Sociologia

This article analyzes urban governance innovations in the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, focusing on the role of these innovations within the wider political management strategy of the executive leader. These innovations, all of which utilize digital information and communication technologies, are important elements within a leadership and management strategy. The article explores the role of digital innovations within the broader strategy of the mayor’s use of managerial tools as means to strengthen control of the city’s governance. Though presented as an apolitical management style of “what works,” this form of management is also deployed to enforce contentious political decisions with substantial implications for the social fabric of the city. This article offers an analysis of the political role and implications of urban governance and public service innovations that are often presented and analyzed in purely instrumental and apolitical ways.

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.

We aim at assessing neighborhood effects on the socioeconomic integration of poor individuals living in three shanty towns of Salvador, Brazil. Grounded on semi-structured interviews, we demonstrate that the spatial proximity of Nordeste de Amaralina to affluent gated communities fosters the interviewees’ economic integration. However, mechanisms of social segmentation impede cross-class interactions. In the peripheral São João do Cabrito, the interviewees’ confinement to the local social context along with the absence of positive social references produce their social isolation and constrain their economic integration. Yet in the peripheral Fazenda Grande II/Jaguaripe I, the shared use of urban services by socially dissimilar groups provides an opportunity-enriching environment for the lower echelons. We discuss two mechanisms that account for neighborhood effects: changes in the support structures and the impact of crime. Concluding, we advocate for a multidimensional approach to neighborhood effects, capable of attending to the interrelatedness of micro, meso, and macro-social factors.

The paper examines the impact of neighborhood effects on individuals’ socioeconomic integration in two peripheral shanty-towns and in three favelas located in Brazil. In the peripheral São João do Cabrito, the individuals’ embeddedness in a homogeneously poor region fosters their social isolation; yet, in Fazenda Grande II/Jaguaripe I, the population’s socioeconomic heterogeneity attenuates neighborhood effects. The individuals’ functional integration vis-à-vis their wealthy surroundings declines toward the periphery of their neighborhood, their chances of integration being conditioned by the shared use of public space, and the surrounding gated com-munities’ degree of spatial isolation. We discuss three mechanisms that explain neighborhood effects: changes in the support structures, the impact of crime, and territorial stigmatization. We conclude that individuals’ chances of integration mainly depend on the spatial distribution of employment and urban services, rather than on their proximity to affluent neighborhoods.