After nearly three weeks back in
Rio, much appears to have changed, but the extremely complicated and
contradictory reality remains the same. I have been charmed, yet again, by the
exuberant natural setting, the easy socialbility of Cariocas, and the
infinitude of problems that scream out for direct action. I continue to be
amazed by the breadth, depth, and expense of the mega-events in a city that has
not managed to provide the basics for the majority of its citizens. The news
cycle when read from abroad is more depressing than the lived experience of the
city, principally because there is none of the context of daily interactions, a
bowl of açaí, or random outbursts of evangelical sabma on the streets of
Copacabana.
This last sentence, of course, applies to those who can afford to
construct their life-bubbles in places like Jardim Botanico, Urca, and Ipanema.
For the majority of Rio’s population that live in favelas, the Baixada
Fluminense and the Zona Oeste, the daily reality of crushing urbanism, banal violence, toxic food supplies, crumbling
schools and hospitals, and mind-numbing traffic does away with the romanticized
geoporn that is the core of the city`s well-oiled marketing machine.
In a recent trip to the Zona
Oeste on the SuperVia train (run by Odebrecht), I was surprised that it wasn’t
as bad as I thought it would be. Of course, this was off-peak, on a stretch of
track that has to look good for the Games. The train system as a whole carries
far fewer people than it did 40 years ago and received over the last ten years only
about double the investment for its 270km of track that was put into the 23km
VLT in the center of the city. This kind of disproportional investment has
exacerbated uneven development and defines Rio’s urban planning regime for the Olympics.
It also speaks to the reality of low expectations – why shouldn’t Rio have a
decent train with all of the money that flowed into the city and state in the
ten years preceding the World Cup and Olympics? The perverse priorities of entrenched
elites joined forces with the Olympic shibboleth to torque urban planning
agendas in a summarily retrograde way.
This is not so different
from other Olympics and forms a core element of a global business model that
uses cities as platforms to extract monopoly rents. The development of elite
sporting facilities is by nature exclusionary and the suite of privileges that
the IOC and FIFA demand of their hosts reinforce this outcome. There is never a
Zone of Inclusion around venues, only
Exclusion. The launching of a series of
talks and activities called Rio
2016: The Exclusion Games will express the real politick of the Games from
the perspective of those who have been most negatively impacted by their
implementation in a radically unequal city whose elites have pursued a decade
of sports mega-events to consolidate the status quo ante.
Of course, now that the
public calamity has been declared, the expectations for post-Games Rio will be
lower than ever. Without the cloying narratives of hosting the global spectacle
to drive urban investment and development, the difficult task will be to make
the Olympic-related infrastructure serve the needs of Cariocas (and those who
don’t live in Rio proper). This will be an increasingly difficult task as
finances dry up and maintenance costs for hi-tech flights of Calatravan fancy
spiral upwards.
The mayor has called the
Olympics a missed opportunity, the same thing that everyone said about the
World Cup and the Pan American Games. Most people agree with that assessment,
but who is responsible for the failure?
No comments:
Post a Comment