Mega-events in Brazil and the conflict of the faculties

"The conflict of the faculties", title of a collection of texts by Immanuel Kant about the relationship between knowledge and power under a government, helps to illuminate a tension between fields of knowledge in the context of mega-events in Brazil: the 2014 World Cup Soccer and the 2016 Olympic Games.

On the one hand, urban planners and social scientists pay attention to the probability (as similar occasions in other countries have shown) that these events will negatively affect urban space. They are believed to contribute to increased inequality and discrete forms of expulsion of low-income residents in areas demanded by the real estate market.

On the other hand, scholars in the field of physical education (gymnastics), with the support of the media, highlight the legacy of sporting events not only for the direct effects to the field, through resources for high performance sports, nor for the cultural changes that may grant a more prominent place for sport activities in Brazilian society, but specially for the legacy (positive impacts) for the urban space they will bring.

Between the two disciplines the same object – the city – evoked in different ways by each one, according to a historical division of intellectual labor. The coexistence of different perspectives indicates a state of the disputes between heteronomous fields for the monopoly of scientific truth about the city.

The paper proposed attempts 1) to identify the symbolic struggle that involves the notion of the city, examining its symbolic and material dimensions, and 2) to verify the objective relations in which each group is included, as well as the social positions of actors.