Mega sporting events as tools of urban redevelopment: lessons learned from Rio de Janeiro (original) (raw)
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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.
The preparations for the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro are being tainted by violent and sometimes illegal displacement of poor families for the building of urban structure and sport facilities. This paper will focus on the social consequences of RIO2016 regarding these displacements. For this purpose, the literature on the theme will be reviewed as well documents produced by different actors. We show that previous Rio de Janeiro proposals for hosting the Olympic Games were changed in the name of city’s aesthetic and supposed safety for the Olympic family, whereas gentrification became a norm and few groups were privileged. On the bright side, the approximation of academics and community strengthened social movements of resistance.
Social inequality and housing policies, 2018
The relationship between social classes and occupied territory in the city of Rio de Janeiro can be understood through the analysis of how they fought for space and formed the urban environment as we know it today. We can find the goal of increasing the spatial distance between social classes in the recent history of the city, which has formed a unique configuration of segregation and unequal access to the most needed urban goods. Such pattern of segregation was produced by authorities in favor of powerful actors, like the construction companies, by the removals of favelas in valued areas. The activities brought by the 2013 Olympic Games aggravated this scenario, removing communities, as Vila Aut´odromo, in new disputed lands. The interest of big companies in valued areas of the city has provoked the removal of almost 67.000 of people between 2009 and 2013. According to this, we seek to understand how the mega-events preparations followed the historical patterns of urban policies of the city’s most important events. We argue that the preparations reinforced these local patterns and, as a result, left more social exclusion as an \Olympic Legacy". To explain the relations between political actors and urban configuration are provided: i) a historical review of the main events of the city; ii) a theoretical chapter explaining the concepts used; iii) a chapter of data, clarifying the divisions between social classes in the city; and, finally, iv) the case study, explaining the connections between the mega-events and the urban policies in Rio de Janeiro. Understanding the Olympic Games through the history of the city will clarify the relations between global and local economic interests, and their capacity to shape domestic politics.
This bachelor thesis, completed in 2014 for a BSc in Environment and Development Studies at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, critically reflects on the development consequences linked to the hosting by Brazil of the 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Summer Olympics. The thesis is divided in two parts. The first introduces the concept of ' sports mega-event' and provides a broader discussion of its overall characteristics and social significance for hosting societies. The second focuses on Brazil as a case study, discussing the preparations and the controversial development agendas associated with the sports mega-event enterprise in the country.
Olympics´ Impacts in Rio de Janeiro´s urban sustainability
Transylvanian Review, 2018
The aim of this paper is to discuss the relationship between sustainable urban transformation and hosting a sport mega-event. Therefore, indicators were extracted from the literature review of impacts in four dimensions (physical, economic, environmental and social). Corresponding factors were compared with sustainability sub-themes in order to evaluate whether hosting the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro was in line with sustainability goals for the city. Results show that there is a slight alignment between them in terms of event-related transport expansion in the city and green spaces improvement. But, there is a huge gap between the physical, environmental, economic and social-cultural goals of hosting the Games and urban sustainability. Likewise, Rio de Janeiro has not met sustainable objectives in terms of diminishing the mega event´s impacts on: i) urban environment like the offsetting carbon emissions; ii) economic downward trend; iii) social improvement such as reductio...
Urban restructuring in Rio for 2007 PAN (english).docx
Hosting a sports mega-event (SME) almost always means the expenditure of large amounts of resources, beyond the amounts normally found in municipal, state and federal budgets. The impact and cost of sport mega-events have grown in concert with their political and symbolic capital. These increasing costs are disproportionately assumed by the public sector while SME boosters in the politics-sports-media alliance (Delaney and Eckstein 2003) promise short, medium and long term returns on investment. In structuring an evaluation of the economic, urban, and social costs of SMEs in Brazil, we ask the following questions: 1) how are the new injections of capital socially distributed and used? 2) does the inevitable urban restructuring impact the existing socio-spatial inequalities?