Occupy All Streets Olympic Urbanism and Contested Futures in Rio de Janeiro Edited by Bruno Carvalho Mariana Cavalcanti and Vyjayanthi Rao Venuturupalli
Bruno Carvalho
Occupy All Streets Olympic Urbanism and Contested Futures in Rio de Janeiro Edited by Bruno Carvalho Mariana Cavalcanti and Vyjayanthi Rao Venuturupalli
Contents Rio, City of Epithets: Olympic Urbanism in Context Bruno Carvalho
Viable Futures: Contradictions and Possibilities in Social Housing in Rio de Janeiro Gabriel Duarte and Renata Bertol
Branding the Marvelous City Beatriz Jaguaribe and Scott Salmon
Futures and Ruins of an Olympic City Mariana Cavalcanti, Julia O’Donnell and Lilian Sampaio
Occupy All Streets: Protesting a Right to the Future Bruno Carvalho
Parque Madureira: Public Space, Leisure and Trauma in Rio de Janeiro Bryan McCann
Monopoly City vs. Singular City: Competing Urban Visions Theresa Williamson
New Centralities: Planning the Post-Olympic City Guilherme Lassance
City Beyond Epithets: Situating Olympic Urbanism Vyjayanthi Rao Venuturupalli
Bruno Carvalho
Rio, City of Epithets: Olympic Urbanism in Context
In the mid-1990s, amid a crisis of rampant violence in Rio de Janeiro, an influential Brazilian journalist, Zuenir Ventura, published a book with the title Cidade Partida. The expression could be translated as broken or split city, as if Rio had an integrity that contemporary violence shattered. A more apt translation is an increasingly prevalent phrase used to describe urban conditions in the United States: divided city.1 Given the striking contrasts between Rio de Janeiro’s upper-class buildings and hillside favelas, it is not surprising that the epithet found broad resonance. Cidade Partida challenged what was until then Rio’s most recurrent moniker, Cidade Maravilhosa—marvelous or wonderful city. Those familiar with its landscape will find explanations to be superfluous. In the 1930s, when a song about Rio titled “Marvelous City” hit the airwaves, in the 1960s when it became the city’s official anthem, and today, when crowds sing it in unison during carnival, images of Rio’s cultural and natural exuberance come to mind. But the origins of the expression betray another history. “Marvelous City” became popularized in the context of an ambitious, Paris-inspired set of urban reforms early in the twentieth century. The phrase designated a city becoming modern, whiter, and at long last, as we read often in the press from the period, “civilized.”2 In this scenario, a more divided city was in fact the goal, with the poor—disproportionately non-white—pushed to the outskirts or incipient favelas, as far as possible from central areas and from view. Led by then-mayor Francisco Pereira Passos, the reforms resulted in the eviction of one-tenth of the city’s residents. To be sure, part of the goal of the reforms was to remedy a reputation Rio had earned as a “city of death” or “foreigner’s grave,” due to the prevalence of diseases like yellow fever.3 But the notion of the marvelous city of the belle époque as the privilege of a few remained clear to many. The manifesto of a labor group in 1929 mocks the use of the epithet by “literary fops” from the city’s Avenida Central, drawing attention instead to the dire living conditions of the working classes.4
1. “The Divided City” is, for example, the theme of an Urban Humanities Initiative at Washington University in St. Louis, funded by the Mellon Foundation. A version of this essay was presented at a panel hosted by this initiative in October 2015. 2. See for instance, O Paiz coverage on May 5, 1904 and on September 5, 1910, where we find sentiments like: “The Rio that appeared after the downfall of old houses and old costumes, is today a marvelous city.” Though there is extensive scholarship on Rio in Portuguese, this introduction will privilege sources available in English. On the reforms, see Teresa Meade, “Civilizing” Rio: Reform and Resistance in a Brazilian City, 1889–1930 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997). 3. The Zika virus, in this regard, produces an unmistakable echo of the past. 4. In 1912, the French poet Jeanne Catulle-Mendès titled a collection of verses on Rio as La Ville Merveilleuse, and in 1928, Coelho Neto published a book of short stories with the same title. The “Manifesto do comité pró confederação geral do trabalho do Brasil” was published on February 14, 1929, in the Diario Carioca.
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6. Bruno Carvalho, Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013).
Rio once had the largest urban slave population in the Americas, and the presence of their descendants in major public spaces presented an embarrassment to governing elites. In the belle époque, World’s Fairs and Expos proliferated, and major cities served as arenas where empires and nation states could compete. Not coincidentally, the modern Olympics began in 1896 in Athens, amid this era of proliferating precursors to today’s mega-events. Rio de Janeiro at the start of the twentieth century was the third major port of the Americas, behind New York and Buenos Aires, and the capital of a newfound republic, proclaimed in 1889. The city’s compact colonial fabric, marked by varied and jumbled street life, did not befit national ambitions. The Pereira Passos interventions sought to give an urban form to the positivist ideals of “order and progress,” enshrined in the Brazilian flag. In practice, Rio de Janeiro was to be considered marvelous when undesirables were not around. A divided city was, in fact, a desired outcome of the reforms. But as students of the past quickly learn, in the history of city planning, the improbable happens often, and the unintended happens all the time. Spaces envisioned as exclusivist playgrounds for the elites have since become appropriated as sites of democratic congregation, multiethnic encounters, and popular expressions. In belle époque Rio there were attempts to prohibit those not dressed “decently” from circulating in central areas.5 Now, these same spaces are periodically occupied by carnival revelers or political protesters. The dream of a city with central spaces reserved to the rich only partially succeeded. The aspiration of a tropical civilization in the Parisian mold waned, as more relaxed dress codes attest. In later decades, led by Rio, Brazil instead projected a far more original—even if evidently distorted—image as “the country of carnival,” or of “racial democracy.”6 In the 1990s, Ventura wrote his Divided City in the aftermath of a massacre, when off-duty policemen killed twenty-one people in one of Rio’s poorer peripheral neighborhoods. He spent months in this community and wrote a book that intertwines different sides of the segregated city. Ventura was bold not just for exposing Rio’s divisions, or the inner workings of drug traffickers and corrupt police forces, but rather for his insistence on affirming the city’s imperiled traditions of circulation, cultural exchanges, and meaningful common denominators. Since then, far-reaching infrastructure investments have favored favelas, and in Brazil, major redistributionist policies have been implemented without stirring the sort of ethnic animus that we find elsewhere (though there are discouraging signs). After emerging from a long military dictatorship (1964–85), Brazil at
the turn of the century appeared to be in an ascendant trajectory, even as its former capital and most visible city lagged behind. In 2007, winning the hosting rights to the 2014 World Cup signaled Brazil’s emergence on the global stage, validated by a relatively successful weathering of the 2007–08 financial crisis. In October 2009, Rio de Janeiro’s election as the first South American host to the Olympics meant that the city’s time had also come. The announcement was received with jubilation. Then-president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva declared: “Today I’ve felt prouder of being Brazilian than on any other day. Today is the day that Brazil gained its international citizenship. Today is the day that we have overcome the last vestiges of prejudice against us. I think this is a day to celebrate because Brazil has left behind the level of second-class countries and entered the rank of first-class countries.”7 Rio’s mayor Eduardo Paes, who assumed office in the beginning of 2009 and was reelected to a second term (2012–16), often speaks of the Olympics in terms of the legacies that it will leave behind. He has framed himself in the tradition of Pereira Passos. Under the Paes administration, as Rio experienced some of the most consequential changes since its foundation in 1565, at least three new officially sanctioned epithets have been proposed. Porto Maravilha, “marvelous port,” evokes the marvelous city trope to designate the ambitious revitalization of the port area. Cidade Integrada, “integrated city,” seeks to push back against the divided city moniker. Ultimately, Rio’s government settled on Cidade Olímpica, or Olympic City.8 The Games arrives, however, amid a climate of general disillusionment and concern with Brazil’s prospects. In some ways, this represents a widespread shift over the past few years in perceptions of how wise it is to host mega-events. Given scandalous cost overruns, broken promises, and white elephants after recent Olympics and World Cups, this is not surprising.9 But Rio’s experiments with mega-event and Olympic urbanism need to be understood in their particular contexts, and the essays in this book accomplish that. Theresa Williamson’s, in fact, proposes other epithets—“monopoly city” and “the singular city”—as more useful categories for thinking about contemporary Rio. At the same time, the interventions connected to the Games and the missed opportunities in the lead-up to them should pertain to all those concerned with urban futures, and with how we can build more democratic cities. Between the early-twentieth-century ideal of a Paris in the tropics and the drug war–fueled violence of the 1990s, quite a few changes occurred. In some ways they set Rio apart in its current condition as a divided
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5. “A capital irradiante: técnica, ritmos e ritos do Rio,” in História da vida privada no Brasil, Vol. 3, ed. Nicolau Sevcenko and Fernando A. Novais. (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1998), 623.
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7. BBC, “Rio to Stage 2016 Games,” BBC Sport: Olympics, October 2, 2009, http:// news.bbc. co.uk/sport1/ hi/olympic_ games/8282518. stm. 8. See Prefeitura do Rio de Janeiro, “Cidade Olímpica,” 2016, http://www. cidadeolimpica. com.br. 9. See Mark Perryman, Why the Olympics Aren’t Good for Us, and How They Can be (New York: OR Books, 2012), and Dave Zirin, Brazil’s Dance with the Devil (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014).
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13. Ibid.
city—and as an Olympic city. In a nutshell, during the 1920s and ’30s the thinking in Brazil departed from a broad Western consensus over scientific racism, including an obsession with notions of purity and the belief that miscegenation leads to degeneracy. In a country as ethnically mixed as Brazil, it is easy to understand how such ideas might be an inconvenience.10 Over time, the image of Brazil as a land of racial harmony became widely propagated, and sociocultural as well as political discourses increasingly posited mixture as a desirable feature. Initially marginalized expressions, like samba, originating in some of Rio’s most diverse quarters, became dominant and emblematic of nationhood. Echoes of this cultural history pervade the repertoire through which Rio has been presented to the world, including as an Olympic city.11 These narratives are more or less uncontroversial among experts. Any serious student of twentieth-century Rio (or Brazil) sooner or later confronts the question of how a culture and self-image defined by mixture coexists with stark socioeconomic inequality. It just so happens that in interwar Rio, a contradictory development coincided with newfound discourses of Brazil’s ethos as mixed and inclusive. In an early and audacious embrace of certain tenets of modern urbanism, planning and governance became increasingly intent on segregating urban spaces. Sociocultural paradigms and urbanism went in opposite directions: the country became broadly accepted and even celebrated as mixed, but city planning further sought to divide and stratify.12 This at once vastly unequal but vibrant and diverse Rio could be deemed a porous city, a descriptor that disrupts established narratives perpetuating either the flattened notion of a divided city, or the myth of a culturally harmonious, multiracial haven. Despite its inequalities, Rio’s cultural history has been shaped by fluid boundaries and exchanges across class, gender, race, language, and epistemologies. It is important to remember this past—still present in various cultural practices—as the legacies of Olympic urbanism risk rendering Rio’s porosity more outmoded than ever. Foregrounding Rio within a hemispheric perspective might help to press the point. Porosity can be understood as an attribute of port cities, as shared etymologies might imply. But Rio diverges from other major cities of the Americas for its lack of ethnic neighborhoods during the twentieth century. After the 1930s, for example, one of Rio’s popular public squares became known simultaneously as the epicenter of a Jewish neighborhood and as a Little Africa. It was actually located in an area where whites remained the majority.13 There was never anything in Rio quite like what occurred in cities of the United States during the twentieth century. No Jim Crow laws, redlining,
blockbusting, or white flight. Cultural consumption is generally not segregated by race. Favelas, historically represented as black, have in fact always been multiracial. Even today, in the least white area of the city according to the latest census data, the Mangueira favela, less than a third of residents self-declare as black; citywide, in the same census, around 11.5% self-declared as black, 36.5% as pardo (mixed or gray-brown), 51.2% as white.14 And yet, to anyone familiar with this former capital of a country where slavery lasted until 1888, occurrences like those leading to renewed antiracism movements in the United States present all-too-familiar patterns: racialized police brutality and murder, along with institutionalized inequities that seem to render racism as blunt as it is redundant. Maps showing race by household in beachfront neighborhoods of Rio might not show the sharp dividing lines found in St. Louis, Missouri, or even in São Paulo, and on a hot day, the bodies behind census dots might converge on the beach, regardless of color. But it is not that inequality in Rio manifests itself more as a Pollock painting than a Mondrian.15 It is more that, whereas poverty is multiracial, the wealthiest city blocks are nearly entirely occupied by white residents. Nonetheless, even with residential segregation, the presence of largely unplanned but shared multiethnic spaces like beaches, dancehalls, sidewalks, and stadiums have been vital to Rio’s rich culture. It is this legacy that is put in jeopardy by Olympic urbanism. In the 1920s and ’30s, pioneering urban plans proposed strict zoning laws and near-absolute social segregation, with the circulation of automobiles as a guiding concern. In the 1940s, the neighborhood that brought together Rio’s Little Africa and Jewish quarter was razed for the construction of a monumental avenue. Between the 1950s and ’80s, like other major Latin American cities but unlike so many in the United States, Rio’s population kept growing. A series of elevated highways privileged the increasingly affluent beachside South Zone, adversely affecting suburban neighborhoods. New transportation networks facilitating access to the downtown coupled with legislation against residential uses in central areas led to a more sprawling and uneven city. As Rio became less compact, spatial segregation grew. The 1960s and ’70s were marked by “removals,” under a military dictatorship, when the state razed several favelas located in prime real estate areas, forcibly relocating residents to housing projects in the peripheries. The estimated population living in favelas grew from around 10% of a city of 3.2 million in the 1960s to almost 20% of a city of 5.8 million in 2000.16 Since the 1980s, as Brazil adjusts to democracy, the contradictions between the rhetoric of inclusion and practices of exclusion have remained.
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10. See Lilia Schwarcz, Spectacle of the Races (New York: Hill & Wang, 1999). 11. As the poet Manuel Bandeira famously put it in the 1920s, the Rio native is “someone born in [the state of] Espírito Santo or in Belém do Pará [a city in the Amazon],” Crônicas da província do Brasil (1937; repr. São Paulo, Cosac Naify, 2007), 155. Rio remains a diverse city of few nativist tensions, but its inclusionary ethos can hardly be reconciled with the persistence of uneven infrastructure and unequal access to rights. 12. Modernist architecture, at its best, offered interfaces, creating sites of negotiation between these opposing pulls and pressures. On tensions between urbanism and socio-cultural life, see Carvalho.
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14. For census data, see IBGE Censo Demográfico 2010 at http:// censo2010. ibge.gov.br. In Mangueira, 24.5% self-declare as white, 27.67% as black, 46.39% as pardo. Data on Rio can be found at http:// portalgeo.rio. rj.gov.br 15. The analogy with painters was a suggestion by Rick Burdett, during the panel on “The Divided City” hosted at Washington University in St. Louis in October 2015. 16. This data is summarized from the respective censuses. There is a vast bibliography on favelas and on Rio’s more recent history. In English, see Brodwyn Fischer, A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro (Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010), and Bryan McCann, Hard Times in the Marvelous City: From Dictatorship to Democracy in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014).
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17. See, for instance, various reports by RioOnWatch: Community Reporting On Rio (http://www. rioonwatch.org).
They are crucial to understand ongoing tensions related to developments spurred by the 2016 Olympic Games (a topic to which the essay “Occupy All Streets: Protesting a Right to the Future” returns). In a porous city, stratification does not preclude fluid boundaries. But in a growing metropolitan region with upwards of 12 million inhabitants, no measure of cultural cohesion could sufficiently reconcile deep inequities with democratic life. The official “Integrated City” epithet, which never caught on, was doubtlessly well-intentioned. And there is a good case to be made for new mobility infrastructure—namely, a metro extension, and highways with Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) lines—leading to a more integrated city. Yet in this case, anyone would be hard-pressed to argue that these investments also lead to a more inclusive city. More integrated in terms of mass transit, perhaps, but with unprecedented segregation. Not all is dire news, even if much is. There are at least three main clusters of developments connected to the Olympics. The ambitious reforms in the historic port area—the aforementioned Porto Maravilha—have included the removal of an elevated highway that stood between the city and the bay, as well as the addition of tram lines connecting the port area to the center. A new Museum of Tomorrow (Museu do Amanhã) designed by Santiago Calatrava opened in late 2015. To the credit of the Paes administration, the original plans for the Olympics did not contemplate this long-neglected region in significant ways, and although these developments have become associated with preparations for the Games, they are marginal to it. Aspects of these reforms deserve praise, but they included forced relocations and have generated justified fears of gentrification (and further relocations).17 North of the center, the area around the Maracanã stadium, deserves attention, as well as the neighborhood of Deodoro, technically already in Rio’s West Zone. Deodoro is in a usually overlooked part of the city, of low to middle income residents and pockets of poverty. Leaving Deodoro, a road sign contains the following graffiti: “the bad side of this good city.” Facilities built to host Olympic events have been converted into a new public park (Parque Radical) with a swimming area that reportedly received as many as 15,000 bathers after its inauguration. Deodoro will be connected by the Transolímpica expressway to the wealthier West Zone neighborhood of Barra da Tijuca, the focal point of the Olympics. The fifteen-mile route, covered by exclusive BRT bus lanes, is supposed to reduce to around twenty minutes a trip that might have taken two to three hours in the past. Bryan McCann dedicates his essay in this volume, “Parque Madureira:
Public Space, Leisure, and Trauma in Rio de Janeiro,” to an intervention in a North Zone working-class neighborhood not far from Deodoro. But the bulk of the investments related to the Games has been directed to Barra da Tijuca in the West Zone, and to a newly developed area being deemed Barra Olímpica. Not accidentally, Barra’s place in the city’s imaginaries are crucial to “Branding the Marvelous City,” the contribution by Beatriz Jaguaribe and Scott Salmon in this volume. In turn, the essay by Mariana Cavalcanti, Julia O’Donnell, and Lilian Sampaio, “Futures and Ruins of an Olympic City,” focuses on Barra Olímpica. Even though the Olympic Park and the majority of events are located in this area, the scale of accompanying developments has until now remained surprisingly under the radar. This might constitute the most consequential spatial reorganization in the city’s history. Barra da Tijuca’s development, parallel to the beachfront, began in the 1970s and picked up significantly thereafter. It now has over 300,000 residents in an area larger than Miami, a city to which it is sometimes compared. Barra’s symbolic boundaries have expanded with Rio’s Olympic urbanism, as adjoining territories—further inland—repeat its patterns of development: several square miles are now covered by highrise condominium towers with fenced-in open spaces. Car-dependent and sprawling, this represents a more environmentally predatory urbanization model than Rio’s traditional corridor-street neighborhoods.18 Most readers would recognize the patterns of real estate developers currying favors through campaign donations, insider dealings, and billions of infrastructure investment, where costs are incurred by the public, but profits are private. The disproportionate investment in the East-West axis, parallel to the waterfront, conforms to an elitist vision of Rio’s future that harkens back to the Pereira Passos reforms of over a century ago. A competing vector, dating to the city’s very beginnings, structures Rio’s development along a South-North vector, around as well as across the Guanabara Bay.19 This is reflected in a metropolitan region of over 12 million people, whereas the municipality’s population is around 6.5 million. Rio’s official limits are oriented along an East-West axis, shaped by water and a mountain chain. Here, structural conditions conspired against the best interests of the population. From City Hall’s perspective, after all, there were evidently more incentives in keeping investments within municipal boundaries, rather than where they were most needed.20 The spatial logic here reflects a challenge of contemporary urbanism, where we often have a mismatch between “the city proper” and the lived city.21
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18. There is growing literature on the environmental advantages of more compact urban develop-ment. See, for example, William B. Meyer, The Environmental Advantages of Cities (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). 19. The promises efforts to de-pollute the bay—and for that matter, the lakes in Barra da Tijuca—have not been met, and water conditions have attracted considerable attention in the foreign press. 20. During the past decade or so, several citywide social indicators improved, but less so if we include the metropolitan region. By and large, investments have continued to privilege more spectacular and central favelas as well as the Olympic city, accentuating spatial inequalities and segregation. 21. At least one recent NGO has been attempting to tackle this issue in Rio’s metropolitan area. See “A Casa Fluminense é um espaço de construção coletiva de políticas públicas para toda a metrópole do Rio de Janeiro,” 2016, http:// casafluminense. org.br.
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The notion of Olympic urbanism might bring to mind takedowns of “Olympian” urbanists and planners, sketching out grand designs from a removed distance, in god-like fashion. This book is not a reiteration of now familiar critiques of top-down planning. In fact, several alternative plans outlined more democratic visions for the city. In “Viable Futures: Contradictions and Possibilities in Social Housing in Rio de Janeiro,” architects Renata Bertol and Gabriel Duarte show how Olympic pressures distorted interventions already underway, forcing designers to cater to new demands and resulting in missed opportunities for the city even when creative solutions prevailed. In “New Centralities: Planning the Post-Olympic City,” Guilherme Lassance reflects about moving forward, after the Games. But in Rio, as elsewhere in the contemporary world, city planners and designers are hardly the driving force behind urban development. The sense that Olympic urbanism implies an Olympian attitude nonetheless remains. It is just that rather than planners calling the shots, decisions more likely reflect the collusion between certain government officials and a few players in real estate. The main beneficiaries of Rio de Janeiro’s Olympic urbanism have been real estate developers. In particular, the vision of Barra Olímpica as limited to the rich has been made abundantly clear in one developer’s declarations to the press.22 After the Games end—and postcard images of Rio de Janeiro as the Marvelous City stop gracing television screens everywhere—what will remain? Besides a new epithet, the Olympic city, with limited popular appeal, how will Olympic urbanism transform Rio de Janeiro’s future? In Rio, as elsewhere, socioeconomic divisions often reflect spatially, in the built environment, as a result of concerted efforts. The city continues to be a fascinating case study and laboratory for how mobility and segregation can coexist, for how identitary boundaries can be surmounted, and for how socio-racial mixture or cultural inclusion can abet other forms of exclusion. Rio’s past can continue to inform our present, but it seems like the city is becoming more divided in unprecedented, and yet, unfortunately familiar ways.
Works Cited Bandeira, Manuel. Crônicas da província do Brasil. 1937. Reprint, São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2007. BBC. “Rio to Stage 2016 Games.” BBC Sport: Olympics, October 2, 2013 http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/ olympic_games/8282518.stm. Carvalho, Bruno. Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013. Casa Fluminense. “A Casa Fluminense é um espaço de construção coletiva de políticas públicas para toda a metrópole do Rio de Janeiro.” 2016. http://casafluminense.org.br. Catalytic Communities (CatComm). “Community Reporting On Rio.” Rio on Watch. 2016. http://www. rioonwatch.org. Catulle-Mendes, Jeanne. La Ville Merveilleuse. E. Sansot. 1912. Coelho Neto, Henrique Maximiano. A cidade maravilhosa. São Paulo: Companhia Melhoramentos de S. Paulo Weiszflog Irmãos Incorporada, 1928. Fischer, Brodwyn. A Poverty of Rights: Citizenship and Inequality in Twentieth-Century Rio de Janeiro. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010. McCann, Bryan. Hard Times in the Marvelous City: From Dictatorship to Democracy in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Meade, Teresa. “Civilizing” Rio: Reform and Resistance in a Brazilian City, 1889–1930. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997. Meyer, William B. The Environmental Advantages of Cities. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Perryman, Mark. Why the Olympics Aren’t Good for Us, and How They Can Be. New York: OR Books, 2012. Prefeitura do Rio de Janiero. “Cidade Olímpica.” Rio Prefeitura. 2016. http://www.cidadeolimpica.com.br. Schwarcz, Lilia. Spectacle of the Races. New York: Hill & Wang, 1999. Sevcenko, Nicolau. “A capital irradiante: técnica, ritmos e ritos do Rio.” In História da vida privada no Brasil, Third Volume, edited by Nicolau Sevcenko and Fernando A. Novais, 513–620. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1998. Watts, Jonathan. “The Rio Property Developer Hoping for a $1bn Olympic Legacy of His Own.” Guardian. August 4, 2015. http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/aug/04/rio-olympic-games-2016-propertydeveloper-carlos-carvalho-barra. Zirin, Dave. Brazil’s Dance with the Devil. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2014.
22. Carlos Carvalho, founder and president of Carvalho-Hosken, the development company behind Barra Olímpica and much of Barra da Tijuca, declared in an interview with the Guardian: “We think that if the standards were lowered, we would be taking away from what the city—the new city—could represent on the global scene as a city of the elite, of good taste . . . this reason, it needed to be noble housing, not housing for the poor.” One the residents of the Vila Autódromo favela, being pushed away by developments connected to the Olympics, he states that “they have to go.” For more see Jonathan Watts, “The Rio Property Developer Hoping for a $1bn Olympic Legacy of His Own,” Guardian, August 4, 2015, http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/aug/04/rio-olympic-games-2016-property-developer-carlos-carvalho-barra.
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Occupy All Streets: Olympic Urbanism and Contested Futures in Rio de Janeiro analyzes the implications of the comprehensive transformation of the city in relation to the 2016 Games. Contributions from literary critics, historians, anthropologists, architects, media theorists, geographers and urban planners explore the array of interventions proposed and built in anticipation of recent mega-events. Collectively, the essays tell the story of how these changes to the cityscape have kindled Rio’s citizens’ hopes and aspirations for their “right to the future,” and also chronicle the various ways they have contested the futures being imposed on them. Anticipating the city yet to come, these essays also point to the potential for activism and protest to transform the Olympic legacy into different futures. While focused on Rio, Occupy All Streets is full of insights for other cities experiencing wide-ranging challenges and facing far-reaching reforms.
Editors
Edited by Bruno Carvalho Mariana Cavalcanti Vyjayanthi Rao Venuturupalli Contributors
Bruno Carvalho Mariana Cavalcanti with Julia O’Donnell and Lilian Sampaio Gabriel Duarte with Renata Bertol Beatriz Jaguaribe with Scott Salmon Guilherme Lassance Bryan McCann Theresa Williamson Vyjayanthi Rao Venuturupalli
Urban Research Urban Research (UR) is a book series devoted to speculation about the condition and future of the city. We publish projects ranging from the practical to the utopian, from community-generated plans for neighborhood transformation to outstanding outcomes from academic studios, visionary speculations by designers burning the midnight oil, and collations of arguments about the most urgent issues of urban growth and survival. Our remit is to get the word out about solutions that exceed the imaginative reach of “official” planning and design and to encourage the most vigorous debate. UR, the imprint of Terreform, seeks to become a key venue both for individuals and organizations engaged in progressive urban research, design, and critical advocacy. We invite the collaboration of all who share our interest in creating sustainable, beautiful, and just cities around the world. urpub.org
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