Rio 2016: The laboratory of a new urban strategy

The upcoming international events in Rio de Janeiro on the following years, such as the FIFA 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games, are positioning this city in the central focus of large scale urban projects. These events are playing a crucial role in the conception of urban policies within the city, stimulating the development of transport infrastructure, the building of stadiums, lodges, as well as the implementation of wide renewal programs, particularly in the neighborhoods located around the port. Involving controversial issues like the expenditure of a huge amount of public resources and the displacement of entire communities, the question of providing legitimacy for such projects is far from being an easy task, requiring the employment of a complex political strategy by the agents engaged in their success.

Many critical appraisals have emphasized the use of formulations like the strategic planning doctrine and the global city theory as the main ideological devices employed in order to make these interventions politically feasible. The aim of this article is to question if the constitution of the ideological conditions for the dissolution of potential resistance against these policies can be explained only by the spread of an urban model that takes the assumptions behind these discourses as a point of depart or not.

We argue here that the hegemonic project that is been carried out in Rio, conducted by an alliance leaded by the Federal government, is fundamentally based on a set of contradictory policies that comprehend from interventions inspired in neoliberal ideas, like gentrification and intensified police repression, to expressively subsidized housing programs, such as “Minha Casa Minha Vida”, and the massive deployment of urban infrastructure in poor neighborhoods, more commonly associated with a Keynesian paradigm of regulation.