The mega-event city as neo-liberal laboratory: the case of Rio de Janeiro (original) (raw)
Related papers
Revista de Administração de Empresas, 2016
Mega-events are urban spectacles that bring together capital, physical materials, symbols, people and organizations, to produce sports and cultural events. Rio de Janeiro hosted the soccer World Cup in 2014 and will shortly host the 2016 Olympics, two such mega-events. This paper discusses these mega-events in terms of a new and influential model of transnational governance that involves market-based alliances between urban leaders, real-estate developers, global corporations and sports-related civil society groups. It begins by defining mega-events and their significance to transnational governance, and then describes the mega-events being held in Rio de Janeiro. In the final section, the implications of these mega-events are reviewed, highlighting the on-going period of contestation within urban visions of transnational governance.
Mega sporting events as tools of urban redevelopment: lessons learned from Rio de Janeiro
In the 1990s, the municipality of Rio de Janeiro initiated a new policy that involved the use of mega sporting events as tools for urban redevelopment and regeneration of the city. This strategy culminated in the hosting of the 2014 Fédération Internationale de Football Association football World Cup and the 2016 summer Olympic Games. Through interviews with experts and bid book analysis, the paper aims to assess the impact of this strategy on Rio de Janeiro and its population, with a specific focus on the 2016 summer Olympic Games and two main Olympic clusters, Maracanã and Barra da Tijuca. Indeed, the 2016 Games were touted as a way to promote sustainable development in the city, and, also, social inclusion. However, the results show a very harmful impact of the Olympics on Rio de Janeiro. First, they increased the physical fragmentation and polarisation of the city; second, they aggravated social and economic inequalities among the local population.
A festive surveillance (and its discontents): Mega-events in Rio de Janeiro
Favelas@LSE, 2015
There is an ongoing public debate around the potential negative effects of the mega-events being hosted by Rio de Janeiro. In this post, Jorge de La Barre contributes to this conversation by discussing the mega-event rhetoric in the city and its relation to recent protests in Brazil.
2021
This dissertation studies the political consequences of Rio de Janeiro’s hosting of sports mega-events (the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympics) through the lens of citizenship. Through a contextual and grounded analysis based on longitudinal ethnographic fieldwork, it examines (i) how the mega-events influenced the political organization and management of the city, and (ii) the mobilization and organization of popular resistance to the Olympic city project. The main conclusion drawn is that Rio’s mega-events were used as a leverage for a neoliberal reconfiguration of the city in a way that was de-politicizing - as the urgency and exceptionality of the mega-events opened up for suspending legal norms and bypassing political contestation - yet, did not render the city ‘post-political’. In contrast, it triggered popular politics and protests that challenged de-politicized urban development and politicized urban citizenship. This way, the dissertation studies the contentious poli...
According to Castells (1983, p302), the city, the dominant spatial form of urban society, is the result of conflicts over what a city should be and is structured according to the “interests and values” of historical actors. So do cities today generally reflect what society on the whole wants, and if not, are people willing to rebel? This paper focuses on cases of the relocation of inhabitants of the city of Rio de Janeiro, to see how idyllic, or not, capitalism and hosting mega-events can be.
Future shock: mega-events in Rio de Janeiro
Leisure Studies, Taylor & Francis, 2015, p. 1-17, 2015
In preparation for the mega-events of 2014 and 2016, the city of Rio de Janeiro has been going through a permanent shock of agenda, characterised by important urban reengineering projects, population removal and favela (shanty town) pacification. This essay explores the Rio of (sports and other) mega-events and questions the place of the social, in a paradigm marked by futurism and by techno-culture that may be announcing a new political economy: the political economy of mega-events.
An Olympic city in the making : Rio de Janeiro mega-event strategy 1993-2016
Postgraduate research grant programme 2012 report, 2012
In October 2009, the city of Rio de Janeiro was announced the host of the XXXI Olympic Games. The news came as surprise to many commentators which have previously placed the city as the underdog amidst more high-profile bids, but for those involved with the Brazilian bid the award was the culmination of a project initiated sixteen years earlier. During this period Rio de Janeiro's mega-event strategy evolved through failed Olympic bids, the hosting of the Pan American Games and the mobilisation of expert knowledge from former hosts and bid committees. However, despite the cumulative learning and the relational nature of the project a more nuanced perspective indicates how the strategy was part and parcel of a marked change in local urban politics, appreciated for the ability to leverage funding and accelerate urban development. This study reviews the pre-award years and its aftermath in order to document and interrogate the contested development of Rio mega-event strategy and examine the emerging geography of the city of the 2016 Games.
Global urbanism and mega events planning in Rio de Janeiro amid crisis and austerity
Internation Planning Studies, 2020
Putting Milton Santos' theorisations in conversation with post-colonial conceptualization of global urbanism, the paper discusses the legacy of mega-events planning in Rio de Janeiro in times of austerity, through the prism of the nexus between globalization and urbanism. Three main interrelated dimensions of the Carioca global urbanism and of the clash between global aspirations and local realities are highlighted and discussed in order to challenge dominant conceptualization of both mega-events planning and austerity urbanism: a) the mobilization of an ensemble of high-tech fantasies as globalist imaginaries of urban planning; b) a complex reconfiguration of the core-periphery geographies of knowledge as a key trait of a perverse globalization; (c) a multitude of discourses and practices of insurgent urbanism as a source of radical imagination against the imperatives of austerity.
The revanchist logic of mega-events: community displacement in Rio de Janeiro's West End
Visual Studies, 2012
As the curtains are drawn in London’s East End, Brazil and Rio de Janeiro will be under the international spotlight over the next four years. This paper focuses on the process of Olympic city-making in the West End of Rio de Janeiro, where the planning and construction of facilities and transport network have adversely affected low-income settlements. The planning of the Olympic Park has become the latest episode in a series of attempts to drive out one of the longest established poor settlements in the borough of Barra da Tijuca. Attention is given to the changing discourse justifying the relocation and the context in which residents have resisted eviction. In another case study, the paper considers the construction of Bus Rapid Transit corridors aimed to improve access to the area. In this instance, some communities were not able to avoid eviction, being relocated to the western edges of the city or financially compensated. Analysis of the eviction process is drawn from material collected by visiting the affected communities. The paper concludes by reflecting on the inexorability of Olympic city-making and entitlement to the emerging geographies.