Construção civil

O presente artigo tem como objetivos (i) mostrar como a experiência de revitalização do Bairro do Recife foi desvirtuada, aproximando-se da tendência de city marketing, entendida como a aceleração da taxa de transformação de certas localidades, com ênfase especulativa sobre imóveis e grandes obras de renomados arquitetos, com importantes repercussões em termos de trânsito de veículos e fluxos de pessoas, e (ii) questionar sobre a legitimidade de projetos que, embora institucionalmente aprovados, comprometem as características de determinadas estruturas espaciais urbanas, como é o caso dos centros históricos.

The current developments in Rio de Janeiro in the wake of the 2014 International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympic Games have accelerated the transition from a hybridurban order to a new urban order of intensified neoliberalization and commodification. This transition is a complex and contradictory process that entails both rollback and rollout features of neoliberalism, as well as a permanent restructuring of sociospatial relations and political arrangements. By discussing the on going policies and politics of urban restructuring, we examine the creative destruction of urban structures, institutional arrangements, and regulations of urban space with the transformation of 3 sites in Rio de Janeiro — Barra da Tijuca, the port district, and the South Zone. The process of variegated neoliberalization generates new modes of production and reproduction, which threaten the principles of democratic governance and universalization of rights to the city. 

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.

Based on a study of urban interventions in the city of Rio de Janeiro conducted in the context of the 2016 Summer Olympics, this article investigates how contemporary dispossessions relate, contribute, or do not contribute to the expansion of capitalist accumulation. To do so, I first define 3 types of dispossession: (a) redistributive dispossession; (b) expanding dispossession via capitalization and proletarianization; and (c) expanding dispossession via commodification and proletarianization. The first is only a redistribution of already produced surpluses, and the other 2 expand the accumulation of capital by converting means of production or subsistence into capital or commodities and increasing the availability of labor power. The theoretical distinction between different types of dispossession guides the analyses of spatial restructuring in the wake of the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

The critical geography scholarship on mega-events mostly adopts the framework of accumulation by dispossession, highlighting the disruptive legacies such as displacement and gentrification wrought upon host cities. Though the critique is largely correct, it has failed to capture the complex layers of historical and institutional contexts that underlie urban social change in mega-event cities. This article makes a case for broadening our analytical perspective by introducing the concept of aspirational urbanism, which refers to the diverse practices and discourses launched by state and business elites in an attempt to remake their cities bourgeois and world-class. Aspirational urbanism underscores the gap between global aspirations and local realities and draws our attention to the ad hoc economic, political, and cultural strategies used by state and business elites to bridge the gap. The concept is particularly useful for studying transformations in mega-event cities in the Global South, because these are the places marked by sharp contrasts between global city ambitions and developing-country realities. By way of introducing this special issue on urban transformations and spectacles in Brazil, this article presents a comparative analysis of the Rio de Janeiro 2016 and Beijing 2008 Olympics to examine how aspirational urbanism unfolded differently in the 2 cities.

This paper evaluates the compatibility of public–private partnerships (PPP) for housing in Brazil with the notion of the right to the city, enshrined in the Constitution. A 3-year investigation of the country’s first housing PPP, Casa Paulista, located in downtown São Paulo city, informs the analysis. Drawing from the international debate on the right to the city and its application in Brazil, I offer a definition of the term that transcends the notion of rights-based policy, and implies urban dwellers’ appropriation of urban production and city space. While failing to scale up centrally located housing delivery, the PPP facilitates a new housing regime marked by the decreased ability of citizens, particularly grassroots movements, to appropriate housing production, directly contradicting the right to the city ideal. Finally, I describe an outcome from this new regime—an ad hoc and opaque system of public land allocation for PPP housing developments.

In the Global South, the notion of the right to the city has increasingly been used to challenge the effects of uneven development on vulnerable informal residents. Yet, under a neoliberal spatial regime, acknowledging rights of informal residents does not necessarily lead to increasing access to the opportunities that cities produce. The article documents a contradictory process of,simultaneously, institutionalization of rights and implementation of profit-driven urban investments associated with 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil. It is based on local-level, case-specific analysis of a dispute around the mega-event mobility investments and the demands of residents of Lagamar— a low-income, informal community in Fortaleza— adopting participant observation methods during a 3-year field research period. The case illustrates how Brazilian right to the city policies have gone beyond the mere recognition of land rights of informal residents, yet they have fallen short of addressing the needs of the urban poor, highlighting the role of mega-event investments in this process. The contradiction of simultaneously expanding and eroding the rights of the urban poor in Brazil has given room for manipulative state practices that I have called “undoing the right to the city.”

Brazilian housing movements often use the slogan “a home is an entryway to all other rights,” which embodies the belief that a secure home is just the beginning of claiming the rights of citizenship. These movements rejoiced when President Lula da Silva came to office in the 2000s and enacted social programs meant to reshape the relationship between citizens, the state, and the market. But how did reform of social programs prove to be empowering of individuals and transformative in urban governance? In this paper, I evaluate how the Minha Casa Minha Vida Entidades Program, based on the principles of auto-gestão (self-management), shaped feelings of self-efficacy and civic participation of residents at the time of construction and beyond. Through interviews and surveys with residents in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Salvador, I find their experiences led to feelings of empowerment and many sought to work collaboratively to make further claims of the state. These individual and community-level transformations may also be the start of greater movement toward the right to the city across Brazil.

A pertinência de se sediar a Copa do Mundo, tornou-se, para o Brasil, um tema controverso entre 2013 e 2014, focando-se os debates em dois elementos de disputa: os impactos econômicos e sociais do evento. Um terceiro elemento, contudo, também fora mobilizado, mas pareceu bem menos contestado. Argumentava-se que sediar a Copa do Mundo se justificaria pela promoção da imagem do Brasil no exterior. Esta proposta surge justamente em uma situação de economia globalizada, na qual países em todo o mundo disputam a atração de um capital flexível e desnacionalizado. Nesse sentido, as identidades são articuladas como marca no intuito de se produzir o espaço simbolicamente como mais atraente a esse capital, o que se nota, em especial, na promoção turística. Este artigo busca compreender a relação entre a formação das marcas-lugar empreendida pelos órgãos de turismo nacionais, e a promoção da imagem do país no contexto da Copa do Mundo. Será demonstrado, no caso brasileiro, que a pluralidade de agentes interessados na representação do Brasil leva à hierarquização dessas representações, hierarquização que se dá, contudo, não a partir do Estado-nação, mas de empresas globais envolvidas com o megaevento.