Removal, resistance and the right to the Olympic city: The case of Vila Autodromo in Rio de Janeiro

On the same October day in 2009 that the International Olympic Committee announced the 2016 Summer Olympics would be held in Rio de Janeiro, the mayor of Rio de Janeiro announced that Vila Autódromo — a fairly small favela in the west part of the city, crowded between a lagoon, an automobile racetrack, and a busy highway, and ultimately the Olympic Park — would be removed as part of the infrastructure plan designed to prepare the city for the Games. This article examines the case of Vila Autódromo, and the resistance of favela residents to being forcibly removed from their community, to provide insight into the sources of opposition and resistance to urban development. The practice of force devictions in the name of urban development will be explored as a manifest form of marginalization in the context of Olympic development. Rather than concealing urban problems, urban spectacles such as the Olympics serve to highlight social inequalities and display highly contradictory urban representations that can spawn agendas of resistance that serve to complicate elite redevelopment agendas and divide progrowth coalitions.