Great, Good, and Divided: The Politics of Public Space in Rio De Janeiro

At a time when cities, particularly large Latin American cities, are increasingly polarized and overcome with violence, and public space has long been pronounced dead, an exceptionally vibrant public realm survives in Rio de Janeiro. In the elite beach neighborhood of Ipanema, residents spend a large part of their free time in public: on the street corner, in bars, and on the beach. Ipanema has a proliferation of what Ray Oldenburg calls “third places” where neighbors, friends, and colleagues plug into and out of an ongoing public social life. But below the idyllic surface lies a conflictual social space stratified along race and class lines. Through an analysis of the discursive construction of the beach, the politics of beach access, and a 15-year old tradition of beach riots, I question the notion—popularized by Oldenburg and others—of public space as the location of an organic civil society that greases the wheels of commerce, promotes democracy, and solves its own problems in the common interest. Rather, I argue that Rio’s famous beach neighborhoods are a key arena of the public sphere where the terms of Rio’s unjust social order are challenged, negotiated, and largely reproduced. Nevertheless, Ipanema’s public space represents political possibility for the otherwise excluded majority.