A City at Play: Rio de Janeiro on the Eve of the Olympic Games

CityReadsVol.86

A City at Play: Rio de Janeiro on the Eve of the 

2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games

The special issue of Architectural Design, Brazil: Restructuring the Urban sets out to explore the transformation of Brazilian cities after the hosting for the sporting mega-events. Rio's Olympic story is not a happy one.

Hartman,H. (2016), Seeds of Change: Urban Transformation in Brazil. Archit Design, 86:10–19. doi: 10.1002/ad.2041

Wisnik, G. (2016),Where to for Brazil's Cities? Citizen Empowerment or Global Marketing?. Archit Design, 86: 20–27. doi:10.1002/ad.2042

Nobre, A. L. (2016), A City at Play: Rio de Janeiro on the Eve of the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games. Archit Design, 86: 28–39. doi: 10.1002/ad.2043

Source:

Picture source: http://as.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118972465.html

Brazil is a country of city dwellers undergoing radical transformation: over 85 per cent of the country’s citizens live in cities and almost half of those live in 22 metropolisesof over a million people. Whereas previously urban growth had been ad hoc (withthe significant exceptions of Brasília and Curitiba), preparation for the FIFAWorld Cup in 12 cities across the country in 2014, and for the upcoming Olympic and Paralympic Games in Rio, changed all that. Several Brazilian cities have proactively invested in infrastructure and the public realm. Upon being named to host the next Olympics in 2009, Rio embarked on a multitude of transformative construction projects unseen in the city since Brazil’s capital was relocated to Brasília in the 1960s. Simultaneously, many of the World Cup host cities undertook the restructuring of their stadia, airports and transport connections to accommodate international visitors.

The failure of public authorities to meet their ambitious aspirations for the sporting mega-events sparked a series of street protests across the country under the banner of ‘the right to the city’, beginning in 2013. For Brazil, this was an entirely new phenomenon, one which has unveiled the potential for bottom-up influences to effect urban change.

It is these transformations that the special issue of Architectural Design, Brazil: Restructuring the Urban, sets out to explore. The focus is on that civic sense, places where Brazilians from every walk of life experiencethe city. Rio’s Olympic story, as documented in the pages of this issue, is not a happy one.

Economic Vicissitudes

Nine months before the Games, BBC Radio 4 reported that the Rio 2016 organizers had cut their budget by up to 30 per cent, impacting the opening ceremony (the budget for which was estimated at 10 per cent that of London's), temporary structures, and even in-house photocopying.

To understand Rio's predicament, one must bear in mind the changes in Brazil's national landscape since 2009, when the city was chosen to host the Games. At that time,the entire country was riding high on the euphoria of petroleum discovered in Rio's seabed, to such a point that the 2008 global economic crisis minimally impacted the national economy. A period of optimism ensued, sustained by a conjunctionof factors, including federal policies to generate work and income, the growth of the middle class, and the selection of the country as host for this sequence of international events.

Brazil's economic boom peaked with 7.5 per cent growth in 2010.

A November 2009 cover of The Economist depicted Rio's iconic Christ the Redeemer sculpture erupting from the Corcovado mountain like a rocket.

But signs of a Brazilian crisis began to appear in 2013.  A faltering economy since then precipitated a downward spiral that caused widespread dissatisfaction over the federal government's lavish spending on World Cup stadia, igniting massive street demonstrations during the football Confederations Cup in June 2013, openly questioning the government that had lured them in on promises of urban redemption based on these mega-events.

Critical questions like the collapse of infrastructure and urban services, social inequality,public safety, and the eternal conflict between public and private interests were repeatedly aired in the public forum of the street.

In 2014, Petrobras,the country's state-run energy company, was exposed in a multibillion-dollar corruption scandal – by some estimates involving as much as US$22 billion in money laundering-- implicating top government officials and executives of the country's leading construction firms, including some involved in delivering the Rio Olympics. Further street protests in 2015 called for President Dilma Rousseff's impeachment. In September, Standard & Poor's cut the country's sovereign credit rating to a non-investment speculative grade.

The country's gross domestic product plummeted and unemployment shot up.

In September of 2013,Brazil featured again on The Economist cover with an image of Corcovado's Christ taking a nosedive into Rio's Guanabara Bay, with the query: ‘Has Brazil Blownit?’

A Country of City Dwellers

The hosting of these international events coupled with an economic boom at the end of the last decade sparked a new confidence among Brazil's public and private sectors that wasreflected in the country's rapid urban metamorphosis.

Urban growth was fueled by key policies of the Luís Inácio Lula da Silva presidency (2003–10),which empowered the country's expanding lower middle class. The construction sector alone grew by more than 10 per cent between 2009 and 2010.

In the more than five and a half decades between Brasília's inauguration in 1960 and the present day,the country's population has practically tripled, from 70 to 200 million. Brazil's population surpassed the 200 million mark in 2011.

With the great migration from rural areas to cities, the rate of Brazilian urbanization has jumped from 45 per cent (still predominantly rural) to 85 per cent,characterized by the swell of urban centres and uncontrolled growth of their suburbs and favelas.

To understand the plight of Brazil's leading metropolises, a comparison between São Paulo and Mexico City is revealing. Despite having initiated construction of subwaysystems in the same era – at the end of the 1960s – Mexico City's network todayis two and a half times the extent of São Paulo's. While the former has 202 kilometres(125 miles) of track, the latter has only 78 kilometres (48 miles), while Riode Janeiro boasts a pitiful 40 kilometres (25 miles). It should be noted that public services in general have been poorly maintained in Brazilian cities since that time.

Since the 1990s, issues of crime and public safety have dominated the daily life of urban Brazilians. Explosions of violence reflect both Brazil's growing social apartheid and the decline of state power in relation to parallel structures such as criminalfactions linked to drug trafficking and rural oligarchies. As a result, an urbanmodel that might be called an 'archipelago city' has evolved in the face ofthese blatant social inequities. Favelas and luxury condominiums are often separated only by a simple wall.

An aerial view of São Paulo favela Paraisópolis by photographer Tuca Vieira

Rio on the Eve of the 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games

Brazil's second largest city is not much different from the rest of the country, where more homeshave TVs (97 per cent) than sewerage (64.3 per cent). In the Olympic city, 30 per cent of the population still has no access to a public sanitation system,and even in areas with real hook-ups, only about half of the sewage is treated before‑ owing into rivers or the sea. This explains why residents of Rocinha(one of the largest favelas in the city, located in the affluent southern zone)are demanding basic sanitation rather than the cable car.

Jorge MarioJáuregui/@telier metropolitano,Cable car, Complexo do Alemão, Rio de Janeiro,2011

Rio de Janeiro: keymap locating major landmarks, projects and Olympic venues

Santiago Calatrava, Museu do Amanhã(Museum of Tomorrow),Rio de Janeiro,2015

Olympic Park,Barrada Tijuca,Rio de Janeiro, July 2015

More than 20,000 families were relocated between January 2009 and December 2013 as part of public works associated with the Olympics

Right to the City 

These mega-events transcend the world of sports and involve massive infrastructure investment accompanied by rampant real-estate speculation. They have thus accentuated the country's internal social disparities, creating a powerful tinderbox that ignited popular demonstrations on the streets of numerous Brazilian cities.

Excessive spendingin response to FIFA's extravagant demands has planted seeds of change, awakening Brazilians to their ‘right to the city'.

The wave of optimism that swept Brazil in the first decade of the 21st century has succumbed to a tide of gloom and distrust of the status quo. Many projects, particularly in Rio, were led by construction companies who ignored local design talent. Many of the new World Cup stadia are located on remote sites on the urban periphery with expensive infrastructure that is now under-utilized.

Cities are for people and should not be sacrificed to the sterile whims of the market translated into built form.

Clearly, Brazil today is polarized between the urban marketing strategies of these global mediaevents, on the one hand, and the simultaneous empowerment of its citizens,expressed through political demonstrations and tactical urbanism actions in public spaces, on the other.

While the Olympics and most of the FIFA investments represent a missed opportunity, a glimmer of independent initiatives from civil society may suggest a new, more incremental way forward for Brazilian cities. The seeds planted by street protests and bottom-upinitiatives may deliver transformations more suited to Brazil's context in leaner times.

In the 1940s, Austrian writer Stefan Zweig sought a haven from Nazism near Rio de Janeiro where he penned his well-known ode to the country Brazil: Land of the Future (1943). As leaner times lead to belt tightening, one can only hope that these seeds will germinate and that Brazil will realize its potential as a country of the present.

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