizens, but it visualizes a moral rift between the drive for profit and the preservation of human life and dignity.

Ideally, Olympic Extrastagecraft will articulate with the global media platforms and the mega-structures that convey the Olympics, co-opting their visuality. But in practice much Extrastagecraft will unfold in the street. This will be acceptable as long as the performerprotestors address the duality of the street-space. Although the street-space certainly provides a publicity and a visuality that is desirable for activist designs, the street-space is also an interstitial non-space and a space that remains mediated by the systems that produced it. In The Urban Revolution, Henri LeFebvre aptly dispatches the totality of the street. First he argues for the street: “It serves as a meeting place...In the street, a form of spontaneous theater, I become spectacle and spectator, and sometimes an actor.” Then, against the street, he writes: “...a colonization of the urban space...takes place in the street through the image, through publicity, through the spectacle of objects...The parades, masquerades, balls, and folklore festivals authorized by a power structure caricaturize the appropriation and re-appropriation of space.”81 Rightly, LeFebvre identifies the paradox of street-space but this does not invalidate the street as a meaningful site for political activity. Rather, this reveals a dialectic volatility that redoubles the necessity to use the street as a site of Extrastagecraft. The challenge becomes acknowledging the structuring of the street by the very systems of power that we seek to defy, and then illuminating the limits and failures of said structuring. Without attempting to “colonize” urban space by imposing a new structure, activists can inhabit the street as is with performative behavior that 81

LeFebvre, Henri, The Urban Revolution, University of Minnesota Press, 2003/1970.

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draws attention to the street-space’s incongruence. When this is enacted specifically targeting spectacle spaces or appropriating tropes that originate therefrom, it is textbook Extrastagecraft.

Yet Rancière exhorts that activists must not get “caught up in this police logic of the equivalence of the power of the market and the power of its denunciation.” He argues against simply denouncing the spectacle and the screen, saying instead that “the problem is to define a way of looking that doesn’t preempt the gaze of the spectator.”82 So, Extrastagecraft must be a healthy blend of spectacle and counter-spectacle. Easterling warns: “Righteous ultimatums or binaries of enemies and innocents that offer only collusion or refusal might present a structural obstacle greater than any quasi-mythical opponent.” This permits us to mix the counter-spectacle of self-visibilizing counter-publics with the spectacle-proper of the entertainment business. Also, mainstream systems of spectacle production can collaborate with (or be co-opted by) activist entities without too many furrowed brows. Extrastagecraft can package counter-spectacle into commodified spectacle.

Allow me to provide one example.

Mirroring the “Olympic Live Site” The Olympic Live Site is a piece of Extrastagecraft that I have planned for the public courtyard in front of the Barclay’s Center. It would appropriate the concept of the “Live Site” that is a feature of the Rio 2016 Olympic Master Plan. In each satellite of the Olympic sportive complex (Barra, Deodoro, Maracanã, and Porto Novo) there will be a place where Olympic audiences can linger and relax in between their ticketed events. These are centrally designated locations for lounging in the grass and watching jumbotrons that are live-streaming other Olympic events around the city. Within the rubric of the Olympic security apparatus, these are also specialty sites for the purchase and consumption of food and beverage, including alcohol.

These mandatory-relaxation zones strike me as a spatial contrivance and a consumer sham, but it’s a concept that can be instrumentalized with artful immediacy and political effect.

The plan is to establish an “Olympic Live Site” in Brooklyn, right in front of the Barclay’s Center, during the Olympic opening ceremony. In this Live Site, street performers would be deployed, decked out as fans of various Olympic teams, and photographing, filming, and live-streaming it all. It would heighten the whole thing more if a journalistic film crew would performatively videotape the whole thing. It would be theatrically crucial, to draw attention to the constructedness of this spectacle, to have a second film crew filming with cardboard cameras. Ultimate impact would be delivered if unsuspecting actual Olympic sports fans were moved to join into the spectacle. Though tacitly a protest, this event would apparently embrace the Olympic invention of the “Live Site” and reinforce the universalizing Olympic narrative. Thereby, this spatial intervention would foot the Extrastatecraft bill. It’s “exaggerated compliance” and “pandas,” since the Olympics and their media machinery couldn’t well deny the evocative visuality of the event. If it were made to appear convincingly loyal to the Olympic brand, it would qualify as “hoax.” It would also be “doubling” and a “remote” since, while street actions outside of the Maracanã will surely be prohibited during the Olympic games, the Barclay’s Center can be proxied to political effect. The use of Barclay's center is spatial appropriation by substitution.

82

Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 2000/2004.

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And by selecting that site, we decry the homogenizing non-place of the stadium.

According to Christopher Gaffney, “the political logic behind such large stadiums is that they diminished an individual’s ability to make their voice heard in public. The cavernous space of the stadium required participation en masse, reducing individual agency in the public sphere in a seemingly neutral political environment while at the same time diminishing the potential for oppositional politics.”83 The Olympic Live Site intervention would hyper-politicize the stadium space, and reclaim it for both Brooklynites and Brazilians.

This prototype of Extrastagecraft is inspired by the artist Krzysztof Wodiczko. His performative conceptual art is specially designed to confer political agency to oppressed or disenfranchised populations. In Contours of a Spatialized Politics, Neil Smith claims that Wodiczko’s work presents “political possibilities for resistance inherent in the production of specific scales, the abrogation of boundaries, the ‘jumping of scales.’”84 This is evident in pieces like his “Homeless Vehicle,” a mobile artifact in which homeless folk can sleep or wash up, or “Mouthpiece,” in which immigrants publically profess their stories through a television over their mouths. Wodiczko’s work provides “a ‘public agonistic site’ where the oppressed can participate in cultural politics in active rather than passive ways.”85 I imagine the Olympic Live Site to function similarly. Wodiczko’s work is a cogent example of Extrastagecraft. These works of art carry extra implosivity due to their incongruence with the normative codes of public space even as they perform other normatively mediated codes of modern life.

I am aware of the possibility that in the attempt to harness spectacle to combat spectacle, we may in fact re-inscribe the normative values that we are attempting to counter-punch. To this I quote Baz Kershaw again, in his report of Coco Fusco and Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s famous performance art piece “The Guatinaui World Tour,” “By the simple stratagem of refusing to signal clearly the ontological status of its codes, this spectacle risked reinforcing the very forces it aimed to subvert.”86 During that performance, the artists sat in a cage dressed as ambiguously punk-rock aborigines. In the case of Extrastagecraft happenings such as the Olympic Live Site, I am willing to take this risk in order to increase the scandal of publicly muddling the legibility of ontological (and spatial and legal) codes. In other words, by purposely not explaining the art project, you risk giving people the wrong idea but you also avoid telling people what to think. If two spectators think differently, the art becomes the site of contestation and precipitates discourse. The work of interpreting incongruous spatial signifiers for one’s self is the liberating instrument of Extrastagecraft.

Only after spectators who later see media about the Olympic Live Site happening would come to understand the subliminal critique of the piece. By spatializing the corporate linkages that I have shown in the previous chapter, a new narrative emerges about Barclay’s Center and Rio’s Olympic Village. The Olympic Live Site at Barclay’s is revealed as a counter-spectacular media trap, drawing the IOC, AECOM, AEG, the UPPs, the NYPD, Ratner, Doctoroff, Bloomberg, Lula, Rouseff, and the rest onto the stage.

The essence of what I am proposing in Extrastagecraft is a hybrid of activism and art, in which politics are enacted artistically and art becomes political action. Rancière has written Gaffney, Mega-Events and Socio-Spatial Dynamics, 2010 Neil Smith, Contours of a Spatialized Politics, Homeless Vehicles and the Production of Geographical Scale, Duke University Press, (Social Text Vol 33, 1992,) 54 – 81.

85 Garoian and Gaudelius, The Spectacle of Visual Culture, 2004.

86 Baz Kershaw, Curiosity Or Contempt, 2003.

83 84

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presciently about the value of such a practice: “The dream of a suitable political work of art is in fact the dream of disrupting the relationship between the visible, the sayable, and the thinkable without having to use the terms of a message as a vehicle. It is the dream of an art that would transmit meanings in the form of a rupture with the very logic of meaningful situations. As a matter of fact, political art cannot work in the simple form of a meaningful spectacle that would lead to an awareness’ of the state of the world. Suitable political art would ensure, at one and the same time, the production of a double effect: the readability of a political signification and a sensible or perceptual shock caused, conversely, by the uncanny, by that which resists signification.”87 So any protest that effectively co-opts Olympic visuality to disrupt the Olympic narrative constitutes a “suitable” work of political art and an artful approach to politics.

Of course, artfully designed counter-spectacular activism requires more than just the traditional “arts”. It requires artful organizational structuring, artful media coverage, artful fundraising, artful litigation, and more. The next chapter of this paper will examine a crosssection of resistance groups in Rio and NYC and chart the myriad strategies and tactics that they employ. The ensuing analysis will deduce which techniques most consistently help resistance movements to achieve their goals.

87

Rancière, Politics and Aesthetics, 2000/2004.

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Chapter 4 A Taxonomy of Resistance Strategies and Tactics “A beautiful place may never bring about explosions of life; while a haphazard hall may be a tremendous meeting place: this is the mystery of the theater, but in the understanding of this mystery lies the only possibility of ordering it into a science.�

- Bertolt Brecht, The Development of an Aesthetic The central research question of this paper is: what strategies and tactics are most effective to attain measurable outcomes in resistance to mega-event driven urban development? In Chapters 1 and 2, we identified trends of Olympic development and evidenced those trends in the contexts of Rio de Janeiro and New York City. Then Chapter 3 theorized how the struggle for the Olympic movement manifests on an aesthetic battlefield. Now we proceed upon the premise that resistance to the urban restructurings of the Olympic games is both necessary and desirable. Our civilization cannot allow this destructive practice to continue, especially since we possess the social and technical capacity to design a better way. But what is to be done? How can the trend be reversed, the direction shifted? Too often, the daunting prospect of resisting such large-scale injustice can breed complacency. It may seem that the global scope of the corporate and spatio-technical processes at play are insurmountable by any single well-meaning individual or group. Indeed, it is a challenge. But across the world and spanning history, individuals and communities have coalesced in vocal opposition to the Olympic games.

The Shifting Sands of Anti-Olympic Resistance There is a rich tradition of popular protest in response to the Olympic games. This protest may be reactive, (in response to specific instances of injustice), or preemptive, (in anticipation of injustices down the road). Usually this protest is initiated by concerned residents or organizations in the host city. Often the Olympics act as a rallying cry to unify numerous local initiatives (housing justice groups, environmental justice groups, worker’s unions, etc.) against a single cause. As often, the ills of Olympic development can be framed as symptoms of larger problems (state corruption, corporate greed, etc.) and thus anti-Olympic fervor is absorbed by popular uprisings with simpler messaging or broader appeal. Some groups may form specifically to oppose the Olympics while others, already active around a particular issue, will refocus their messaging through an anti-Olympic lens.

These distinct but complimentary styles of activist messaging deserve their own neologisms. Intersectional messaging is when groups with separate campaigns align their efforts in a site or situation that is relevant to each of their topics of concern (such as a housing justice group and an indigenous rights group protesting the eviction of an indigenous village).

Alternatively, agglomerative messaging is when groups propound their individual messages under the heading of a broadly appealing uber-message that encompasses all others (such as the

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2014 People’s Climate March in NYC, in which activist groups of every stripe came together to decry global warming).

Anti-Olympic resistance groups exist episodically at the city scale, but the movement is struggling to manifest globally. Beijing 2008, Vancouver 2010, and London 2012 each featured a nominally “trans-national” resistance group that was ultimately confined to its geography and time-in-the-sun. Jules Boykoff, in his essay “The Anti-Olympics”, gives a good survey of the patchwork of Vancouver groups, each with its own cause, that banded together to protest the Olympics in that city. He writes “it might be more accurate to call anti-Olympic resistance an ‘event coalition’ since the activism is barely sustained through time and from site to site. Aware of this distinction, activists concertedly called their actions a ‘convergence of movements’ around ‘the Olympic moment’ rather than a ‘social movement’ – a term that tends to flatten out heterogeneity and overstate continuity.”88 So the landscape of anti-Olympic resistance is nuanced. In order to comprehend an array of strategies and tactics in use today by these activist groups, I researched and surveyed 18 groups currently operating in Rio de Janeiro and New York City. Interestingly, there were not enough specifically anti-Olympic groups to justify limiting my research to only that set. In the following analysis, I selected activist organizations in NYC or Rio whose protestatory efforts are geo-spatially related to Olympic development sites.89 Firstly, I will provide a portrait of each organization I studied. Second I will describe the methodology I used to execute this research and analysis, and explain each category of my investigation. Third I will analyze the strategies and tactics90 that clinch (or fail to clinch) political leverage towards attaining a group’s objectives. Fourth, this chapter will wrap up with some ruminations on my findings and their implications for future counter-Olympic activity.

Portraits of Selected Case Study Organizations

Jules Boykoff, "The Anti-Olympics", New Left Review 67, January-February, 2011.

I argue that, by dint of their aforementioned collusion with the Olympic planning regime and their pertinent obsession with marketing a “global image of the city,” the corporate targets of New York City resistance movements are relevant parallels to FIFA and the IOC. Because the spectacles of New York’s mega-development have led to the “slow violence” of gentrification, it is not the spectacle that is being resisted per se, but the specter of the spectacle.

90 See “gloss”ary.

88

89

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World Cup and Olympics Popular Committee of Rio de Janeiro – This group is the Rio de Janeiro branch of a regional initiative formed across the 12 Brazilian cities that hosted the 2014 World Cup. The Portuguese shorthand is Comitê Popular. Comprised of NGO’s, community leaders, and academics, this coalition exists to resist the exclusionary policies of mega-event-driven urban development and foster a more inclusive conversation about the real Olympic “legacy” for Rio de Janeiro.91 They organize a huge variety of events and protests: workshops, public debates, parades, alternative sports leagues, rallies, petitions, and more. Their 192-page publication “Mega-Events and Human Rights Violations in Rio de Janeiro Dossier” is a comprehensive review of all the injustice that mega-event development has caused in Rio.

Levante Popular da Juventude – Representing the voice of the Brazil’s youth, this national coalition of passionate student activists seek the broad goal of the “transformation of society,” refusing to “lower their heads to injustice and inequality.”92 They operate across three “fronts”: The student front, the territorial front, and the peasant front. This broad base of engagement enables Levante to mobilize a large and enthusiastic body of young people to pour into the streets and cause a ruckus practically every weekend.

Catalytic Communities – Catalytic Communities is a non-profit organization with a small staff that operates in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Its mission is to create models to better integrate 91 92

The World Cup and Olympics Popular Committee Website, (accessed 5/1/2016), http://rio.portalpopulardacopa.org.br/ Levante Popular da Juventude Website, (accessed 5/1/2016), http://www.levante.org.br/

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the favelas into the urban fabric of Rio, providing a higher quality of life for the residents. This is achieved through training and workshops as well as participatory planning and advocacy.93 Catalytic Communities also produces the critical citizen journalism platform Rio On Watch.

Rio de Paz – Performative site-specific installation art is this organization’s strategy to raise awareness about urgent social issues in Rio. These installations range from displaying evocative signage or banners to laying out elaborate theatrical symbology, (such as a matrix of footballs on the lawn of the Federal Congress or a faux funeral on Copacabana beach). These projects are always mounted in highly visible public sites. They focus on the epidemic of violence in Brazil, especially the state-sanctioned murder of young dark-skinned men.

Midia NINJA – NINJA stands for “Ninja Independent Narratives Journalism and Action.” This group’s mission statement is all about embodying a peer to peer network of citizen-sourced journalism to decentralize news production and encourage free press. Though based out of Brazil, they operate globally and anonymously, producing a startling array of online news in text, photography, and video, in multiple languages, which is often generated in real-time as events are unfolding.

93

Catalytic Communities Website, (accessed 5/1/2016), http://catcomm.org/mission/.

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Vem Pra Rua – A recent political corruption scandal in Brazil has given rise to this right-wing group that organizes massive street protests. Demonstrations in mid-March 2016 saw a crowd of upwards of 3 million people total in cities across Brazil, advocating for the impeachment of the current president Dilma Rousseff. Vem Pra Rua borrowed the name, which means “come to the street,” from popular protests against rising transportation costs in 2013, though those protests were led by much more grassroots groups. This is an example of Vem Pra Rua’s (evidently effective) practice of co-opting left-leaning messaging in service of its right-wing agenda. Vem Pra Rua, notably, is funded by Globo, the Brazilian national media corporation.

Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra (MST) – Brazil’s Landless Worker’s Movement is the largest and most dynamically organized social movement in Latin America. Having existed for over 30 years and with a membership of about 1.5 million, this group reaches across every state in Brazil. Their key constituents are rural farmers and indigenous communities who are locked in territorial struggles against deforestation, mineral extraction, and agribusiness. They also have an international support network through the affiliated Friends of MST. The organizing strategies of this group are expertly nuanced and deserve deeper study than can be accorded in this report.

MST’s goal is agrarian land reform to secure a sustainable way of life for Brazil’s rural poor,

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which they work towards through a measured process of political education, protest, and organized land occupations.

Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens (MAB) – Organizationally similar to MST and with intersectional struggles, The Movement of People Affected by Dams is a gigantic group of rural activists who have organized across Brazil to protest the construction of dams in the Amazon basin. Their goals are the stoppages of dam construction or, barring that, the creation of legislation to ensure adequate compensations for all Brazilians affected by the construction of the dams.

Golfe Para Quem? – This is one of the few specifically anti-Olympic groups that has cropped up in Rio de Janeiro (as of this writing). Golfe Para Quem?’s goal is, (or was), to prevent the construction of the Olympic golf course. The course is now completed. Despite other golf courses in Rio that would have met the IOC requirements, the new course was built on the environmentally protected Marapendi nature reserve, a biodiverse vestige of the Mata Atlantica

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rainforest. This is in complete violation of previous environmental protection laws.94 In 2014 Golfe Para Quem? (along with Ocupa Golfe and other individuals) staged numerous protests of the golf course project, including an occupy-style encampment on the course which resulted in many arrests. They have also pursed legal avenues, suing for work stoppages until environmental impact reviews were completed. Though the work stoppages were rejected, the reviews were done. But the reviews were commissioned by the Rio city government and their conclusions, (that the golf course actually increased the area’s biodiversity95), are dubious at best.

West Side Neighborhood Alliance – Housing Conservation Coordinators is a non-profit organization in Hell’s Kitchen that advocates for affordable housing by providing free legal services to eligible low-income residents. Leading up to the 2005 announcement of the Olympic bid for the 2012 games, a bunch of local businesses, residents, and community groups from Manhattan’s west side neighborhoods coalesced in opposition to the proposed stadium at Hudson Yards. When New York lost the bid, protestors claimed victory and HCC founded West Side Neighborhood Alliance (WSNA) to bind the groups together as an official membership organization. (In my analysis, I have counted West Side Neighborhood Alliance’s activities independently, without HCC’s, in order to investigate their codependence.) WSNA uses “education, lobbying, and public demonstrations” to “advocate for a diverse, affordable, livable neighborhood.”96 Their stated goal is for community voices to “play an integral role” in public policy decisions.

Elena Hodges, Rio’s Olympic Golf Course Will Wipe Out A Protected Ecological Gem, (accessed 5/1/2016), https://nextcity.org/daily/entry/rios-olympic-golf-course-will-wipe-out-a-protected-ecological-gem.

95 Rio de Janeiro Department of Justice, (accessed 5/1/2016), http://www.rio2016.com/en/news/olympic-golf-courseincreased-local-biodiversity-says-rio-department-of-justices-expert-report.

96 West Side Neighborhood Alliance Website, (accessed 5/1/2016), https://westsideneighborhoodalliance.wordpress.com/about/.

94

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Not An Alternative – Operating at the intersection of art, activism, and pedagogy, this group’s work exemplifies many precepts of Extrastagecraft. However, they are not focused on a specific issue of socio-spatial justice. Rather, they are like an art collective for hire, lending their design talents to various social movements. They have created evocative signage, hilarious slogans, perplexing urban interventions, and powerful aesthetic campaigns. Relevant work to NYC Olympic-induced development projects was their theatrical “Community Plan” rally and their “Defend Brooklyn Against Bloomberg” meme.97 Their stated goal is to “affect popular understandings of events, symbols, institutions, and history.”

The Illuminator – The Illuminator got his/her/their (intentionally anonymous) reputation from Occupy Wall Street, when they managed to shine a giant video-projection stating “We are the 99%” on the side of the Verizon building in downtown Manhattan. The iconic message was visible to 30,000 protestors marching across the Brooklyn Bridge and to anyone else who beheld the skyline that night. Since then, The Illuminator has made a practice of video-projecting agitprop messaging and imagery on architectures around the world. The Barclay’s Center has been a 97

Not An Alternative website, (accessed 5/1/2016), http://notanalternative.org/projects/

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frequent recipient of this treatment, with animations of Bloomberg’s face devouring floating dollar signs or allegations of “Eminent Domain Abuse.” The stated goals of The Illuminator are “to smash the myths of the information industry and shine a light on the urgent issues of our time.”98

Justice League NYC – Active nationwide under the Gathering for Justice campaign founded/funded by Harry Belafonte in 2005, this group is one of the primary associational entities of the Black Lives Matter movement in New York City. Specifically, their work focuses on juvenile justice and demands the indictment of NYPD officers who have committed murder of young African-American citizens. They have made use of Barclay’s Center to elevate and publicize their fight for racial justice. On a night that the British Royal Family and Jay-Z and Beyoncé (New York’s “royal family”) were all attending a Brooklyn Nets game, Justice League NYC staged a die-in in front of the Barclay’s Center99 to visibilize their cause. Inside the stadium, NBA players wore shirts that read “I Can’t Breathe”100 in solidarity with the protestors.

This group also employs the innovative videographic tactics described in Chapter 3. They are practitioners of Extrastagecraft in its purest form, crafting fluid stages in public space and the virtual realm for the representation of alternative narratives generated from an oppressed counter-public.

The Illuminator Website, (accessed 5/1/2016), http://theilluminator.org/.

Lily Workneh, Huffington Post, “Protestors Stage Massive Die-In”, (accessed 5/1/2016), http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/12/09/protesters-brooklyn-die-in_n_6292210.html.

100 Eric Garner’s last words.

98 99

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Families United for Racial and Economic Equality (FUREE) – FUREE is based out of the New York City Housing Authority residencies that are nearest to the Atlantic Yards development. Their leadership is largely low-income women of color. Their stated goals are to “build power to change the system” through political education, community organizing, and direct action.101 The group was most active during the Atlantic Yards development. Beyond avid vocal public protests, the group used some performative street theatrics such as parading with bobblehead puppets of Bloomberg, Prokhorov, and Ratner. They won specific concessions regarding a shuttle bus that the developers paid for after the demolition of a supermarket near the NYCHA houses.

#SAVEARTSPACE – This Brooklyn-based artistic initiative works with advertisers to co-opt billboard space around the country for the transmission of visual art. The group seeks to, literally, save art space from the pervasive advertising spaces of consumer culture. The stated

101

FUREE Website, (accessed 5/1/2016), http://furee.org/mission

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goal is to provide public platforms for visual artists, and to inspire future generations of artists.102 In 2016 a series of art was displayed on bus depots on Flatbush Avenue, within eyeshot of Barclay’s Center. Though the group’s political positionality is illegible through the art, the application of counter-spectacle to combat spectacular spaces is overt.

Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn – The last remaining tenant in the footprint of Barclay’s Center was Daniel Goldstein. He was an outspoken detractor of the project for the duration of the controversial land acquisition process. Goldstein started the group Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn, which became the cornerstone of opposition to the Atlantic Yards project and whose website hosts a trove of documentation and press about the debacle. Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn’s goals were to stop the construction of Barclay’s Center, and to advocate for inclusive and legal planning processes. This was achieved by protests, vigilant web and print campaigns, community hearings, lawsuits, documentary filmmaking, and most of all Goldstein’s refusal to move. But in Spring of 2010, Goldstein’s home was finally taken by eminent domain. Unlike most of his neighbors who had vacated years before, Goldstein received 3 million dollars in compensation for the displacement.103

102 103

Save Art Space website, (accessed 5/1/2016), http://www.saveartspace.org/mission/ Develop Don’t Destroy Brooklyn website, (accessed 5/1/2016), http://dddb.net

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Brooklyn Speaks – Brooklyn Speaks was the coalition that formed to bring lawsuits against the state of New York in the fight against Atlantic Yards development. The group effectively navigated the legal and political framework of the city to achieve some victories. They were able to delay construction by contesting the use of eminent domain, though its use was ultimately upheld in court. Meanwhile, in another case, they were able to prove that Forest City Ratner had lied to the city and its people multiple times. Winning this case, a commission was formed to monitor the project which contained local elected officials and community members. As a nonprofit wronged by the government, Brooklyn Speaks was able to sue to get their legal fees covered by the state, and with that cash they ran an alternative Environmental Impact Study.

They used their findings to support a “disparate impact claim,” demonstrating that the Atlantic Yards development would disparately affect communities of color. Thus, in June 2014, after years of struggle, the group won a concession from Forest City Ratner to construct an additional 2,250 units of affordable housing on the site ten years sooner than projected.104 However, as of this writing, those units have yet to be built.

5th Avenue Committee – A key player in the Brooklyn Speaks coalition was the 5th Avenue Committee. On the night that the Barclay’s Center opened, they joined a candlelight vigil to commemorate “promises unmet.”105 But their influence on the Brooklyn housing justice struggle goes back to the 1970’s when they were renovating buildings and campaigning against unfair housing policy. The seasoned organization’s inroads in Brooklyn politics were instrumental in getting Brooklyn Speaks to a negotiating table. Much of the work of 5th Avenue Committee extends well beyond “resistance,” and into the realm of proactive creation of the society they envision. Their mission statement speaks of advancing “economic and social justice,” which they have done through workforce development, adult education, and affordable housing construction. My analysis stops short of listing construction as a resistance strategy, but this group’s longevity and reputation in Brooklyn gave a clout to the anti-Barclay’s fight that must not be underestimated.

Charles V. Bagli, New York Times, “Plan Expedited For Affordable Units,” (accessed 5/1/2016), http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/27/nyregion/plan-expedited-for-affordable-units-at-atlantic-yards-near-downtownbrooklyn.html.

105 Kit Dillon, The Observer, “A Party, A Vigil, A Protest, A Concert,” (accessed 5/1/2016), http://observer.com/2012/09/with-the-barclays-arena-now-built-opposition-focuses-on-unfulfilled-promises/.

104

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Evaluative Methodology and Metrics My methodology for assessing the effectiveness of each resistance group involved tabulating their goals, some basic characteristics about them, the techniques they employ, and the outcomes they attain. To determine all this I read news and historical articles, interviewed associates of the groups, watched videos of their activities, and in some cases participated bodily in their protests.

Before evaluating each group’s effectiveness, I would need to know what they were attempting to achieve. To categorize goals I did a close reading of the mission statements of each group, handily found on their websites. I sorted the vocabulary of stated goals from these mission statements into ten categories of recurrent types of goals across the 18 case study organizations.

It is interesting to note that no groups that I studied in NYC are seeking new legislation, environmental outcomes, or human rights protections, likely because New York does not share Rio’s legal informalities, rainforest ecology, and extremes of human rights violations. The most stated goal in New York City is affordability, especially for housing. Across both cities, the most common goal concerns attaining racial equality and embracing diversity.

After charting goals, I generated categories that could encompass and sort the rest of my findings. The categories are: Geographic Scale, Press Coverage, Spontaneous Tactics, LongGame Strategies, Extrastatecraft, Outcomes, Presence of Violence, and Web Presence. I scored each organization in each category. A group's score in a category represents how many out of my 10 selected metrics were met by that group in that category. Geographic scale and press coverage are exceptions: in each of those I have selected only 5 metrics. In order to normalize the categories with 5 metrics to the categories with 10, I have expressed “score” as a percentage of total metrics met in a category. Geographic scale and press coverage are also curious in that it is not clear whether they constitute strategies to achieve outcomes or if they are in fact outcomes of other strategies. Thus I have called these categories “characteristics.”

The graphs that you will see in the following section indicate how common certain characteristics, techniques, or outcomes are amongst all of the studied groups.

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13 of the groups I studied were non-profits, 8 were coalitions, and 3 operate anonymously. I did not generate scores in this category, but it is useful perspective.

To measure the geographic scale of an activist group, I considered its physical presence across the hyper-local, citywide, regional, nationwide, and trans-national scales. This disregards virtual or reputational presence and considers only physical presence, such as offices set up, distribution of designed materials, or people actually being present. As you can see, hyper-local initiatives are the most common and trans-national ones are rarest. “Hyper-local” implies groups who focus their efforts on a specific spatial struggle in a single neighborhood, perhaps even as focused as a single building. Hyper-local groups might also manifest at the citywide scale, but not all citywide groups operate hyper-locally. “Trans-national” groups, on the other hand, have agents or offices all over the world. Obviously, a group that is trans-national also registers at the regional and city scales. (A deeper analysis of “trans-national” activism and how it functions is presented in Chapter 5.)

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My rubric to count press coverage is based on five general categories of “press” which depend furtively on a global-local divide: Web News Coverage, Global Print News Coverage, Local Print News Coverage, Local Network TV Coverage, and Global Network TV Coverage.

Generally, press coverage of activist efforts is quite common. More than half of the groups received global print coverage at some point in their existence (such as a mention in an article in the New York Times), and almost every group has been written about on the web. In this case, “Web News” refers to platforms such as Huffington Post, Vice, or Politico which are neither print publications nor television networks, but still widely read. Importantly, my definition of “Web News” does not include posts on social media accounts or unincorporated blogs. Those phenomena are accounted for in the “Web Presence” category, but this category’s intent is to measure the relationship of broadly disseminated corporate or state media coverage to activist efforts. This category also does not include radio coverage.

This category is the most free-wheeling by virtue of the incalculable variation of spontaneous tactics available and the imprecision of quantifying the extent of their use.

Spontaneous tactics claim public space for but a brief window of time, usually not lasting for longer than one day. Though some planning usually goes into these actions, they do not require an extended commitment of time and effort from their doers. I have counted the use of signage, street demonstrations, vigils, music/song/chant, theater/puppetry, live tweeting,106 peaceful civil 106

The term “live tweeting” is an umbrella term, here, for the use of any web technology live during a protest.

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disobedience, static visual art, violent civil disobedience, and temporary squatting.107 These criteria are aggregates of more precise behaviors including but not limited to: marching, dancing, breaking windows, sit-ins, strikes, clowning, flyering, graffiti, installation art, lighting one’s self on fire, etcetera.

Long-game strategies do require an extended commitment of time and effort from their doers. Usually that effort includes founding an organization, fundraising for it, and executing long-term projects in its name. Such projects may include: the delivery of petitions to public officials, the provision of trainings and workshops, the creation of video journalism/documentary film, the creation of textual journalism or academic/technical literature, the filing of lawsuits, the execution of environmental impact reviews, the generation of alternative proposals. Long-game strategies can’t happen in a day. They are the tedious and gradual work of resistance movements, unfolding over months and years, requiring commitment and leadership.

In this study, I have differentiated between temporary and permanent squatting. The essential difference is how long the squat lasts. Anything which lasted for only a day or a week and resembled more of an artistic spatial appropriation or a performative form of trespassing would be called temporary squatting. Once you get into the business of full-on tentcities, occupying space for months and years, renovating buildings, claiming adverse possession, etc., these actions are what I have termed permanent squatting.

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This category is comprised of 10 Extrastatecraft headings that Keller Easterling coined and I summarized in Chapter 3. I left one off, in order for Extrastatecraft to have the same weight as the other 10-metric categories. The one I left off is “Knowing How.” I refrained from taking it upon myself to declare if a group “knows how” to do what it does, and it would stand to reason that they do if I have found out about them. I figured that if every group would have fulfilled the “Knowing How” metric anyway, my analysis loses nothing from excluding it.

In my analysis I also marked if a group’s activities had ever included occurrences of violence, and if that group had an active web presence. These assessments are shown in the above portraits of each group and discussed in the analysis below.

Violence – The mark of “violence” denotes the presence of physical violence during the street events of an activist group. This violence may be initiated by the activists, in which case it has also been counted as a spontaneous tactic under in the metric of “violent civil disobedience.”

But this category also measures state-sanctioned violence initiated by forces such as municipal police or the national guard. Regardless of who initiates the violence, if any property has been smashed108 or any bodies have been beaten, gassed, shot, or otherwise aggressed during the process of a street action, the mark of “violence” has been applied. Within this category I have also noted the presence of arrests, which could occur without violence but almost always correlates with the presence of violence.

Web Presence – My evaluation of effective web presence is a somewhat subjective aggregate of various signals of an engaged and attentive internet audience. First and foremost, I investigated the existence of a functioning website for each organization and the quality of that website’s design. I also judged the organization’s “findability” by checking for a Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat, and YouTube accounts for each group. If the group uses Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube, I required YouTube search results, Facebook group likes, or Twitter followers in excess of 100,000 in any case. I also searched the organization’s name on various search engines to detect degree of press coverage. (Web Presence is distinct from press coverage in that it can be self-produced or produced by the general public and does not rely on the press.

But obviously coverage by global media outlets certainly inflates general web presence.)

The strategies and tactics that I have charted herein are some common activist “repertoires of contention.”109 There are of course infinite possible “repertoires of contention,” so in some cases I have aggregated or excluded certain details. For example, I have listed the “use of signage” as a spontaneous tactic that nearly every group uses, but I do not differentiate between painted and printed signage because my data is not sufficiently granular to detect a causation between type of signage and outcome. Thus, in the next analysis, I have not tracked which specific strategies and tactics produce which outcomes, but just which categories of activities have a correlation to activist outcomes.

Outcomes

I acknowledge the materialist faux-pas of including the destruction of private property as a mode of violence in the same category as human-on-human violence. I do so knowingly, for simplicity’s sake, thereby aligning this category more with mediatized perceptions of the performance of violence.

109 Nick Crossley, Repertoires of Contention and Tactical Diversity in the UK Psychiatric Survivors Movement, (University of Manchester, Social Movement Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1,) 2002.

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Measuring outcomes is crucial to this investigation. In this category, news sources and first-person interviews have told me of the successes of activist initiatives. Many groups conceded that though they may not attain their goals completely, they have incremental successes. For example, Catalytic Communities hopes to prevent evictions and displacements in Rio’s favelas. Though they have not succeeded in their ideal goal of stopping all evictions in the city, they have prevented a few, or negotiated fair compensation for a few evictees. And surely they have raised awareness of the need to prevent future evictions. Considering this, groups with low outcome scores in this study should not be discouraged. Some outcomes are steps on the road to attaining others.

When examining the above graph, bear in mind that this is out of 18 total groups. Thus, only half the groups achieved even the most common outcomes of access to elected officials, or some sort of fame/notoriety. The rarest outcomes are perhaps the most desirable: payouts received, officials fired, and lawsuits won. No group was able to reach all of the outcomes I measured for, nor achieve all of its stated goals.

Once I generated this bar chart, I glimpsed some similarities between the most “successful” groups which I had to visualize. I asked: how do certain characteristics and

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techniques correlate to substantial outcomes? To determine this, I generated a series of graphs.

The x-axis contains the 18 case study groups, ordered from least to most of the given characteristic or technique used. The y-axis contains their outcome scores.

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What do these graphs demonstrate? Overall, the graphs show that the more of all of these activities and characteristics a resistance group enacts, the better. This is seen in the general trend of higher outcomes on the right-hand side of each graph. But that is a very loose relationship. The zig-zagginess of the outcome line indicates that there are many exceptions to the rule. As indicated by the areas where the outcome line overtakes the other line in the middle of most graphs, outcomes can often be attained despite a lack of a particular activity or characteristic. Conversely, outcomes will sometimes not be achieved even if a group gets 100% in a given category. The press coverage graph is the exception to this rule because press coverage spikes quickly, simply indicating that it is common for resistance groups to receive a lot of press coverage. Notably, press coverage is also the line that moves most parallel to outcomes, indicating a positive correlation between press coverage and eventual outcomes. This supports the claim, crucial to the theory in Chapter 3 and the proposal in Chapter 5, that mediatization is key to successful resistance movements. And yet, the graphs show that no matter what resistance groups do, no more than 60% of the total outcomes for which I was measuring are ever achieved.

I generated one final graph that shows the most direct correlation of all:

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There is something interesting here. This graph shows that it is the youngest and the oldest groups out of my case studies who have had the best outcomes. This suggests that resistance groups can either hit the scene fresh and rack up outcomes suddenly, or else they are in for long years of work before getting hard fought results. But the spikes at the start of the graph are Vem Pra Rua and Justice League NYC. Each of these groups, it must be recalled, are backed by other powerful players (Globo and Harry Belafonte) who have been around for a long time and already hold political sway. Indeed these groups could be said to be the modern manifestations of the entire history of Brazil’s conservative political apparatus or America’s civil rights movement. On the other end of the spectrum, MST and MAB have high scores in nearly every category since they have simply had the longest time to execute different strategies and rack up different outcomes. Even the outcome spike in the middle of the last graph, Brooklyn Speaks, was backed by a much older organization, 5th Avenue Committee. Since the urban situations I have researched in this thesis are recent ones, most of the resistance groups are recent as well. And yet, the most outcomes are consistently delivered by the groups that have been around since much earlier days. This leads me to conclude that of all the phenomena I have catalogued in this research, the most reliable way to achieve measurable outcomes is to be in it for the long haul. The most effective organizations demonstrate a sustained and persistent commitment to social movements over years and years.

Findings, Conclusions, and Further Required Research The hope is that by comparing the similarities and differences between activist activities in these two distinct cities, we can uncover clues for successful anti-Olympic campaigning that can be transferred to future resistance in future Olympic host cities. Can we mix and match the most effective tactics and strategies to innovate new hybrid activist repertoires? Now I will

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present some ruminations on the findings I have visualized above. I will then apply those findings as the criteria for the design proposal in the final chapter of this thesis.

Effect of the presence of violence on media coverage: Although my findings here do indicate that the presence of violence at protests increases media coverage, I have not analyzed the extent to which that coverage conveys the message of the protestors, which would be a presumably desirable effect of media coverage. Such an analysis was executed by Jules Boykoff in his essay Framing Dissent: Mass-Media Coverage of the Global Justice Momement. Boykoff found, interestingly, that “a number of media accounts featuring protestors who were concerned that the vandalism and corporate window-breaking would drown out their message, proceeded to completely ignore their message, offering no explanation of why the protesters were demonstrating.”110 This goes to show that while the presence of violence at a protest increases the breadth of media coverage, it does not reliably increase the depth of coverage.

“Raising visibility” or “increasing awareness” as a goal: Often, social movements name their goals as “awareness raising”, “shining a spotlight”, “illuminating social issues”, etc. This is a questionable goal, but an indispensable feature, of social movements. Brooklyn Speaks leader Gib Veconi said that street-level demonstrations were a necessary ingredient to set the stage for his group’s eventual court battle. Visible community uprisings garner support for a burgeoning legal campaign. (They bring the hidden transcript to the surface so that it can make its way into the court transcript.) This is corroborated by Nick Crossley, who draws from Bourdieu’s theory of varying fields that affect the selected tactics of social movement groups. He writes: “Outcomes are shaped by the fields in which they occur. The media cannot change the law, for example; that can be achieved only within the legal or parliamentary field. The most that can be achieved in the media field, in relation to legal changes, is good publicity and thus a favourable climate for change. It is the task of movement participants to ‘convert’ the goods they create in one field into the currency of another field.”111 I posit that raising visibility is inherent to the construction of a resistance campaign. Thus, though it may be the paramount contributor to the achievement of goals, it does not qualify as a goal in and of itself. (Nor is a raised visibility necessarily equivalent to an increased awareness on the part of a viewer.) As such, I have not included purely aesthetic goals in my “Outcomes” category.

Destigmatization as a goal: Theresa Williamson, founder of Catalytic Communities, warns us not to devalue a heightened visibility as a vital outcome of resistance initiatives. She claims that a stigma is a palpable obstacle to favela upgradation or acceptance in Rio. While policy changes may be required to see real improvements in favelas regarding permanent affordability, city services, gun violence, etc. how can favela advocates expect to get policy changes when favelas are still viewed as dirty or unvaluable areas of the city? In deference to this perspective, I have included “destigmatization” as an outcome of resistance movements. In theory, it is possible to destigmatize without actually raising visibility and to raise visibility with actually destigmatizing. This distinction, albeit difficult to measure, is key.

Lack of specifically anti-Olympic groups: When I undertook this research, I was surprised to find a general lack of specifically anti-Olympic organizations in Rio or New York. Amongst my 18 case studies, only 2 groups ran specifically anti-Olympic campaigns (The Comitê Popular and Golfe Para Quem?). Instead, most groups incorporate anti-Olympic messaging into the Jules Boykoff, Framing Dissent: Mass Media Coverage of the Global Justice Movement, (New Political Science, Vol. 28, No. 2,) 2006.

111 Crossley, Repertoires of Contention, 2002.

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context of their specific arena of struggle. This makes sense when the Olympics are neither the root cause of social problems nor their most pressing effect. In Rio de Janeiro, anti-Olympic sentiment has been dwarfed by bigger anger. In 2016, Brazil’s most high-ranking politicians have been implicated in a scandal involving bribes from the (aforementioned) construction companies (Odebrecht, OAS, Andrade Guttierez, Carioca Engenharia, etc.) to national oil corporation Petrobras. Petrobras then gave kickbacks and campaign contributions to politicians in exchange for granting Olympic contracts to the construction firms.112 Massive polarizing protests erupted across the country demanding the impeachment of president Rousseff (an outcome desired by right-wing Vem Pra Rua) or the defense of the democratic process (the position of left-wing groups like MST, MAB, Levante, and the Comitê Popular). In this sociopolitical moment, the antics of the Olympic Oligarchy in Rio are framed as a symptom of the general corruption and greed that has gripped Brazil at large. It is also worth mentioning Zika, a mosquito-borne virus that swept Brazil in early 2016 and is linked to a recent spike in birth defects. Compared to that, irresponsible Olympic planning suddenly doesn’t seem so urgent.

Meanwhile, in New York, any perceptible narrative of Olympic-bid-driven development is subordinate to a larger real-estate narrative of rampant rezonings, foreign investment, rising rents, and displacement of long-time residents from the neighborhoods they call home. As such, though no city-wide anti-Olympic movement ever formed, the array of housing justice groups that have sprung up since the 2008 housing market bubble burst is impressive. The groups I have studied are ones that had something specific to do with the Hudson Yards or Atlantic Yards/Barclay’s Center geographies. These groups must be contextualized in the broader assortment of housing justice groups in New York which includes: anti-eviction groups, antigentrification groups, anti-tenant-harassment groups, legal-representation groups, homeless advocacy groups, affordable housing developers, squatters, groups organizing around senior housing, groups organizing around public housing, groups organizing around rent controlled housing, or groups focused on specific demographics, specific neighborhoods, specific rezoning battles, or specific development projects. All of these groups, under the heading of “housing justice groups” must be framed within the splay of racial justice groups, environmental justice groups, transportation equity groups, LGBTQ justice groups, labor justice groups, and more. If you can think of anything wrong in the world, I guarantee you there’s a group somewhere in New York City protesting it.

Competition in the US non-profit sector: Unfortunately, despite the multitude of housing justice groups working in NYC, there is insufficient cohesion between them to impact the processes of the real-estate market. The United States was founded on ideals of rugged individualism and American exceptionalism which makes communal organizing hard. Even when rallying against a common cause, there is a competitive aspect to movement building that afflicts even the most altruistic non-profits on the NYC scene. The competition comes both from a desire to be seen as the group that leads the struggle and from the need to show measurable results if you intend to secure more funding in the next grant cycle.

The fantasy of the beaches and Rio de Paz’s flaw: It is a bit misleading when romanticizers and advertisers refer to the beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema (and their lesser known companions in luxury, Leblon and Arapador). These "beaches" in reality are one long beach that runs the length of Rio's south-west zone. The historicity of the beach outweighs, in my view, it's Marianna Olinger, “Rival Movements Duel Over the Future of Brazil,” Waging Non-Violence, September 2015, (accessed 5/1/2016), http://wagingnonviolence.org/feature/rival-movements-duel-future-brazil/.

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actual quality as a beach. Throughout time the Beaches have been reputed as a public space that brings people together. A series of interviews conducted on Rio’s beaches by James Freeman in the year 2000 reaffirm the common perception that the beaches symbolize a democratic space that temporarily unifies Rio’s polarized citizenry. “The beach is Rio’s stage. Public opinion is formed there, trends are set, and anything that happens on the beach immediately registers in the media. On the beach, the poor can remind the upper classes of their condition, hold them to their own ideals of democracy and equality, and make them feel the latent power of the majority. But acts of symbolic discontent or event outbursts of class violence have limited power to make fundamental changes in a society where the elite has superior control over the production of space and the production of ideas.”113 This quotation explains why Rio de Paz’s beachside installation art has had little transformative social impact despite its evocative visuality. By placing its images on the “stage” that already symbolizes democratic discourse in the city’s selfimage, Rio de Paz’s beach pieces fail to affront spatio-temporal norms and are instead digested as a conversation-starting photo-op for leisurely passersby. Rio de Paz does mount demonstrations in other hyper-symbolic locales as well, such as the Christ the Redeemer statue or the national capital in Brasilia. In each case, the monumental sites selected create a flurry of online image circulation, but the specificity of the messaging is dwarfed by the absolutism of the iconic space.

Organizing across geographies and demographies: Based on the cases of MST and MAB, which are by and large the most effective and popular/notorious activist groups in Brazil, we can see that a trans-national organizational structure is most empowering. Because these groups also engage a wider variety of citizens (different lifestyles, ages, races, classes, and income levels), they enjoy a broader bandwidth of support and appreciation. This also leads to broader global media presence and broader global empathy. Anonymous groups such as The Illuminator or MIDIA Ninja can achieve their mission better by not being associated with a geographic site or a particular demographic. Globalization is the condition of our times and, in my view, the faster a story can span the globe the better.

Taking legal action: The conclusive finding of my research into resistance strategies and tactics is this: the field in which the most outcomes can be measured is the field of law.

Throughout the struggle for social justice, activists constantly either rely upon or resort to lawyers. The complicated array of community demands tends to get widdled down to physical outcomes like: temporary work stoppages, contract renegotiations, social concessions (such as shuttle buses or extra affordable housing units), increased financial compensations, or the resignation of public officials. Such outcomes require piles of judicial, administrative, and executive paperwork. Enter the lawyers. Legally obtained and mandated outcomes are more common in the US than in Brazil. What worked in New York City may not work in Rio de Janeiro, due to the aforementioned corruption of the court system there. Whether it’s Golfe Para Quem?’s environmental lawsuits, or the public defenders operating in favelas, it is clear that political odds are stacked against social movements in Rio today. But considering the recent news in the Vila Autódromo case that, as of the March 2016, the city has agreed to “urbanize”

James Freeman, Class Relations in the Public Space of Rio de Janeiro, University of California Press, Space and Culture, February 2002.

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the area,114 there is still hope for Rio’s civil society to triumph over the corruption in the courts and use the “rule of law” to take control of their futures.

The following chart summarizes a few more basic findings.

Geographic Scale

Spontaneous Tactics Long-game Strategies Extrastatecraft

Summary of Findings - A hyper-local scale is ideal for hyper-local campaigns.

- Trans-national coalitions are rarest and most effective.

- Standalone function only raises press coverage.

- Must articulate with long-game strategies to garner support and achieve goals.

- Best way to achieve desired outcomes.

- Benefits from supporting spontaneous tactics.

- Requires “local heroes.”

- Enhances press coverage and web presence.

- Is articulated as spontaneous or long-game activities

Violence

-

Web Presence

-

Press Coverage

-

Presence of violence increases press coverage Certain long-game strategies exist to manage violence in spontaneous action Compared to pop-culture content, it is tough to get a meaningful web following.

A high web presence clearly increases the achievement of goals.

The press loves protest!

Citizen journalism lowers the threshold to getting mainstream coverage.

It is evident that the causal/correlative relationship between goals, activities, and outcomes is not an exact science, but highly contextual and reliant on the general popularity of the cause. There are, admittedly, countless other coincidental contributors to an effort's end results which have not been controlled for in this study. My rubric and its conclusions should be taken as a subjective analysis, in the service of aggregating replicable and effective tricks of the trade. Further research is required to deduce whether these activities can help achieve specific outcomes in future urban contexts. Nonetheless, my research indicates that the following activities correlate positively with the attainment of activist outcomes in NYC and Rio today:

Rio On Watch, Vila Autódromo Residents Reach Tentative Agreement with City, (accessed 5/1/2016), http://www.rioonwatch.org/?p=27988 114

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Specific activities that correlate to the most measurable outcomes

-

Law suits Environmental Impact Reviews Celebrity Buy-in/Famous targets/Fame Trans-national Coalitions Facile use of internet and video technology Being around for a long time

Now that we have identified strategies that have the best chance of delivering results against mega-event driven development projects, Chapter 5 will outline a proposal that adopts those activities as its operational criteria.

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Chapter 5

The Coalition for Olympic Design Alternatives “Creating the stage – and constantly demanding to bring onto it those who tend to be excluded by Olympic decision-making processes – is the first step towards restoring the inclusivity of Olympism.”

-Jilly Traganou, Designing The Olympics The Coalition for Olympic Design Alternatives is a trans-national human rights advocacy organization that propagates alternative visions for the future of the Olympic games. We exist to bring the Olympic Movement back into alignment with its own ethics. Our goal is to design and implement a sustainable and ethical Olympic Movement for the 21st century and beyond.

From Research to Design This thesis paper now climaxes with a proposal for a new organization, The Coalition for Design Alternatives. This organization will operate across the globe to design a more ethical and sustainable Olympic movement. I hope I have made it clear by now, dear reader, that such an organization is something the world needs. My ideas for this company will combine the theories explored in Chapter 3 with the best practices aggregated from the organizations analyzed in Chapter 4. This chapter, by providing a detailed prospectus for a fictitious organization, asks “what if?” What if we, as a civilization, took steps to repair our broken Olympic planning regime? If that project were to be led by an organization that could really pass muster with the International Olympic Committee, what would such an organization look like? This chapter will unpack the concept of trans-nationalism and delve into the details of the Coalition for Olympic Design Alternatives (CODA). But first, let’s review how my research has led me to this idea.

The following diagram shows the operational ingredients that I have pilfered from Chapter 4’s case study groups and thrown into the recipe for the CODA.

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From MIDIA Ninja, we borrow the decentralized multi-lingual instantaneous news. From Cat Comm, we admire the news reporting that is embedded in the day-to-day reality of a counter-public. These two inspirations will form the basis for CODA’s Olympic news reporting.

From MST and MAB we aspire to their longevity, but also seek to imitate their use of regional and trans-national networks and solidarity economies. This will inform CODA’s organizational structure. Comitê Popular was involved with the People’s Plan of Vila Autódromo, and even their dossier contains recommendations at the end that could constitute Olympic design alternatives. Brooklyn Speaks brought forth an alternative proposal for Atlantic Yards. CODA will definitely be collating proposals for Olympic redesign, sourced directly from the communities they will impact. CODA is also inspired by Brooklyn Speaks and Justice League NYC’s deft use of lawsuits to derail government or private-sector plans and win concessions for Brooklynites. By way of resistance, CODA will be planning to bring lawsuits against bad Olympic actors on the international stage or in host cities around the world. Finally, the videographic truthspeaking and extra-spatial dissent strategies of Justice League NYC are an example of Extrastagecraft and an inspiration for CODA. We will surely adapt these strategies when we hit the street to raise the visibility of future Olympic injustices.

Trans-Nationalism: Why and How? In Chapter 2, we observed that host city communities are frequently exploited, aggressed, or displaced by Olympic-driven development plans. But in Chapter 4 we saw that many of the

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community-based resistance groups that rise up to resist this process generate relatively few outcomes. Localized initiatives are continually outmaneuvered by a more omnipresent foe.

Because the Olympic Oligarchy mobilizes at a trans-national scale, it stands to reason that resistance needs to “go global” to gain adequate leverage upon its workings. And these days, with the digitization of dissent, truly trans-national social movements are increasingly possible.

But how does a trans-national organization gain, or exert, “leverage”?

In Activists Beyond Borders, Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink provide an explanation of the mechanics of trans-national activism. They identify a “Boomerang Effect” in which an inter-governmental organization or coalition curries international peer pressure to gain leverage on a geo-localized issue. If NGOs in Location A are blockaded from enacting social change by the hegemonies in their nation, then trans-local115 allies of those NGOs in Location B can produce empathy in their own geography, which can fuel an international sentiment that can in turn apply pressure back upon State A.116 Crucial to this system of advocacy is the flow of stories and photographs from the locality in question that serves not just as news, but as testimony.

Voicing the truth of injustices that unfold in a different corner of the globe is the first step in writing the international narrative to destabilize the offending hegemony. This is precisely what CODA will do.

This strategy is founded upon the hope that offending corporations or governments will in fact be swayed by threats to their global reputation. This is often, though not always, the case.

The primacy of a marketable global image is evidenced by the snare of the Olympic Games that was examined earlier. In the case of Olympic mega-development, because the advancement of a global image is a premise for the entire undertaking, it is likely that city agencies and architectural firms will be eager to abate public disdain and banish bad press.

In circumstances where violent repression or legal/political chicanery become no-longeran-option, we do see moments when corporations will relent and issue begrudging apologies, backpedaling policy adjustments, or economic remittances. These moments are what resultcraving activist pamphleteers would call a “win,” though these moments are rarely a surrender on the part of corporate power. (CODA will be playing both sides of this field, broadcasting gruesome but true narratives of Olympic depravity and then providing the designs to write a more desirable story for the future.)

An example of the Boomerang Effect in action is provided by Monroe Price, who writes of the moniker of the “Genocide Olympics” that circulated around the 2008 Beijing games. Eric Reeves was an English professor at Smith College who created that shaming label to protest China’s patronage of the murderous regime in Darfur, Sudan throughout the 2000’s. Price identifies this opportunistic use of the Olympic spotlight as “hijacking” or “piggybacking.”

Appropriating the Olympic platform for other political causes is a time-worn tradition of activists, which goes hand in hand with the Boomerang Effect in this case. Since local groups in Darfur had failed to halt the violence, trans-national groups would have to be brought in.

Because of the visibility of the Olympics, Reeves intuited a “tremendous scope for creative advocacy” and that is what he got. After writing his own e-mail manifesto in 2007, Reeves’ initiative got a lucky boost when actress (and UNESCO goodwill ambassador) Mia Farrow backed Reeves’ views in a Wall Street Journal op-ed. Soon Olympic athletes and Stephen “Trans-local” suggests a group that is geographically stationary but stands in solidarity with another locality. Thus, though people stay in place, their sense of placehood becomes a shared resource.

116 Margaret E. Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy Networks In International Politics, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,) 1998.

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Spielberg, (director of that year’s opening and closing ceremonies), joined the cause. As international pressure snowballed, concessions were made, including Fidelity Investments cutting its stake in PetroChina and, eventually, the sending of a Chinese ambassador to Sudan and the allowance of UN support for African Union troops there. This reads as a fairytale outcome to an activist’s idealistic soapboxing, but it happened.117 It is proof that the Olympics are indeed not only a sporting event or an opportunity for urban transformation. They are a platform for global activism, democratic discourse, and social change. But it is up to enterprising activists to craft the targeted messaging that can catalyze the desired changes.

Thinking about activating groups across geographical scales will help us avoid falling into the “local-trap”,118 wherein prioritizing engagement at the local or hyper-local scale is presumed to lead to greater inclusion, greater democracy, or greater social justice. This is not always the case. Sometimes commiseration, comradery, communication, and support from organizations in different towns, cities, states, countries, or continents is a strategic boon. These organizations may be confronting similar issues in their own localities, and so would corroborate the dilemmas of a fellow organization abroad. This arrangement could be called “trans-local,” one locality putting itself in the shoes of another and deciding to come to its aid. Or operating in its stead. Though exchange of people between the two locations is a bonus, aid can also come over the internet in the forms of information, data, code, software, news, advice, money, supplies, opportunities, or connections to more people.

This thesis’s recommendation of “trans-national” counter-spectacles is intended as an outgrowth of Cindy Katz’s counter-topographies, which “link different places analytically and thereby enhance struggles in the name of common interests.” In the Olympic context, this would mean that a family whose home has been demolished in a Rio favela in 2016 would realize their allegiance to a family that has was priced out of their apartment in downtown Brooklyn in 2012, while a journalist censored in Beijing in 2008 would find a voice in a publication by Tokyo2020’s incipient resistance squad. Charting these global connectivities can align a broad network of individuals, symbolically or socially, in the name of a global good. Katz writes, “Tracing the contour lines of such a ‘counter-topography’ to other sites might encourage and enable the formation of new political-economic alliances that transcend both place and identity and foster a more effective cultural politics to counter the imperial, patriarchal, and racist integument of globalization.” This can only be achieved by a “politics…in which crossing space and ‘jumping-scale’ are obligatory rather than overlooked.”119 That is the type of politics that the Coalition for Olympic Design Alternatives embodies.

Monroe Price, On Seizing the Olympic Platform, University of Pennsylvania, (Michigan: Digital Culture Books,) 2008.

To quote Mark Purcell from Urban Democracy and the Local Trap, (Urban Studies Vol. 3 No. 11, 1921-1941 October 2006), “the “Local-Trap” is “assumptions that are extremely common in the literature on environment and development.

First, localisation is conflated with democratisation, even though localisation can just as easily lead to tyranny and oppression (as with states’ rights and slavery in the US South). Secondly, ‘local people’ are conflated with ‘the people’ of democracy’s popular sovereignty, even though ‘the people’ can be (and have been) defined at a range of scales. Thirdly, ‘community’ is commonly conflated with ‘local-scale community’, even though communities exist at all scales. Fourthly, and following from the assumptions above, local ‘community-based development,’ is then conflated with ‘participatory development’ even though local-scale community control does not necessarily lead towards greater popular participation. And fifthly, the modifier ‘local’ is regularly used to stand in for more specific ideas such as ‘indigenous’, ‘poor’, ‘rural’, ‘weak’, or ‘traditional’, even though there is nothing essentially local about any of these categories.”

119 Cindy Katz, On the Grounds of Globalization, A Topography for Feminist Political Engagement, (Source:Signs, Vol. 26 No. 4, 1213-1234,) 2001, referencing Neil Smith’s concept of jumping-scale.

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CODA: The Vision To resist a global force, it takes a global platform. The Coalition for Olympic Design Alternatives leads the global movement to redesign the Olympic games. We exert political pressure on the International Olympic Committee to produce the games in a more ethical and sustainable manner. We achieve this by harnessing an international network of news agencies, activist organizations, human rights watchdogs, and urban environmentalists. We expose the injustices of mega-event development in the media, bolster resistance movements on the ground, and build popular participation in the design of a new Olympic Movement.

Our Purpose: The purpose of the Coalition for Olympic Design Alternatives is to halt all the negative effects the Olympic movement. We believe that the Olympic games can continue to occur as a valued ritual of our civilization, but without causing any violence, displacement, or destruction for the host city.

Our Mission: Our mission is to provide a platform for local resistance groups to gain political leverage against the International Olympic Committee. We achieve this by generating critical investigative reporting, on-the-ground resistance support, and alternative design proposals.

Our Vision: We envision a more democratic and imaginative Olympics that involves the entire population of the host city in the planning and in the spectacle. The sporting events would take place in a wider variety of environments, the tickets would be more affordable, and any permanent urban development would have lasting benefit for the host city. This new Olympics would welcome a plurality of design ideas from the general public and engender a spirit of participation, creativity, and play.

Our Values: People over profit and development without displacement! Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness should be available to all humans free of charge. We want an Olympic movement that puts the needs of cities and their people before the mandates of governments and corporations. We will be pursuing these values by supporting the very groups who are most negatively affected by Olympic urban plans.

Our Audience: First and foremost, we engage urban inhabitants who are suffering at the hands of mega-event-driven development. We invite them to collaborate with us in projects to visualize their struggles and design solutions. Then we hold audience with the global social justice movement, who we rally around the locally-embedded communities in the Olympic City.

Finally, our efforts draw the attention of the global media and the IOC itself. Our ultimate audience is the Olympic audience, to whom we expose the injustices of the games themselves and the possibilities of a better way.

CODA: The Venture Now this proposal will step back from writing in the present tense, and treat CODA as a venture which is newly being launched.

The Coalition for Olympic Design Alternatives will incorporate as a 501(c)3 non-profit organization based out of New York City. Because New York City has yet to mount an Olympics, it is un-scorched earth for the foundation of a new Olympic vision.

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CODA will take a three tiered approach to addressing The Olympic Dilemma. Through Reporting, Resisting, and Redesigning, we will grow our organization as we nurture and support the already burgeoning global counter-Olympic movement. We’ll start as a citizen journalism and video dissemination hub, using our office as a base to launch the company, report on the Olympics, and fundraise. We’ll build solidarity with anti-Olympic movements that have died down (or are about to flare up) in other cities. By attracting truly global visibility, we’ll emerge as an urban design clearinghouse where we’ll provide legal resistance and community-driven alternatives to the Olympic bids that are put forth by host city governments.

This three tiered plan will unfold over the course of decades. The activities will be overlapping and complimentary. Let us examine each phase in detail.

Tier 1 - Reporting: Our journalism department will scrutinize the activities of the International Olympic Committee worldwide. Our findings will be constantly disseminated online through citizen journalism, social media, documentary video, and academic publications.

We’ll build a team of multi-lingual translators to make sure our information spreads to the countries that need it most, namely, those up next to host the Olympic games. Beyond our own coverage we will valorize journalism from the host city by translating and reblogging it.

The journalism department will include nomadic investigative operatives that track the Olympics from city to city. By telling the stories of Olympic injustice, we create empathy from potential allies and curry international support for our cause.

Year 1 Reporting Objectives (2017)  Launch website Olympics4People.org  Launch social media accounts with daily posts  Begin Olympic news coverage with at least 1 article per week about each upcoming games  Create 2016 Report and

Year 5 Reporting Objectives (2022)  Have a journalist operating in every Olympic host city  Online readership of at least 5,000 per day  Retweets and reposts in the thousands  Develop the capacity to translate into multiple

Year 15 Reporting Objectives (2032)  Have satellite offices in every Olympic host city  Online readership of at least 50,000 per day  Constant retweets, reposts, and citations  Be the world authority for Olympic news  A report and archive for

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languages A report and archive for every Olympic games since 2016

every Olympic games in history

Tier 2 - Resisting: It is necessary to stand in solidarity with local resistance movements. Even though we support the fundamental ideals of the Olympic vision, we cannot expect to gain political leverage without vocally rejecting the status quo. We will join alongside protestors on the ground in host cities to bolster their efforts using Extrastagecraft. And eventually, we will translate anger into action. By developing environmental impact reports, CODA’s locallysourced team of environmentalists, urbanists, and human rights lawyers will uncover proovable crimes of IOC agents and construction companies and bring legal suits against them. This will be what the resistance department is doing when CODA reaches Tier 3.

Year 1 Resisting Objectives  Begin outreach to 2024 organizations  Begin research on 2024 city sites  Internet proliferation of resistance narratives, visuals, and slogans.  Launch 2018 reform petition.

Year 5 Resisting Objectives  Proliferate narratives, visuals, memes, and art about conditions in Olympic host cities.  Assist locals in construction of protest materials and campaigns in the host city.  Launch Nomad.org  Launch 2024 reform petition

Year 15 Resisting Objectives  Develop the capacity to do environmental reviews If the IOC is not compliant with human rights standards, file lawsuits against the IOC.  Continued support of local resistance movements.  Launch 2034 reform petition.

Tier 3 - Redesigning: Not only do we expose and confront Olympic injustice, we come armed with alternative proposals. This department of CODA will maintain “Calls for Olympic Design Alternatives,” open to any group from the Olympic host city’s civil society. Our coalition will bring these proposals to National Olympic Committees while they are still formulating their bids to host future Olympic games. This shows how serious we are about finding new ways forward. Designs would not be limited to the fields of urban planning and architecture: we place emphasis on social programs, infrastructural improvements, or unorthodox, imaginative ideas. Thereby, we are also embodying values of participation and creativity.

Year 1 Redesigning Objectives  Launch 2024 Call for Olympic Design Alternatives  Launch internet portal to receive submissions

Year 5 Redesigning Objectives  Launch 2030 Call for Olympic Design Alternatives.  Endorse/fund at least 5 submitted designs.

Year 15 Redesigning Objectives  Launch 2040 Call for Olympic Design Alternatives  Endorse/fund many submitted designs.

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Participatory designs are accepted by the IOC or enacted independently Olympic planning is perceived as an opportunity for public participation in urban design.

Next is a diagram of how this will play out over 20 years. In this diagram, when a stakeholder appears in a box along the timeline, that means CODA will engage that stakeholder around this time period.

Finally, here is an even longer timeline of what this will look like over the course of multiple Olympic games in multiple locations:

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CODA’s Long-Term Outcomes: Over the years, CODA’s work will alter global perceptions about the Olympic movement. Humanity will come to see that the 13 days of sportive entertainment do not justify the years of hardship for host city populations. The Coalition for Olympic Design

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Alternatives will renew public imagination about what the Olympics can be. Collectively, we can design an Olympic movement that is:  Accountable, with officials and corporations who respect local laws or else face repercussions just like local citizens.  Sustainable, in every sense of the word, respecting the realities of the host city’s social, political, geomorphic, and economic environment.  Ethical, meaning it actually follows its Code of Ethics and adds to that code: - policies that expressly illegalize exploitative labor practices, evictions, deforestation, and repression of dissent.

- a policy that restricts or bans the use of public money for the games.

- a rubric by which this “code” may be enforceable as international law.  Inclusive, meaning employing a democratized design process that welcomes a variety of disparate values and visions before deciding on the manifestation of the local games.

CODA: The Details For all its visionary ambitions, CODA will be able to function primarily out of a basic New York City office with hot coffee machines and fast fiber optic internet. By taking out an initial loan, we will set our operation up with all requisite supplies and equipment to become a citizen journalism and social media tech haven. CODA’s website will be the public face of the company and the instrument by which our operation functions. Our website will facilitate outreach to allies and funders, publish our reportage, amplify messages of resistance groups, receive submissions of alternative design proposals, and contain our digital archive.

Here is a diagram of the structure of our web platform, its functionality, and who will interact with it:

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Now I will detail a few more nuts and bolts about CODA’s action plan.

Hiring: We will start by hiring a small team of web programmers, graphic designers, and writers to launch and manage this web portal. At the beginning, the website will be CODA’s product, so its design will need to be excellent. As we grow and raise funds we will hire additional multi-lingual journalists and video documentarians. We will also need an administrative staff to manage the basic operations of an office and the fundraising for the organization. Eventually our team will be expanded to include lawyers and land-use and environmental policy experts based in the host city.

Linguistic Translation: As stated, our journalism will be a combination of research-driven reports on the broader Olympic movement, and translation of reportage coming out of host cities.

As such, we will need a staff of writers who are fluent in multiple languages. This will provide value to Olympic resistance movements by making their testimonials comprehensible to global audiences. An activist in Beijing 2022 could, for example, tweet at the CODA Twitter account which would trigger a translation function that would re-transmit his anti-Olympic tweet in ten more languages. This could also work to add foreign-language subtitles to videos. Once this capacity is developed, we could collect revenues for our translation services in some cases, such as on long-form documentaries or reports.

NOMAD Digital Archive: As we generate journalism and visual media, we will populate a searchable digital archive with a subpage for each Olympic games featuring a researched report, documentary video, and supplementary resistance materials. This archive will codify narratives and facts about resistance to Olympic games past and make them accessible for application in future Olympic resistance scenarios. This archive will be called NOMAD, the New Olympic Movement Archival Database.

Social Media: An adept use of social media will be crucial to all of our tactics and strategies. Now, and especially decades from now, connecting to allies over the internet and spreading your message remotely is the lynchpin of social movement building. We will re-tweet, re-blog, re-post, and re-gram every anti-, alter-, and counter-Olympic meme on the Earth.

Outreach: Besides social media and the process of hiring, we will need to do targeted outreach to our sister global organizations. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and Terre Des Hommes, for example, are other trans-national human rights advocacy groups with similar missions to CODA’s. Certainly we would attempt to forge partnerships with these groups by letterwriting and campaigning. We will also write letters to and launch targeted campaigns to secure meetings with specific politicians, celebrities, Olympic Atheletes, corporate executives, and the IOC itself. Some individuals may empathize with our cause and become allies in our work.

“Call for Olympic Design Alternatives”: To encourage a proliferation of communityoriented and participatorially created Olympic designs, we will run an ongoing submission process for creative alternative Olympic designs. Anyone can submit and it’s free. We will target any urban minions who are disgruntled with commercial design firms and seek a more fruitful and sustainable system of structuring our built and inhabited environment. This open call will not be restricted to urban design schematics. Submissions could be anything from counter-Olympic art to new Olympic sports to wild architectural designs for fantastical Olympic stadiums. This feature of our work is crucial not only to open dialogues about the possibility of new formulations of the Olympic project, but also so that when it comes time to implement alternative plans, we will have something ready to go. There is an either/or scenario embedded here, as indicated on the timelines. If CODA’s proposed alternatives are not adopted, we will

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proceed to resist through our environmental impact reviews and lawsuits. But if the communitysourced plans are adopted, CODA and the community will oversee their implementation alongside the IOC. We will also advocate for the adaptive reuse of Olympic facilities when the games are over.

Fundraising: A primary type of alliance we will seek will be financial support. At first we will spend all of the time in the New York Office that we aren’t doing journalism or translation doing fundraising. We will have had to take out a loan to open the office. We will apply for grants, such as the Human Rights Watch Global Impact Grant and the Gates Foundation Social Justice Grant. We will also run crowd-funding campaigns, have a donation portal on our website, and throw an annual fundraising event.

Annual “New Olympic Movement” Conference: After we have secured a bit of a budget, we will also host an annual conference on the state of the Olympic movement. We will invite academics, architects, and athletes to present their projects. Getting like-minded social justice types in the room will also create networking opportunities, which could help with fundraising and awareness raising in the long run. We will always invite the IOC and the Olympic family to this conference, and eventually they will accept one of our invitations.

Opening offices in host cities: After our early years of nomadic investigative reporting, we will get in the habit of opening a temporary satellite office in the host city. Then our space will be able to act as a resource for resistance groups and citizen journalists operating in the city. We will bring state-of-the art web publishing and filmmaking skills to the service of the groups hit hardest by Olympic urban restructuring. We will aid local protest efforts by providing space to build and store props and signage, and by broadcasting everything to a world audience. This office will also run environmental impact studies on Olympic sites and consider the viability of bringing lawsuits against the IOC or municipal or state government entities.

Resistance Support: And of course CODA’s operatives in host cities will participate in whatever repertoires of contention the local resistance is enacting. This will no doubt mean joining in marches and parades, signing petitions, attending hearings and debates, etc. But CODA will also bring Extrastagecraft to the table. CODA’s public counter-spectacular resistance strategies will draw from the spatial and videographic stylings of Justice League NYC. We will fuse those strategies with the artfully designed and performative mode of address that is the hallmark of the groups Not An Alternative and Rio de Paz. Their creative appropriations of space lurk in-between the dominant spectacle of the Olympic Games and the usual scripts of antiOlympic protest. So, CODA will propound a unique brand of resistance activities to urge humanity towards a new Olympic milieu. (One example of this might be the “Olympic Live Site” performance described in Chapter 2.)

Here is a “Theory of Change” model for the entire scope of CODA’s project:

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CODA: Foundational Criteria and Precepts Commitment to citizen journalism: Journalism, particularly so-called “citizen journalism” that is authored by a free agent who is not beholden to the journalistic standards (or political biases) of a shareholder-driven media brand, is a foundational component of effective transnational coalition building. Such journalism can illuminate the complexity of a social reality by applying a critical gaze upon corporate agendas or a conciliatory tone towards dissident activities. Boykoff writes, “coverage of dissidence can be seen as a framing contest whereby different social actors and groups present their frame(s) in an effort to gain social currency on the contested topography of public discourse.” Thus, in addition to critiquing problematic Olympic development schemes, The Coalition for Olympic Design Alternatives report the nuances of action and message that local resistance movements deploy against such schemes. A spirited debate about the future of the Olympic movement (and its resistance) can only be had if it is also an informed debate.

Accompanying criticism with alternative proposals: Vila Autódromo’s People’s Plan is proving to the world that there is such a thing as community-based "bottom-up" planning that can be conscientious and fluid. What's more: that it can be done on a sparse budget and be responsive to changes on the ground. This is a far cry from the type of schematic design that makes alterations during construction but never bothers to go back and update the plans. And this is not an isolated incident. To reiterate, a group of planners from Pratt in New York City created an alternative urban plan for the Atlantic Yards site as well. This plan embraced plural visions and community-based decision making in both its inception and in the services it would have provided. Is the existence of such community-driven plans a naïve gesture towards unachievable autonomy or evidence of alternative planning regimes that are gearing up for a fight? CODA will never excoriate an existing Olympic design without also proposing imaginative and practicable

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alternatives. The IOC will play straight into our hand if they ever ask us “have you got a better idea?”

Deliberately duplicitous political position: The Coalition for Olympic Design Alternatives would not present itself strategically as opposition to the International Olympic Committee. We would legitimize and coalesce the myriad local groups that have taken such a stance in the past, but assume an intermediary role, translating anger into action. Though we would be radical at our base, our institutional messaging would be varnished with a sheen of neutrality. Such a political position is necessary so that we can infiltrate the echelons of ego in Switzerland (where the IOC and many other trans-national organizations are based). CODA frames its mission in service of the actual goals of the Olympic Movement. We must be careful not to villainize the IOC, but appreciate its vision and help it achieve that vision more ethically and sustainably.

Reconsideration of campaign language: The above political duplicity will be achieved in part by being meticulous with our vocabulary. The Coalition for Design Alternatives would replace the use of the words “counter” and “resistance” and “anti’ with terms like “alternative,” “prefigurative,” and “proactive”. We need to shift the popular narrative from one of malice towards or aggression against the Olympic games to a visioning process towards redesign.

Ultimately, we will couch the conversation about the future of the Olympic movement in a conversation about values and ethics, weighing a devotion to sportive culture and consumer spectacle against a commitment to human rights and urban quality of life.

Appreciating legalism: Once it has matured, CODA will toil in the realm of international law to attain its objectives. Law is a field that is sadly underappreciated by radical activist groups. But law, too, is being revolutionized by the Internet as laws become publically perusable.

There is ample opportunity for citizen-led legal action that can ultimately impact trans-national systems of production and exchange. I would add that America's oft villainous characterization of lawyers is unfair. They are the technocratic bedrock of our environment and economy. Until we can construct a utopian society in which all citizens are peaceful and altruistic self-regulators, lawyers are civilization’s most dependable minions for meting out that prized conciliatory catharsis called justice.

Need for durational and durable movement: My research has reaffirmed that change doesn’t happen overnight. Groups like MST and 5th Avenue Committee which have existed for 30 years simply have more clout than a temporary collective like Golfe Para Quem? Also, persistent, stubborn groups like Brooklyn Speaks get more physical results than artfully opportunistic practices like The Illuminator. A movement that seeks to secure real reforms from the Olympic Oligarchy would need to be in it for the long haul, with agents addressing Olympics-specific details, day in and day out for years. CODA would absorb some of this legwork on the world’s behalf. By sustaining the project over the years, CODA would add longevity and legitimacy to the global grassroots that wants to reform Olympism. And CODA would ensure that traction was not lost when activist agents in host cities decided to go back to their regularly scheduled lives. Such an outfit would honor, preserve, or resurrect the efforts of previous protesters, representing not just a trans-spatial but a trans-temporal solidarity.

Resistance must persevere over extended time to influence an organization (the IOC) that has already existed for over 100 years. To be sure, if the Olympics had been the head of a nation for over 100 years they would have been voted out or forced out of power long ago.

Global democratizing of Olympism: A long-term aspiration of CODA would be the reform of the nomination and election processes of the IOC. We could fortify the representational effect of the institution if the Committee Members and Ambassadors were elected by actual public

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votes. Introducing a voting process to the selection of IOC Ambassadors, at least, would raise a public awareness of the power dynamics between each athletically participating nation and the clandestine leadership of the IOC planning regime. The Olympic games could become a site of contestation not only of spatial politics at the city scale, but of electoral politics at the global scale.

Valuing a broad and equitable definition of design: We at CODA believe in sociallyconscious design as the fundamental activity of constructing a just society. Design is everything, from the laws we write to the buildings we build to the clothes we wear to the food we eat. Design is the words we say and the paths we walk. Since we value equality, freedom, and justice for all humans (regardless of race, class, gender, religion, sexuality, or any other labels), we value design that actively seeks this state of being. In order to do so, we also value participatory design processes that require listening and conversation with each and every person in a community who is interested in speaking and being heard. This, we believe, is the only way to approach a truly representative and democratic design process. And in so doing, we promote a more peaceful and compassionate world.

That said, there are inconvenient kinks in urbanist narratives of participatory design which must be acknowledged.

Mythologies of Citizenship and Inclusion By way of concluding my proposal for the Coalition for Olympic Design Alternatives, I must debunk, or, rather, complicate, some popular concepts of the “inclusion” of local “citizens.”

This is particularly relevant in formulating participatory design processes such as CODA’s.

The human rights dossier of Rio’s Comitê Popular is provocatively entitled “The Exclusion Games.” This title conveys the opinion of Rio de Janeiro’s local counter-publics towards sporting mega-events. The dossier says that the urban planning model for the games “reinforces patterns, values and inequalities of a markedly patriarchal and racist society, reaffirming the privileges of a minority which is male, middle-aged, heterosexual, and with economic and job stability.”120 It goes on to describe numerous instances, under the auspices of mega-event development projects, of evictions, child labor, sex trafficking, criminalization of prostitution, criminalization of homelessness, and police violence against women and the elderly.

Clearly, game organizers are mandating a spatial code that does in fact exclude a vast crosssection of Rio de Janeiro residents. So, we must ask, in what manner can inclusion for these citizens be procured?

Citizenship in modern society is a legitimizing status conferred by the nation in which you are born. Citizenship affords you certain rights, such as voting, in exchange for certain citizen imperatives, such as paying taxes. This seems simple, but in modern discourses of citizenship the term “participatory citizenship” qualifies a distinction between a purely titular citizenship and meaningful citizenship characterized by a true enjoyment of rights and an active engagement with the democratic processes of one’s society. It is necessary to take this diversion into the semantics of citizenship to consider ideas of inclusion and exclusion in Rio de Janeiro.

When 1.7 million out of Rio’s 6.3 million residents live in Favelas,121 the self-determined patterns of many favelados’ livelihoods do not jive with the legal structures of the state. The 120 121

Comitê Popular, The Exclusion Games, 2015.

Rio de Janeiro 2015 FIFE-ZAP housing price index.

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housing stock of favelas is largely built by the inhabitants themselves, and so they do not have a deed to their land nor do they pay property tax on it, (though most likely they do pay rent or have purchased the building outright through an undocumented business arrangement). Secondly, since informal economies and co-habitative social networks abound within favelas, many favelados pay no income tax to the state or city either. The lack of tax revenue from favela communities may be partly to blame for the city’s general lack of attentiveness to the community’s needs. Legally, these residents are citizens. But in spirit and practice, they are excluded from the benefits of Brazilian national citizenship. The Olympics reinforce this pattern, but in rare cases they do offer opportunities to break it.

When corporations are able to permeate national borders without the traditional sanction of the nation-state, it becomes possible for humans to do the same. In his article “Reimagining Sports: African Athletes, Defection, and Ambiguous Citizenship,” Joseph K. Adjaye notes that the globalized business of sports has triggered a deemphasis of “the traditional notions and values of citizenship.” Increasingly, athletes are motivated by lucrative contracts to defect from their birth country and are granted new citizenship. Sportive culture usurps national borders and so the Olympic Movement is a potential vehicle for the idea of citizenship to do the same. If nations can reconsider the notion of “transnational citizenship” for the agents of the Olympic mission, couldn’t this also be applied to the status of the favelado or the sambista who seeks political agency?122 Towards the ideal of political inclusion, Jacques Rancière professes that “the fundamental question is to explore the possibility of maintaining spaces of play. To discover how to produce forms for the presentation of objects, forms for the organization of spaces that thwart expectations. The main enemy of artistic creativity as well as political creativity is consensus…”123 This viewpoint articulates cogently with Chantal Mouffe’s conception of dissensus as a not only valid but desirable feature of democratic participation. Mouffe asserts that “What is specific and valuable about modern liberal democracy is that, when properly understood, it creates a space in which this confrontation [between left and right, or wrong and right] is kept open, power relations are always being put into question and no victory can be final.” It is, in other words, not the forcing of consensus but the embracing of dissensus that will generate a condition for the fullest inclusion of the public in the governance of its world.124 The thinking goes that if consensus is reached in a political process, whether through a numerical majority-rules vote or a general verbal agreement amongst most people in the room, this rarely means unanimous support for a course of action. There are almost always some members of a community or a population who are dissatisfied with the decision. Thus, obtainance of consensus is not a truly representative decision. We must, instead, embrace dissensus and disagreement as viable, valuable, features of decision making processes. It may never be possible for everyone to be satisfied, but it is possible for everyone to have a voice.

This will surely require a more nuanced and thus lengthy conversation, but that is the actual and difficult work of pursuing an equitable society. Mouffe labels this approach to the participatory governance of a society “agonistic pluralism.” In theory, embracing a multitude of voices with an irreconcilable diversity of opinions and desires will provide a much wider menu of creative Joseph K. Adajye, Reimagining Sports: African Athletes, Defection, and Ambiguous Citizenship, Africa Today, Vol. 57, No. 2 (Winter 2010), pp. 26-40, Indiana University Press.

123 Jacques Rancière, The Art of the Possible, Fluvia Carnevale and John Kelsey in Conversation with Jacques Rancière, Artforum, March, 2007.

124 Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox, Verso Books, 2000.

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courses of action for a community. Even if only one course can ultimately be followed, the discursive act of listening and valuing each individual voice is instrumental to constituting a sense of collective ownership over the decision being made.

When the residents of Vila Autódromo are awoken by the sound of backhoes about to destroy their homes and this is the first that they have heard of the plan, it is an understatement to claim that the Olympics are in need of more inclusive democratic urban planning processes.

Around the world, residents of self-determined settlements would surely not consent to their forced removal and that is precisely why they should not be forcibly removed.

In Horizons of Inclusion: Life Between Laws and Developments in Rio de Janeiro, Maria Clara Dias and Luis Eslava, define inclusion as “listening to an individual’s own demands and creating conditions so that those outside the social, cultural, or legally established order can express their own identity and live authentically without being the object of violence or the stigmas and the threats created by the society in which they may live without being members.”

The authors are referring to individuals who inhabit Rio’s favelas, for whom the Olympics are only the most recent in a seemingly endless line of decisions that were made without their inclusion in either the decision making process or in the plans that were decided upon. The conferral of the “Right to the City” in Brazilian national law was in theory intended to require the contrary to this state of affairs, but practically speaking that law has never taken effect.

So there is a myth, prevalent in modern professional circles of so-called “new urbanism,” that simply inviting some community members into the room where a plan is being presented constitutes inclusion in the planning. This reinscribes dominant narratives of “expertise” that falsely divide the community from the planners. Instead, CODA will situate the community as the experts. This ideological stance will guide CODA’s process of participatory design, in which Olympic organizers will simply go to a room where the community already is, and listen.

The Coalition for Olympic Design Alternatives is, undoubtedly, an ambitious undertaking. The organization would aggregate the best practices in citizen journalism, solidarity economics, legal procedure, and participatory design in order to drastically disrupt the current pattern of Olympic urbanization. It would require political prowess, financial girth, and intense patience. The timeline sets its sights on Olympics in years like 2028, 2030, 2032, and beyond.

But if the IOC plans that far ahead, so must we. Only the most ambitious and strategic initiatives can hope to transform this entrenched global system. But if we are ambitious and strategic, we can hope. It is impossible to predict all of the contingencies that might befall the effort, all of the victories, all of the setbacks, all of the scandals, all of the celebrations. But it is not necessary to predict these things. It is necessary to believe in the possibility of change. I truly believe that if our society came together behind a flagship organization such CODA that was willing to devote the time and effort, we could design a more inclusive, sustainable, and ethical Olympics.

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Conclusion

Towards an Idealistic Mind The Olympics are a massive and constant undertaking of planetary spatial design.

Therefore it is imperative that they be done well. But global civil society has identified that the the mismanagement of the Olympics is a deep debacle extending far beyond sports to economics, planning, architecture, environmental science, policy, law, and human rights. To recap, Chapter 1 gave an overview of the players and processes by which the Olympics extract wealth from host cities. Chapter 2 showed these systems at play in Rio de Janeiro, and traced flows of power and capital back to New York City. Chapter 3 revealed spectacle’s role in the Olympic brand, and theorized Extrastagecraft as counter-spectacular activism for the digital age. Chapter 4 was a catalog of 18 activist organizations in Rio and New York and what they do that achieves results.

Chapter 5 brought it home with a proposal for a long-term, big-budget, trans-national resistance and redesign outfit.

Despite the logistical obstacles and political roadblocks that make the idea of the Coalition for Olympic Design Alternatives seem all but impossible, I have decided to propose it anyway. The world needs it! I believe it is necessary for us to propose that which seems impossible in order to attempt to discover how to make it happen. We must use our imagination as weaponry to bombard the status quo. We must strive for idealism in order to approach anything even approximating an ideal. Alessandro Angelini supports my idealism when he writes that “social research directed toward actors and objects that observe the spectacle askance, that indeed conspire to construct counter-spectacles, promises not to reinforce the trope of the spectacle as a mercurial and self-evident social fact.”125 In other words, skepticism towards famous, popular, expensive, or highly visible phenomena such as the Olympics can set the global imagination upon controlling and reforming them. I’ll summon the name of a Carnival street orchestra who protested against the World Cup in Rio de Janeiro: Nada Deve Parecer Impossivel de Mudar (Nothing Must Seem Impervious to Change).

But change will not happen on its own. It requires leaders! At the heart of my entire inquiry I have identified a fundamental factor of successful social movements: the local hero.

Look to any of the organizations or communities that I have mentioned in this thesis and you'll find intrepid individuals who have taken a leadership role in the resistance. This leadership is not primarily symbolic but logistical and practical. These people are role models, inspirations, community anchors, durational activists. I coin the term durational activism to articulate with architect Miguel Robles-Duran’s concept of the “instant activist,” a disingenuous substitute for the local hero in the theater of the urban. “The activist architect is never instant;” he writes, “it is made by a long and constant struggle to stand aware in critical opposition to the injustices of development.”126 Without those courageous individuals who commit their lives to the goals of a resistance movement, no outcomes could ever be attained.

So it seems that each one of us has a choice to make. If you have dreams, will you strike out on an uncharted path towards that which you desire? Or will you wait for others to lead the 125 126

Angelini, Ludic Maps, 2015.

Miguel Robles-Durán, The Rise of the Instant Activist, Nai Publishers, Reflect #8, 2014.

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way towards a world of their own making? When the Olympic Games come to your city, will you join the crowds in the seats or in the streets? Or both? In truth, the choice is not a moment in time but an ever unfolding process, an ebb and flow of resistance and submission. We denounce the spectacle even as we consume it with glee. We hold fast to our traditions even as we fight for change. There are infinite choices, neither right nor wrong, but the ideals that guide our choices are the foundations of our society. So I have chosen to propose an idealistic project to endorse the practice of idealistic thought. It is not the choice, but the choosing, which constructs the world in which we live.

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“Gloss”ary “Justice” – “Justice” was a common word to find in the mission statements of the researched resistance groups. This explains why legal cases are a central feature of successful social movements. The popular perception of justice means enforcing the “rule of law,” which necessitates an authoritarian apparatus, namely, the courts. However, this definition of justice presupposes the integrity of law itself, and thereby abjures considerations of extra-legal formulations of justice such as spatial justice, temporal justice, emotional justice, romantic justice, or spiritual justice. Elsewhere in this paper I (sarcastically) refer to justice as a “prized conciliatory catharsis.” I intend to suggest that traditional pursuits of justice can be a blind alley for social movements who, in need of real emotional or spiritual healing, resort to court proceedings to wrangle a sense of closure. In this way, justice can become a euphemism for revenge or retribution. As often, systematically delivered justice is a placebo to uphold the status quo. My point is: justice is a social construct with no fixed meaning. Societies should make room for fluid and contextual definitions of justice.

"Grassroots" – Occasionally this text has mentioned the “grassroots.” I intend this term as a catch-all to signify the positionality of mission-driven non-governmental organizations or lowbudget local initiatives (my case studies) who oppose themselves to dominant for-profit corporate or state bodies. The use of this term plays to the romanticization of the counterculture, a sense of getting "back to nature," and a personal preference for "bottom-up" or community-driven processes over "top-down" prescriptive ones. These connotations are applicable, but the term itself must be taken as a stand in for a prismatic ecosystem of complicated and competing hyperlocal interest groups that operate outside of big business and beyond the comprehension of the media.

“Strategies” and “Tactics” – Throughout this investigation I refer to “strategies” and “tactics”.

Both are subsets of behavior that are employed by the resistance groups in question. My usage of each term is guided by the distinction articulated in Michel De Certeau in The Practice of Everyday Life: he calls “a ‘strategy’ the calculus of force-relationships which becomes possible when a subject of will and power (a proprietor, an enterprise, a city, a scientific institution) can be isolated from an ‘environment’,” while a tactic is “a calculus which cannot count on a…spatial or institutional localization.”127 In my interpretation, strategies are multi-step plans that unfold in particular places between particular institutions, groups, companies, etc. Strategies may take long stretches of time: days or years. On the other hand, tactics are materio-behavioral processes that happen momentaneously and may not originate from or be targeted towards a particular space, place, or entity.

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Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1984.

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