A bright, beautiful, and naturalized future ©

Lordy. When will the city government come to terms with the reality of how cities function? It’s a rhetorical question, the answer to which continues to shock and awe. Every day there is a new and more ridiculous edict intended to impose control on the uncontrollable. This week their Lordships launched the brave idea that all of the weekly ferias livres (open air markets) need to close promptly at 1pm. This un-loving squeeze (or the annihilation of space by time), which has also occurred  in São Paulo, was met with an entertaining, effective, and important protest, photos and video of which are below. In the short movie, well worth watching, the crowd is chanting “Epa, Epa, Epa, Quero minha xépa! Epa, Epa, Epa, Quero minha Xépa!”

Xépa is the discount price given by merchants at the tail end of the feira. The forced closing of the market at 13hrs will change market logics and eliminate long-standing custom. This is exactly against the principals of a free-market economy. The easiest thing to do to preserve the Xépa and the discursive integrity of their Lordships would just be to back the f€©k off and let the feiras be.

Informality will not be tolerated in the Olympic City of Rio de Janeiro 2016 Olympics Jogos de Verão 2016 Host City Olimpíada 2016, 2016, 2016, ©,™,℠,℗,ⅎ,∩, ₭. According to the ill-logic of the current regime that governs this city, Rio de Janeiro functions Best and Only when all of its elements are formalized, social practices regularized, and social formations crystallized. In order to accomplish this Sisyphean and Kafkaesque task, to contravene the very nature of the city, their Lordships are applying an extensive series of Shocks. Some of these shocks are, perhaps, welcome – at first. I like a swept street and sanitary restaurants as much as the next flaneur.  Shocks like the one being applied to the feiras are not only unnecessary, autocratic, and downright annoying, but contrary to principals upon which their Lordships depend for the continued accumulation of wealth and power. There is no Shock of Education, Shock of Health, Shock of Clean Air, Shock of Corruption – just the Schlock of Order.

The Saga of the Maracanã continues. This week, workers struck to protest the poverty of their wages and working conditions. The greve by the STRAICP union (Heavy Industry Construction) workers will continue into next week. After one of the workers was seriously injured by an on-site explosion, the workers walked out with a series of demands including an increase in the lunch allowance, safety inspections, and a health plan that is “equivalent to the directors’”. As the projects for the mega-events accelerate, the indices of accidents are bound to increase and workers' rights will be eroded. What is the highest blood/concrete ratio that Brazils’ major construction firms are willing to tolerate?

The Olympic governing structure is nearly erectus. It took awhile for their Lordships to figure out just where and how to pull and push and prod to get the juices flowing, but now that they’ve got it just about where they want it, the pistons of progress can lead us smoothly forward into a blissful, naturalized, and fully actuated future.  Just check out how easily the BRT lines are going to slice through the urban fabric, leaving a silky trail of effervescent efficiency. It's hard to see the tens of thousands of disappropriations happening in this video, but if you listen closely, you can hear the screams. 

The struggles to mount on Mount Olympus are the stuff of boring, though important tabloids. Henrique Mirelles has jumped out of the lower reaches of APO and moved to the Conselho Olímpico, a perch from which he will lend a certain sober credibility to the Herculean and Pharonic projects happening down below. The APO top spot belongs to Márcio Fortes de Almeida. The recent revelation was that he is willing to work with one third of the public functionaries that have been designated to work for him is a good indication of how much work the agency is going to do. Since Mirelles figured out where the real power lay and moved out, the APO has been stripped of nearly all significance. Remember, a few months ago the APO was going to have 484 positions. A senate committee hacked it down to 181 and now Fortes now only wants around 60. The APO will organize the  spending of R$29 public billions. I don’t think everyone working at the APO will be an accountant, especially as the organization is charged with determining what is to actually be built. How many urban planners will the APO employ? My guess is ZERO. This year, the paper tells me, just putting the APO together is going to cost the tax-payer R$22 million.  This is going to be a very expensive rubber stamp.

The other Olympic news of note was the announcement of the winner of the Olympic Park competition. AECOM of London (responsible for the London 2012 Olympic Park),  in conjunction with Daniel Gusmão (DG)of Rio, carried home the R$100 thousand prize and the right to deliver on their proposal. Interesting, the proposal intends to preserve at least a part of the Vila Autódromo, urbanizing and integrating it into the larger urban context of the Olympic peninsula. Whether this will actually happen or if the Vila Autódromo will be used as a Potemkin Village is yet to be seen. Here’s the video of that incredibly bright and interesting and naturalized future:

Festa Juninho (Pernambucano)

Here’s a big post to give everyone something to chew on for a couple of weeks.  I will be giving talks at:  Duke University in Durham, NC on June 22 (@ the Haiti Laboratory, Franklin Humanities Institute, Bay 4 Smith Warehouse, noon), The Brazilian Association of Investigative Journalism in São Paulo on July 2, and Intel in Santa Clara, CA on July 11. Details forthcoming.

Starting from the top down in classic mega-event style:

Leonardo Martins in Jornal do Brasil wrote,  “As UPPs são, antes de tudo, um projeto de poder, de controle de um espaço tradicionalmente submetido à opressão. Os novos Capitães, que comandam as UPPs são os novos “donos do pedaço”, em substituição aos traficantes que ali se encontravam. Autorizam bailes, mandam baixar o som dos moradores, escolhem as músicas que os moradores podem escutar, determinam horário e condutas pessoais, intimam e intimidam àqueles que tem uma opinião mais crítica acerca da função da polícia, como por exemplo o fechamento da rádio comunitária do Andaraí, pela Polícia Federal, sobre o pretexto de rádio pirata e atrapalhar o tráfego aéreo."

“The UPPs are, above all, a projection of Power, for control of a space that has traditionally been oppressed. The new Captains that command the UPPs are the “owners of the land”, substituting the drug traffickers that were there before. They authorize dances, tell the residents to turn their music down, choose the music that the residents can listen to, determine the coming and going and conduct of people, intimate and intimidate those who have a more critical opinion of the police function, as for example the closing of the closing of the community radio station in Andaraí by the Federal Police on the pretext that it was a pirate radio station and it interfered with air traffic.”

I haven’t been back to visit and UPPeed communities in awhile, so I don’t have much more to contribute to the debate than I had a few weeks ago. I hear adolescents around town say “UPP é o caralho” and have seen that succinct and poignant phrase scribbled on walls.

Mayor alert! EP twisted his ankle in a political minefield, but don’t worry, he’s going to be ok. O Principe’s attempts to manipulate the infrastructure of the Olympic machine didn’t sit too well with people more powerful and experienced than he. In trying to limit the powers of the APO, EP threw a few one-liners into the City’s Olympic act that he then had to beg some legislators to erase and pretend to everyone else that he wasn’t trying to maintain as much power for himself as possible. The story is much longer than that, of course, but takes a doctoral thesis to sort though. Fortunately, those are available.

Transoeste disaster

According to sources buried deep within the international press corps, The IOC has had all of their questions answered in regard to forced removals for Rio’s BRT lines. The Trans-Oeste BRT (Blown Right Through) is moving people out of the way faster than a turd in a hot tub. The results are shit.

Picture of housing demolitions carried
out by Rio's Housing Secretary along the Trans-Oeste BRT line, April 2011.
Nelma Gusmão de Oliveira foto.

Last one standing, Zona Oeste
Rio de Janeiro. Nelma Gusmão de Oliveira foto

Mayor alert! O Principe tried to stick the Olympic golf course in a closed condominium complex where the cheapest condo goes for R$2.1 million. Unfortunately, the land that he wanted to put the course on has been stuck in the judicial system. Apparently the news took the condo residents by surprise.  The is the kind of “planning” is happening on a metropolitan level, not just with the Olympic golf course.

According to the Union of Externally Controlled Federal Auditors (AUDITAR), “the new model of contracting banked by the base of Dilma Rousseff’s government in the house of deputies is going to make the public works for the World Cup and Olympics much more expensive.” This is not at all surprising given that the new laws are designed to “flexibilize” normal contracting processes.

Compounding the problem is that those who frequent stadiums end up paying for them three times. Once for construction. Twice for higher ticket prices. Third for world-class maintenance costs.  Even our illustrious Federal Deputy Romário is calling the stadium budgets into question.

The CBF brought their team back to Brazil for the first time in a long time to prepare for the Copa America in Argentina. The ticket prices were staggering and the games were seen as test venue for the CBF to employ private security guards (as will be the case during the World Cup). The Prossegur rent-a-cops did not take kindly to the unfurling of a banner by the ANT-GO crew and gave them some rough treatment for unfurling this lovely banner. Congrats to these brave formigas!!!

Ricardo Ali Baba Teixeira, OUT! For decades Brazilian football has been in the hands of incompetent and corrupt
officials, we demand the democratization of decisions related to Brazilian football with the participation of fans!
Neither FIFA, or the CBF, or Football is of the People!
National Fans Association

Here are the attendances and financial details from those matches:

Game	Paying Public	Gate Receipts	Average Ticket	Free tickets
BRA (0) x HOL (0)	36.449	R$3.120.625	R$85.81	7.000?
BRA (1) x ROM (0)	30.059	R$4.357.705	R$144.90	9.000?
	66.508	R$7.478.330	R$112.44	pqp

It’s impossible to tell how many tickets the CBF gave away to itself and to its sponsors. Interestingly and stupidly, the first match in Goiânia, resulted in Ricardo Teixeira (Mr. Jowls) promising a Copa America 2015 match to that city, even though they are not hosting any World Cup matches.  In Rio, tickets for Copa Libertadores matches in 2010-2011 started at R$75. In three hours of football,  the CBF made off with R$7.5 million and scored one goal. How expensive will tickets to the World Cup be? How expensive will the stadiums be?  This is a link to a professor from the Fundação Getúlio Vargas who is criticizing the Maracanã budgeting process. We have seen a 170% increase in construction costs since 2009. This is without multiple labor shifts, without increased raw material and labor costs, without counting the subsidy for imports, without counting the no-bid conracts, without the time crunch, etc.

But, this will give Brazil (and Rio in particular) the MOST MODERN STADIUMS IN THE WORLD!!!!!!

maracá mais moderno do mundo

What does it mean to have the most  “modern “ stadium in the world? The continual search for and production of the modern in Brazil has had very mixed urban, social, and environmental results. When the Maracanã was constructed, it was the most modern stadium in the world, was it not? Will not the host of the 2016 European Championships have the most modern football stadiums in the world? Why bother calling it the most modern stadium in the world?  It’s a stupid and completely relative question.

Modern could mean functional but certainly means secure and comfortable and bougie, but in the context of Brazil’s mega-events “modern” has become more associated with overspending on monumental mistakes that are guaranteed to bring diminishing economic returns in an attempt to appear modern for and to foreigners. The stadium, as such, does not have to be submitted exclusively to economic metrics as a measure of its value. In addition to agreeing to build economic black holes, the cultural costs have not been calculated in the production of the twelve stadiums for the World Cup. The Mané Garrincha Stadium in Brasilia had bleachers so well-made that it took three attempts to demolish them with explosives. They are installing an expensive house of cards in his place.

FIFA has chosen Rio de Janeiro as the host of the International Broadcast Center for the World Cup. It will, of course, be in Barra de Tijuca at the Rio Centro complex. This is interesting (though not surprising) for a couple of reasons. One is that it will develop further Barra’s emergent position as the high-tech and media production center of Rio de Janeiro and Brazil. Why? Because in order to install something as sophisticated and grandiose as an IBC millions if not billions of fiber optic cables need to be stuck into the region, creating an information infrastructure that augments already profound structural inequalities within the city.

Secondly, the increasing and repetitive investment in communications infrastructure in Rio de Janeiro (and São Paulo) is consolidating the position of those cities in the hugely unbalanced urban hierarchy of Brazil. The choice of Rio will guarantee that it grows its media and communications industry at the expense of Belo Horizonte, Salvador, Porto Alegre, etc. Of course, wherever this kind of investment happens there are knock on geographic effects. However, the overwhelming Federal investment in Rio de Janeiro (at least R$100 billion between 2010-2016) is going to have long term consequences for a more balanced urban system. The FIFA media release is worth a read.

The Secretary of the Fazenda of Rio de Janeiro is trying to find ways to raise R$4 billion to finance public works for mega-events. His primary obstacle, according to Oh, Globo is the Law of Fiscal Responsibility (LRF), which prevents cities from emitting bonds while they are in debt. O Principe is still waiting for his R$ 2.5 billion loan to come in from the World Bank and until that happens, Rio is prohibited from borrowing more money. The strategy therefore is to wait until Henrique Mirelles (O Neo-Libertador) finally gets into power and then they’ll talk about how much debt they can saddle Rio with. This quote I found rather touching: Do ponto de vista político é muito delicado (mexer na LRF), mas do ponto de vista econômico, faria sentido", ressaltou a secretária. (From the political point of view it’s very delicate [to mess with the LRF) but from the economic point of view it makes sense). Head, shoulders, knees, and toes! Get flexible people!

Dilma and the PT get to work on the law

Did you know that trees are as flexible as stadia? Well, the revisions to the Forest Code that are getting crammed though the senate is going to surprise you, or not. The Amazon is being picked apart by agri-business, timber, and mining interests and the Worker’s Party is doing everything it can to hand the country over to capitalists. The passing of the mutilated Forest Code and the mega-event flex-laws are the priority of the new Minister of Institutional Relations. If Dilma’s government were any more flexible they’d call the county Shavasana.

Problems Continue

Problems continue in Brazil's mega-event world.

Stadia: Yesterday’s edition of Veja, a conservative news weekly, had as its cover a photo of the Maracanã  with the headline – "At the current pace, the Maracanã  will reopen 24 years late". The story behind the front page was not encouraging. None of the 12 Brazilian stadium projects underway are at the same stage of development as were the stadiums in South Africa. Not that it matters. According to Peter Alegi, a top SA 2010 researcher, only one of the ten 2010 WC stadiums is currently in use and the 50,000 capacity Royal Bafokeng Sports Palace drew an impressive 655 fans for a recent league match.

Corruption: The delays and confusion and lack-of-planning and stupidity and incompetence and outright theft and lack of professionalism in the planning for the 2014 World Cup has now been called out by Brazil’s biggest media outlets. This very same media have had their hands forced into a critical posture but never take the next step to calling for a total reorganization of Brazilian football. The CBF is one of the most corrupt and closed institutions in the world. It’s president Ricardo Teixeira was named as one of the greedy gophers selling his votes to Qatar. His father-in-law, João Havelange was also named in the recent corruption scandal.

Transportation: The transportation lines being crammed through Brazilian cities to attend to the short-term demands of mega-events will dislocate millions of people without attending to the real demands of Brazilian metropolitan areas.  The lack of planning in transportation was reported by Agencia Brasil the other day and comes as no surprise. In the above mentioned Veja article, one of the highlights was that the Brazilian government has already declared that 9 of the 12 airport projects will not be ready for the World Cup or Olympics. The Rio Metro saga is playing out poorly as no one can figure out where the new line 4 is going to go.

Forced Evicitions: Last week the UN was in town visiting the thousands of homes that have been partially or totally destroyed by the Rio city government to make way for these ill considered transportation lines. It’s a sad and tragic comedy of Olympian proportions. The hubris and callousness of the Rio city and state government knows no bounds.  According to the Estado do São Paulo newspaper the expectation is that at least 65 thousand Brazilians will lose their homes. The reality is that tens of millions more will be directly and indirectly affected. (Click here for a great story by Tom Phillips).

Transparency: Zero. The Rio 2016 Organizing Committee released the contract that the city signed with the Olympic Committee – 19 months after it was signed. The Brazilian chefão, Carlos Nuzman said that only newspapers would have access to the contract and that the general public would not be able to access what their democratically elected leaders have agreed to do with their money.  The laughable websites www.transparenciaolimpica.com.br and www.cidadeolimpica.com.br continue to function as smokescreens for the funneling of public money into private hands.

Privitization: nota dez. Henrique Mirelles, head of the APO (Public Olympic Authority) and former head of Brazil’s central Bank, has long used coded words to guide his public commentary. His latest was that the Olympics will usher in a new form of public governance.

For the first time I have begun to think that Brazil will not be able to pull these projects together in time for the World Cup. The lack of competency and organization and oversight is staggering and of continental proportions. There are so many moving pieces that have gone unattended for so long that it might be too late to create a functioning mechanism. The government should take over all World Cup operations now, nationalizing the CBF and the World Cup profits. The World Cup was awarded to Brazil in 2007, almost nothing has happened since then. The delays and disorganization serve to increase the cost of everything while necessitating a financial infusion from the state that will invariably be turned into private profit. It is important to remember that the WORKERS’ PARTY (PT) of LULA is behind these developments. Where mega-events are concerned, there is rarely any good news, just talking heads, hollow discourse, and momentary distractions from an increasingly harsh reality. 

Pos-Carnaval scattershot

Brazil is expensive. Everyone keeps saying it, we all keep paying it. Here’s an example from yesterday. I filled up a very small car with gas, R$104 (US$65, about six dollars a gallon in a country that doesn’t import oil and has its own refineries). Then, it was time to change the oil. The synthetic quarts, sucked out of the ground, processed, produced and sold in Brazil were R$39 each. That’s twenty dollars a quart of oil. The oil change set me back R$186. So, between filling up the car and getting the oil changed I spent R$290 or US$ 175. Not to even mention the cost of buying and maintaining cars here, nossa senhora.  If you can say carro caro five times quickly without having both words sound the same then you are probably used to such prices and don’t even think about it anymore.

Brazilians are getting more and more into debt as the consumer society expands. The front page of OGlobo’s Economia section from Sunday: Brazilians already commit 22% of their salaries to pay down debts. This is up from 13.9% in 2003. The banks in Brazil charge up to 180% per year for credit card debt, and for short term cash loans, the percentages can be even higher. The best possible business to have in Brazil is a bank. As people begin to borrow against the inflated values of their homes and apartments and buy more and more things that they didn’t even know they needed until they had someone offering just that very thing, then wow! When the bubble bursts in 2017(?), it will probably still be good to be in banking (as the recent experience in the USA has shown).

There is a direct correlation between occupying a foreign country and occupying Rio’s favelas. The Brazilian military has been leading the UN’s occupation of Haiti for many years and has used the strategies and tactics of that occupation in the military exercises in the Complexo do Alemão. Sensitive as ever to the cultural nuances of “indigenous people”, a Brazilian coronel was quoted as saying, “it doesn’t get to be an organized crime unit like in Rio. Violence happens here may times because it is a part of their culture.” (Não chega a ser uma organização criminosa como no Rio. A violência acontece aqui, muitas vezes, por fazer parte da cultura do povo.)  There are other comparisons to be made here between the USA and Brazil, but I will leave it to the reader to make those connections.

O’Bama is planning a visit to Rio for St. Patrick’s Day week. He’ll give a big public speech in Cinelândia. I’m trying to call this the “Visita d’Obama” but was told this is not grammatically correct. It’s the “Visita do Obama”, which for me is one too many O’s.

Dilma officially indicated Henrique Mirelles as the head of the APO (Autoridade Pública Olímpica). The former head of Brazil’s Central Bank will preside over an institution that was significantly reduced in size during the deliberations in the Senate. The APO went from 480 to 181 official posts. The Lula government was sparing no expense, for anything, but Dilma has had more fiscally responsible ideas in her head. Sergio Cabral and Eduardo Paes also wanted the APO to have reduced powers and they appear to have been successful in their negotiations with the federal government. I haven’t been able to find the revised text of the Medida Provisória 510, so if anyone out there has some time and inclination, I’ll update this post and give due credit!

Classes started this week. I’m teaching a course called “Producing the Olympic City” in the Master’s program of Architecture and Urbanism at UFF. If anyone wants to get on the blog, google group, or zotero send me an email and I’ll get you signed up. Falando nisso, se houver Brasileiros interessados em participar no curso, estou abrindo as portas para vocês! (BTW, for those of you not familiar with zotero.com, it’s perhaps the best thing ever invented for researchers, even though it only functions in Mozilla).

Head of Autoridade Publico Olimpico announced; Nova Fonte Nova underway

In all of the shuffling of positions that occured with the change of government in Brazil, the ever-confused Minister of Sport Orlando Silva couldn't quite figure out where he was going. The CBF wanted him to stay in his current position as did the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB). If you find it shocking that Brazil has a cabinet position filled by a nominal communist, don't be, Mr. Silva is as red as an international finance manager.

The Dilma government decided to maintain Silva in his post at the MoS and has indicated Henruque Meirelles to occupy the top position in the APO. As president Mirelles will make R$22,000 a month and direct a budget of R$30 billion. His qualifications? For the past eight years Meirelles has directed Brazil's Central Bank, winning IstoE's 'Brazilian of the Year' award in 2009. As with nearly all Latin American central bank directors since the Chilean coup in 1973, Meirelles has passed through a conservative USAmerican institution (Harvard) and was the president and c.o.o. of Bank Boston.

There are some conflicts ahead for Mr. Meirelles. The APO is comprised of representaives from three spheres of government, federal, state, and city. The state governor of Rio appears to be on board but the mayor, Eduardo Paes has openly resisted the scope of power of the APO to direct the Olympic building projects. Yesterday he said that he wants "someone smaller" in the position, ostensibly so that Paes himself can have more control over what is going on. This will be an intersting clash of egos. It's unclear to everyone how the APO is going to function, where they will set up shop, who is going to fill the 400 odd positions, and the amount of authority they will wield over urban planning in Rio. We can bet that there will not be much in the way of transparency mechanisms as nearly a year and a half after the seletion of Rio as host of the 2016 Olympics, the website dedicated to Olympic transparency www.transparenciaolimpica.com.br has NO USEFUL INFORMATION.

In my other attempts to gain access to information about the organization of the World Cup and in particular the Maracanã project, I have been met with a vast and stunning silence. I will attempt in the near future to bang on the doors of the SUDERJ archives while continuing to call and email in order to get access to someone or something that will shed light on the inner workings of the World Cup project. The SUDERJ website is good for a laugh.

Which brings me to the World Cup. Four years after the selection of Brazil to host the 2014 tournament there is no didicated website. The CBF website (which only recently has started to work in any browser other than Explorer) has a link that takes one to the FIFA website. On the FIFA site, there are pictures of flaccid, pale middle aged men shaking hands and smiling. There is no public transparency mechanism for the World Cup, and it is increasingly difficult to figure out where money is coming from, where it is going, what the associated infrastructure projects are and who is in charge of anything. The media are as complicit in this obfuscation as as anyone, as I pointed out in my damning critique of IstoE last week.

Another example of the faux-journalism related to these projects came in yesterday's OGlobo. Buried in the middle of the sports section was a full page treatment of the Nova Fonte Nova in Salvador. The stadium was demolished last year over the protests of several residents' groups. There's an excellent article about why it was wrong to demolish the stadium, highlighting its historical function in the city, its multi-purpose utility, and the false and flawed logic employed by the government in order to build something to attend to the sick desires of the FIFA-mafia. Oh well.

The OGlobo piece talks about the public-private-partnership between two of Brazil's largest civil construction firms, OAS and Odebrect, the amount of public financing (R$300 million), the money spent on demolition (R$67 million), but does not mention how much private capital has gone into the project. The stadium will, you will be plesed to hear, "have 31 quiosks, 11 elevators, a panoramic restaurant, a football museum, and space for lectures, shows and business meetings." They might even have a football team play there, though nothing is confirmed. And of course, all of this destruction and construction is actually good for the environment as it will "utilze natural [sic] wind, recycle rain water and sewage, and will (somehow) preserve the environment around the stadium."

The second section of the report was not so glowing as the majority of the urban infrastructure projects planned for Salvador have not lept off the paper and into the lives of residents. The shocking thing about this article was the official statement that Salvador is expecting 70,000 tourists for the World Cup. That's it? 70,000? Surely they get more than that for Carnaval...The planned investments in urban infrastructure, which are needed, amount to R$750 million. But who is directing these projects? Will these projects only attend to the needs of the 70,000 visitors, or to the city at large, creating a more integrated urban transport system? How much will these (so far) phantom projects cost? As a demonstration of the logics behind the projects, the coordenator of the Salvador World Cup said, "It's no good to talk about exact values because the projects will be distributed between various municipal departments and some projects are only related to urban dynamics, and won't be considered part of the World Cup costs?"

Indeed, it is no good to talk about exact values, because these values are going to be hidden from public view. According to the vast majority of press reports, the World Cup and Olympics are responsible for EVERYTHING that will happen in Brazil through 2016. However, when it comes time to talk about the ways in which this will happen logistically or where the money will come from or how those money trails will be followed and accounted for or who will be responsible for delivering the finished product and ensuring that public money is spent in the interest of the public, the answer is always "não dá".