Retrospectives of mega-events are best left for years following
their conclusion. Yet the constant drive for summary, judgment, evaluation, and
pronouncement following the Games is so pervasive and contradictory that it
becomes necessary to remind ourselves that the event is not over – indeed in
many senses it has just begun.
What we are witnessing in Rio de Janeiro is the unfolding of a monopolistic,
rent-seeking business model that plays on human emotions of desire, belonging, and
consumerist distinction as never before. The tightly braided relationships
between mega-events rights holders (IOC and FIFA), the “primary stakeholders”
of the event (Coca-Cola, McDonalds, Dow Chemical, Samsung, Hyundai, etc.), the
civil construction and real estate sectors and the executive branches of
government have been exposed. The general revolt of the Brazilian middle class
in June of 2013 was an expression of the frustration with the propagation of
this model in a country that has not met the basic needs of its citizens.
Yet after the event cycle has closed, it appears that the warnings
of academics, journalists, activists, and others have been completely forgotten
in the glow of the Olympic flame. The dire conditions of police violence,
infrastructure, blown budgets, and suites of elite privilege turned out to be
true yet the Games themselves have somehow been exonerated from exacerbating
these problems because they happened without fatal incidents for the IOC family.
Journalists and editors are rushing to do a retrospective mea culpa about the
impending disaster of Rio 2016 because the infrastructure worked, the sport was
great, and Rio throws a fantastic party.
As the mega-event monolith rolls on to Russia and East Asia, it
seems we are doomed to repeat the same mistakes, just in new forms under shifting
conditions, and in new places. There has always been a strong synergy between
the workings of global capital, geo-politics and the realization of the
Olympics. As a scholar who has
accompanied the transformations in Rio de Janeiro’s urban, social, and sporting
landscapes for more than a decade I have seen the unfolding of a deeply flawed
urban and social project that has transformed the city in enduring ways. Below
I outline some of the principal ways in which this has happened and point to
some of the consequences that I foresee in a city that has spent the last 20
years pursuing a mega-event urban agenda.
The
consolidation of consumer sovereignty
The Olympics and World Cup have accelerated
processes within Brazilian society that privilege consumerism over citizenship.
Both events transformed what were public spaces (Maracanã, Zona Portuaria,
beaches) into zones of private consumption where one can exercise one’s right
to public space and culture in the exact degree to which one can pay for it.
These processes of privatization
have long been on the agenda of Rio de Janeiro’s executive branch and unfolded
in very similar ways throughout Brazilian cities that hosted the 2014 World
Cup. The events create zones of exclusion that are able to be penetrated by
those with the proper credentials – a processes of self-selecting access that
conforms to the contours of capital accumulation more generally. The corporate
sponsors of events have their employees dropped off near the stadia in special
buses where they are directed though city streets by youths holding up banners
that herald the arrival of the corporation. Ostentatious credentials swing like
signboards of entitlement as the global elite are conducted to their front-row
seats for the global spectacle.
The consolidation of trends
towards what Mike Graham has called passage-point urbanism get an extra push
with the hosting of sports mega-events, normalizing spaces, relations, and
practices of exclusion/inclusion that become a naturalized part of the urban
environment. Within this new regime, one can conquer the right to freely
circulate within the city relative to one`s capacity to pay for that right. The
term “rights holder” is not accidental or incidental, it is the paradigm that
defines the urban condition in the event city.
The accelerated financialisation of urban territories
As Raquel Rolink has expertly
analyzed in her book Guerra dos Lugares there is a trend towards the financializaion of urban land markets
that has resulted in the exponential growth of disappropriation and expulsions
around the world. One of the more radical and universal effects of hosting
mega-events is the acceleration of the trends that Rolink identifies – except
that in places like Rio de Janeiro and Brazil more generally, the pre-existing
socio-economic conditions exacerbate the devastation that unfolds.
We know that in the years leading
up to the Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games, more than 77,000 people were evicted,
removed, or dislocated from their homes to make way for “socially necessary”
infrastructure projects. And while it is true that any major urban intervention
will require the removal of houses and communities, there are legal measures in
place to guarantee due process, fair compensation, and legal recourse to
violations of the right to housing. Yet when the mega-event wrecking ball
descends, so too come regimes of exception that carefully sidestep democratic
institutions so that “fast track contracting” (known as RDC in Brazil) can
accomplish in seven years what would normally take twenty.
The acceleration of a city’s
biorhythm for an event driven planning agenda will always most negatively
impact those who are least able to defend their rights. In Rio, the urban poor
have always been excluded from accessing the suites of rights that have
permanent land tenure as their fundament. The historical wave of expulsions and
removals that have happened under the mayorship of Eduardo Paes have coincided
exactly with the pursuit of sports mega-events as a justification for “doing whatever” , as Paes
once bragged.
These processes always take place in the literal geographic
sense of the word, and they also demand a dis-placement. For David Harvey, this
process fits within a larger paradigm of “accumulation by dispossession” but in
Rio we have seen this take multiple forms in different geographic territories. One
example, is the port region which was privatized through mayoral decree and
public monies employed to guarantee the financial viability of the project. At
the same time, the city government invested heavily in a light rail system that
will serve to further valorize these newly private territories while ignoring
other transportation projects that could have created a more viable network for
the metropolitan region as a whole.
The Olympic Village, Olympic Park,
and OlympicGolf Course are three more examples of state led gentrification
projects that have taken public lands out of circulation, handed their
management to private companies, and left no provision for social housing or
models of sustainable urbanism. The state-led production of exclusive
residential enclaves has again been sustained and justified through the
expulsion of the poor (Vila Autódromo and other favelas in Barra da Tijuca), the construction of low
grade transportation to return the poor to their former places of employment
(BRT Transoeste), and the discourse of legacy.
The restructuring of urban circulations
Without question, the largest,
most visible interventions for mega-events are always the transportation
projects. Airports, metro lines, highways, tunnels, bus lines, light rail:
Brazil’s investments in infrastructure for the World Cup and Olympics were
historic in scope and cost. However, not all infrastructure is necessarily
good. Witness the destruction of Rio’s perimetral, a very bad idea from the mid
20th century that has been replaced with a pedestrian promenade. In
this case, pedestrian circulation has replaced automobile circulation in a rare
attempt to return the center of the city to pedestrians.
More generally, however, if we
look at the transportation systems developed as part of the “necessities” for
the Olympics, we see a few troubling tendencies. The first is to concentrate
all of the federal and state investment in the City of Rio de Janeiro to the
detriment of the metropolitan region. The already exaggerated distribution of
wealth to the City of Rio was aggravated, privileging expensive transportation
solutions (metro and VLT) in the center and south zones, while ramming through
sub-standard transportation (BRT) in the North and West.
There was a major investment in
road building, as each of the 150km of BRT line also opened up more space for
automobile traffic. Along the trajectory of the Transcarioca BRT there are
narrow sidewalks, and at no point did any of the BRT lines take into
consideration non-motorized transport. The re-articulation of all of the city’s
bus lines to serve as feeder lines to the BRT system has had significant
negative consequences for the residents of the North and West zones (not to
mention those who live in the Metropolitan Region). These regions concentrate
the majority of Rio’s population and have not benefitted from a more integrated
and efficient transportation network, but have seen their mobility choices
limited.
This limitation takes the form of
transportation funnels that connect Barra da Tijuca to the West and North and
South zones. Of the seven major transportation investments made for the
Olympics and World Cup in Rio, five connect to Barra da Tijuca - a neighbourhood that is not built on a
human scale, that is zoned for exclusive condominium communities, and within
which residents do not use public transportation. While the Linha 4 of the
Metro will inevitably benefit the 50,000 residents of Rocinha that commute
times to the employment-rich areas of Rio’s Zona Sul and Centro, the
opportunity cost of this investment will only unfold over decades. It is also
yet to be seen how the metro will function on a daily basis as it is likely to
be full at its point of origin in Barra da Tijuca.
While the city government has
said that it managed to elevate the percentage of the population that takes public
transportation from 18% to 63% within seven years, there is not yet any data
that support the claim (frequently and erroneously repeated in major media). We
have not seen any administrative decision that seek to change the Brazilian
ideology of car ownership as a fundamental right, nor have we seen infrastructure
projects that would encourage people to use their cars less frequently or to
drive fewer kilometers (such as park and ride, or multi-modal transport
stations).
The development of Rio’s mega-event
transport systems is directly linked to the financialization of the urban land
market. On one hand, the valorization of urban territories through the
development of transportation projects facilitates expulsion and removal
through eminent domain and gentrification. On the other hand, the city
justifies removal through claims that the poor can continue to have access to
job markets and environmental amenities because the transportation lines will
serve to reduce their commutes. However, this reading is also limited, as the
weight of the opportunity costs for not creating new circulatory pathways
through the metropolitan region as a whole will eventually cause more traffic
congestion, more wasted hours in buses and trains that have not been modernized
and will further marginalize those who live in the metropolitan periphery.
The extensive projects that have
been forced through Rio`s planning system have given the impression that the
city has really made progressive changes to its urban circulations. Yet the
lack of urbanization that has accompanied the projects, along with the violent
urban ruptures that the BRTs have occasioned along their trajectories have been
accompanied with shocking stories of forced removal and displacement that call
into question the social utility of using a mega-event as leverage to
restructure circulations that are pre-determined by a 16 day party.
The consolidation of elite exception
The two above processes are
intimately linked with the planning process for the global spectacle, as well
as the ability of vested interests to extract maximum wealth from the host
city. While there is evidence to suggest that the investments unlocked by the
arrival of the event have the capacity to stimulate the local labour market in
the short term, there is scant evidence to prove that long-term benefits accrue
to the host city’s economy or to its citizens.
To the contrary, the very structure
of sports mega-events consolidates the socio-economic realty of the
institutions that are responsible for their realization. Both FIFA and the IOC
are based in Switzerland, shrouded in secrecy, and gain enormous profits form
their events, while assuming almost none of the financial risk. These
institutions depend on local governments to sign onerous hosting contracts that
enforce a suite of exceptions and guarantees. Of course, the local
collaborators are also searching for rent-seeking opportunities for their
political and economic coalitions and in order to accomplish the task of
accumulation, install regimes of exception (and temporary, non-governmenal
autarchies) that consolidate both the opportunity for wealth making and
exclusivity.
These practices range from the
granting of special visas to foreigners, tax exemptions for corporations, the
closure of city streets, legislation against ambush marketing, the “cleaning”
of urban space (billboards and homeless), to differential models of policing
for different spaces of the city. This last item is much discussed, as the
ostentatious display of firepower during mega-events functions on multiple
symbolic and practical levels.
On the geo-political level, hosts
use the exhibition of tanks, jet fighters, and NASA like command and control
centers to show the rest of the world that they are capable of handling
external and internal threats. On the national level, these same weapons are
used to control borders, fight organized crime, or to crush social movements.
At the local level, military ostentation is meant to ensure the continuity of
the event, guarantee the safety and security of teams, delegations, officials,
and tourists while making doubly sure that there are no “interruptions” to the
maximum circulation of these groups in the city. As one gets closer to the
event, the security varies: ostentatious on the outside, invisible on the
inside.
These security dynamics extend to
the way in which the city as a whole is imagined, projected, and constructed.
The Olympic city is a place to be photographed, where the landscape and the experiential
dynamics of place are consumed through selfies, where the police are there to
guarantee the exercise of the right to consume and to be consumed. In the
non-Olympic city, the official desire is that the cameras will never go there,
that tourists will never be tempted “to stray” into the suburbs, into favelas,
or off of Pure Island. The tourist routes as described on the Visit.Rio website are almost all in the Centro and Zona Sul (the Feira
Nordestina in São
Cristóvão is the exception). We saw that the continuing tragedy of violent
police incursions into favelas continued apace during the Olympics: the deaths
of police and residentes are inevitably excused with phrases such as, “it would
have happened anyway, you can’t blame the Olympics for that.”
The shifting of resources combines with the opening of public cofferes
to gruarantee the provision of security, health care, emergency services,
energy, water, food, transportation, financing, etc. for the Olympic City and
Olympic Citizens (Family) before and during the event. This is essentially a
transfer of public resources to the wealtheiest sectors of Brazilian and global
society. The costs are borne by the public and now that Rio de Janeiro state
has declared a calamity, those who have benefitted from this transfer of wealth
will continue to benefit disproportionately after the event has passed. There
are two reasons for this.
The first reason is the well-documented condition that Brazilians who
have enough wealth to privatize their daily lives do so as soon as they are
able. Thus, with the rise of the “New C Class” Brazil also experienced a rise
in private car ownership, an increase in private schools, and a surge in
private health insurance. These represent the privatization of mobility,
education, and health care. Brazilians also have privatised secutiry as never
before and this sector has seen tremendous growth. The privatization of
residental landscapes also comes with private security, as porteiros, guards, and 24 hours cameras demand cheap labor pools
that live in the perifery.
With the bankrupcy of the Rio State Government, those who were able to
consolidate their sócio-economic position within the last fifteen years will be
able to continue to access their constitutional rights to housing, education,
security, and health care through market mechanisms. Those who are forced to depend
on the public for basic services will find that their rights have been eroded
as a consequence of the transfer of wealth demandeded by a decade long series
of global parties.
Vacuums of institutional responsibility and accountability
One
of the most impressive moments of Thomas Bach’s (IOC president) speech during
the closing ceremonies was the finality with which he left the stage. After
presiding over the flag transfer ceremony from Eduardo Paes to the mayor Shintaro Ishihara, and waiting through a
bungled speech by the Carlos Nuzman of Rio 2016, Bach said, “Thank you Rio,
goodbye!” He then turned and walked off the stage.
Goodbye and thanks for all the billions. Bach’s
speech did not mention the massive contortions that the city had gone through
to host the IOC’s party. Nor did he mention how the IOC would stay involved in
the future development of the city, or encourage a team of urbanists to ensure
that the so-called legacy projects would be completed. He said goodbye, as in
“We’ll never see each other again.” It wasn’t a até a próxima, que seja
logo, or even the German auf weider sehen…just the short, curt, English goodbye.
This phrase struck a particular chord with me
because it is indicative of how the mega-event business model works to create
vacuums of responsibility that permit large institutions, governments, and NGOs
to push forward massive projects based on promises to the public that can later
be ignored without consequence. For instance, the cleaning of 80% of Guanabara
Bay was a proposal included in the Rio 2016 bid book. The bid book was agreed
to by the IOC and the City of Rio as the guiding document for the Games, but
neither would take any responsibility for the completion of the project. The
City always said it was a State responsibility and the IOC said that it was a
promise of the bid committee. The bid committee ceased to exist once Rio 2016
was contracted by the IOC and even though may of the same people from the bid
worked for Rio 2016, they would not revise their projections or take
responsibility for the lack of completion of the promise. Similar lacunas were found
throughout the preparations for the World Cup and a the list of incomplete,
overpriced projects from that tournament grows, so too does the obvious
non-utility of most of the stadiums build for that one month of football.
In Rio, it is unclear if there are any
institutional channels through which the population will be able to measure the
development and implementation of the so-called legacy projects. It is not at
all certain that the handball arena (Arena do Futuro) will be dismantled and reconstructed
as public schools, or if these schools will be able to make good use of the
very particular architecture. While this could be an interesting architectural intervention,
there is as yet no evidence whatsoever that it is going to happen.
And if it doesn’t will there be any agency or
individual that can be held responsible? The mayor will be out of office, the
governor will have moved on, the organizing committee will no longer exist, and
the IOC will be cooling its heels in Switzerland. The party is over, the
hangover is coming, and the billions are being stuffed into Swiss bank
accounts. Valeu a pena?
