Shocking Normalcy

I wish that I were so creative as to make up the stories unfolding in Rio and Brazil for the World Cup. I was criticized a couple of weeks ago for failing to see the humor in the Visa advertisements that featured Imperial Stormtroopers on the beach with the slogan “Everyone is welcome at the World Cup”. Two days ago, OBobo, South America´s biggest waste of cellulose and the paper of record for Rio´s Zona Sul, pinched off this gem above the fold. This is the new uniform of Rio´s Mega-event Shock brigade. There were, as often happens in USAmerican papers when invading Oil/Banana Republics, fawning descriptions of the weaponry, training and mandate of the stormtroopers. It would be comical if it weren´t so terrifying. Please, if you are going to the World Cup, do not wear black, don´t bring anything to cover your head and bring your running shoes. As long as you consume in the right way, in the right places, and with Visa, everything will be just fine.

Speaking of consumption, there was a national furor this week about the “poor taste” that Adidas demonstrated in producing t-shirts for the USAmericans that highlighted the desire of foreigners to ravage Brazilian women. Tudo bem, agreed, the t-shirts were horrendous and heads should be rolling at Adidas (which it should be remembered has been FIFA´s principal partner since the 1980s). But if we look at the way that Brazilians represent Brazilian women to themselves and to others, it would appear that Adidas was only following the disgusting lead of classic machistas like OBobo´s Ancelmo Gois. In his daily column, Gois always publishes, every day, hundreds of days per year, photos of women that he finds attractive. His comments might as well be accompanied by an icon of a drooling mouth. One slobber for pretty, three slobbers for gostosa.  Every year this middle aged white man has a competition to see who will be the “Mulata do Gois” . Beyond the idea of a black woman as a sexualized possession of those with more power and privilege, the general sterotypes propagated by Gois, OBobo, and Carioca society in general towards women make it completely normal for a multi-national corporation to market the place of Rio and the people of Brazil as objects of consumption. If Brazilians are shocked by the marketing of the “natural beauty” of Brazil to foreigners, they should take a step back and consider how they represent themselves to themselves (with a tip of the hat to Andrew Downie).

The Utopia of Rio in 2014

As if to confirm my infinite posts about how Rio is a city that needs a smart system to watch it fall apart, the heavy hand of the mayor has again fallen on the resident population. The genie of urban planning has been let out of the bottle yet again, reorganizing all of the vehicular traffic in downtown while eliminating second and third options at the time of greatest road closures because of Carnaval. The mayor is trying to make things so bad in Rio that if and when any of his hare-brained transportation projects get done, they will seem like improvements on  the hideous conditions the projects themselves have imposed.

Put this on repeat: Rio does not have the conditions to host its own population, much less mega-events. When urban systems are stressed out, they break. When one breaks, others are compromised. The metro broke yesterday. There was a two hour traffic jam on the bridge. The BRT Transoeste is a disaster. A broken sewage line in Copacabana closed traffic. Murders, thefts and petty crime are on the rise. Is it any wonder that the federal government is investing R$2 billion in the World Cup security apparatus? The closer we get to the Cup the more local populations will be treated as insurgents / rebels. Rio de Janeiro might be turning into a Death Star that holds its own people in tortured poses while it reconfigures urban space to maximize the flow of capital into private hands. 

Laws, Evictions,and Demolitions, oh my!

This is the link to Law 12.350/2010 that will "abrir as pernas" (open the legs) of Brazil for FIFA.

FIFA will not pay taxes of any kind. Nothing imported for "use" during the World Cup, including trophies, banners, commemorative materials, print materials, etc. will be subject to import taxes. Oh, and neither will anything else, like comupters, structural engineering equipment, durable goods, pharmaceuticals (?), etc. FIFA will also not have to pay and tax on industrial products (IPI). Do you get the idea? FIFA is going to make a killing in Brazil! This will be the best World Cup ever!

But first the Brazilian Government has to kill some people. Don't worry, they're all guilty. Except when they are teenage girls surfing the web in their homes.

Or forcefully evict them from their homes. This new "Forced Eviction Count" will be tracking the total number of evictions in Rio as the city delivers xmas presents with a bulldozer. As of this writing the count is 2092. I predict that we will reach 10,000 by mid-2011.

Or restructure parts of the city (or cities) without thinking twice about the ironies and contradictions. I particularly like this recent bit, where Paes and Lula symbolically detonate the Perimetral (elevated highway) in Rio's Zona Portuaria. The mayor called the perimetral a "monstrengo" (monster) that had to be demolished. The Little Prince of Rio also confirmed the idea that mega-events are a great chance to unleash projects that have been waiting in the wings for decades. In this case, Paes suggests that the Zona Portuaria project has been 40 years in the making.

The planned demolition of the perimetral is not only rediculous but stupid. Even the brown-nosing Oglobo published alternative plans from architects to turn the highway into a park or to use alternative transportation lines on an infrastructure that was admittedly ill-conceived, but that is also very far from the end of its life-span. So while the city, state and federal governments are dipping into guaranteed social funds (FGTS) to demolish a bad idea to replace it with a worse one, they are also spending billions to build new types of perimetrals thoughout the city. These are called BRTs and if you look at the contador de depejas, you will see that all of the evictions are due to the installation of these really, really bad modes of transpotation (as I talked about a few posts ago).

The good news: there is significant mobilization working towards building a better city. Individuals, groups, and institutions are organizing, and quickly, to meet the immense challenges presented by the onslaught of mega-events. More good news comes from the fact that many of these projects have yet to leave paper, so there is time, but that time is running out.

The bad news: basically everything else. When I talk to people about what is happening in Rio in regard to the upcoming mega-events, it is very hard to find anything positive to say. The city is more expensive than ever. The city government is taking every possible step to homogenize culture and create neutered spaces of entertainment for a fickle global elite. The streets are becoming increasingly militarized.  The mayor himself is in debt to huge real-estate and civil engineering firms who funded his campaigns, thousands of people, normal, hard-working, law-abiding people, are being evicted from their homes to make way for transportation lines and stadiums that will leave no short or long term benefits for the city. The federal government is giving away the shop to FIFA  The Zona Portuaria is being turned into a privately managed realm of isolated spaces of consumption that will have no connection with the tens of thousands of people living there, mostly because they won't be able to live there anymore. IBM is arriving to give Big Brother a bigger, more mobile eye. Who knows, perhaps this is all inevitable...

That's all for a very entertaining and difficult 2010! Welcome to the thousands of new readers and thanks to those of you who tune in regularly. 2011 promises to be just as busy so please keep coming back. I'm taking a few weeks of holiday in the frigid USA, so I'll be back once I've resettled in the Cidade Maravilhosa.

Ate logo!

Putting the pieces together, building the Olympic city

Today’s headline in OGlobo: government gives R$ 20 billion (US$11.2 billion) for the 2014 World Cup. This astronomical sum is divided between airports (R$5.6 b), ports (R$740 m), hotels (R$ 1.8 b), stadiums (R$4.8 b), and urban mobility (R$7.8 b). These are most of the essential pieces of hosting a mega-event. This R$20 billion does not include investment from state and municipal governments, which, along with the inevitable cost overruns will push limits of my solar powered calculator. If only they would hurry up with the damming of the Xingú!

On page 15 of today’s OGlobo (I do actually get news from other sources, but this is the morning ritual), three more indications that things are moving quickly in Rio:

 1) There is a proposal to the Plano Director (Master Plan) of Rio that will allow for the privatization of public spaces, ala the Business Investment Districts that Giuliani installed in NYC in the 1990s.

2) The Port of Rio will receive R$1.6 billion in public investment through 2014. This money is separate from and in addition to the R$ 20 billion announced on the front page.

3) The Olympic project will forgive any and all debts accrued by Rio’s Dock Company (Companhia das Docas) in order to facilitate the transfer of real estate to private investors. This debt remission needs to be added to the public financing as well, but no one knows just how much is owed by the Companhia das Docas to the federal government.

There are complex calculations that need to be done in order to arrive at an estimated value for the planned investments. One example is the R$3.5 billion that is being redirected from the Fundo de Garantia por Tempo de Serviço (Gauranteed Fund for Time Served, a public pension fund) for the demolition of  one stretch of the Elevado de Perimetral. This demolition is part of the Rio city government’s Porto Maravilha project. This should be considered a public investment but it is unclear who is going to receive the money, who will direct the project, and how the government intends to track the spending.

At the same time that Lula is throwing as much money as possible at mega-events, he “fears the errors of the 2007 Pan American Games” (p. 6 in the Sports section). The Pan 2007 was ten times over budget and left no “urban legacy” for the city. Part of the problem during the Pan was that no one was clearly responsible for the work being done or the cost overruns, so the government ended up with the tab. The Olympics are an order of magnitude greater than the Pan and the same people are in charge, with modifications that will make the money trail even harder to follow. The World Cup is not as financially demanding, but all the same, Lula affirmed that the federal government will create conditions for World Cup host cities to “increase their debt capacity” so that they can restructure urban space in order to host FIFA’s private party.

There is a government website dedicated to the control of public spending on the Olympics, but since it was launched at the end of 2009, it has not changed in the slightest and is perpetually under construction. Last month, Lula created the APO (Public Olympic Authority) as well as the Empresa Brasileira de Legado Esportivo S.A. - BRASIL 2016 (Brazilian Company for Sporting Legacy, Inc), which will do a million different things in addition to receiving all of the money from the government directed at the Olympics (R$30 billion). The creation of two parallel government institutions to direct the 2016 Olympic Project is going to cause some serious confusion. Making sense of where and how the money goes in and where and how it comes out is going to make my head hurt for the next decade.

In the coming months I will be attempting to put all of these pieces together into some kind of coherent framework and welcome all comments and connections. As I see it, the construction of the Olympic City and World Cup nation involves the following elements, many of which are overlapping:

1)      City image and branding

2)      Political hegemony (in Brazil's case)

3)      Financing

a.       Federal, state, local

b.      Public Private Partnerships

c.       Transparency, corruption, & accountability

4)      Parallel government structures

a.       CBF / LOC 2014

b.      COI / LOC 2016

c.       APO

d.      BRASIL 2016

5)      Alteration of customs and immigration laws

6)      Environmental projects

7)      Re-structuring of urban space

a.       Urban “renewal” projects

b.      Real-estate speculation

c.       Changes to zoning laws

d.      Direct and indirect population resettlement

e.      Privatization of public space (BIDs)

f.        Façade painting

8)      Modification of transportation networks (international, regional, local)

a.       Airports

b.      Train

c.       Metro

d.      Bus

e.      Car
w.  Ferry
z.   Bicycle?

9)      Modernization / Upgrade of communication networks

10)   Production of “global” cultural spaces

a.       Museums

b.      Consumer culture

c.       Commodification of locality

d.      Tour guide and taxi driver language training

11)   Tourist accommodation

12)   Athlete, referee, and media accommodation

13)   Security

14)   Sport installations
15) Global Crime Networks (GCNs)
16) Corruption, Conflict of Interest, Transparency

Nossa senhora! A gente tem muito trabalho pra frente…