Forests and Trees

Favela da Paz, São Paulo. 500 meters from WC stadium

Another week of protests, teachers still on strike, violent police actions, sewage bubbling on residential streets, ill-conceived plans to rework the traffic flows in the city center, international consultants jetting in to pat each other on the back for their clear vision and well-manicured lives, disappearances and summary executions by “pacification” police, diminishing football crowds and record profits, real-estate speculation, institutional blinkardness, macro-economic troubles, frustrated expectations and a constant battle to make the simple things work. Despite the rot these trees of discontent still make for a lovely forest – if you can afford it.

Corinthians/Itaquera WC stadium. R$820 million

The longer I live in Brazil the more clear it becomes that the country is being shaped to guarantee basic human rights to those that can afford to purchase them. In Rio, the access to mobility, education, health care, leisure, sanitation, water and air is conditioned by one´s position in the forest of capitalismo selvagem. Personally, I can´t complain as I have a good job, a foreign passport, a nice apartment and can afford to buy private health care and live in a part of the city that is replete with cultural and environmental amenities. I will not be removed from my house for Olympic transportation lines and do not have my world dominated by milicias, traficantes or the military police. The vast majority of the 13 million residents of Rio do not live like this.

The arrival of the World Cup and Olympics in Rio de Janeiro (and Brazil) are accelerating and consolidating a number of disturbing trajectories. The protests are an attempt to end the processes of privatization, urban fragmentation, spatial isolation, militarization, elitização, forgetting and obfuscation. There are innumerable examples of all of these processes that cannot be attributed to one particular actor. One of the horrible

The fundamental question for the future of the World Cup. Favela da Paz, S.P.

beauties of these events is that they bring together temporary governance regimes and non-state actors that create vacuums of responsibility. FIFA can´t interfere in what the government does, the government has to agree to FIFA demands. The IOC has “certain needs” that the city is obliged to meet, yet the IOC can´t demand that the projects meet social needs. The mega-event coalition uses the state apparatus (within which mayors and governors are sub-altern agents of capital) to divert finances to the creative destruction of a host city. The mega-event industrial complex may be nothing more than a colossal shell game run by Fuleco, whose goal is to accumulate and consolidate power.

Homenagem à Yemanjá

The other night, when I came home from a party, all of the lights on the Aterro do Flamengo were out. From the front window I could clearly see fires along the beach, flickering offerings to the orixá Yemanjá, goddess of the sea.

Aterro do Flamengo, 2am 3 Feb, 2012. Immediately above the 2am
are the fires set on the beach in honor of Ymenjá.

The lights were out, the radio later informed, because a power outage had hit a few parts of Flamengo and Botafogo. The cause of the pane (breakdown) was unknown and there wasn’t a larger systemic failure as happened in 2009 when a massive apagão hit Brasil shutting off power to nine states. 

It might appear that Rio is falling down faster than it can be built or remodeled, but that’s not an accurate assessment. Antes de mais nada, we should remind ourselves that Rio is not the only city in the world with some old and decaying infrastructure problems. The United States, for example, will (soon) find itself in a massive infrastructure crisis. Has everyone forgotten about the I-35 bridge that collapsed in Minneapolis in 2007? How’s that I-95 corridor treatin’ ya? Waited for a summer-time bus in Austin? How's that passenger train service between x and y USAmerican cities beyond the Portland - D.C. megalopolis?  After the Minnesota collapse, I'm pretty sure there weren’t Brazilian journalists calling up professors in the USA to ask whether or not the country was falling to pieces. There should have been, but we know that the only thing flat about globalization is Thomas Friedman’s head.

So it's not just Brazil or Rio that has infrastructure problems but they are particularly acute here for a number of reasons. The country has only recently emerged into the global economic spotlight. Even though it's a terrible term, it's not a CRIB country for nothing. For many decades, it did not have the financial capacity, international trade or internal consumer markets that produce the need to develop large scale widely placed infrastructure (remember that this only happened in the USA beginning in 1956 with the Eisenhauer National System of Interstate and Defense Highways program). 

True, there are many bureaucratic and institutional structures that limited Brazilian infrastructure development and investment (and continue to do so), but the reality is that Brazilian cities, and especially Rio (and especially after the capital moved to Brasília in 1960), did not invest in basic infrastructure. Not having smooth functioning transportation, communications, sewage, tourist, security, or other systems that are equipped to handle the volumes of traffic that come with rapid economic growth is a historically contingent reality. The successful pursuit of so many bloody events is stressing these already fragile systems. These things really need to be planned for in the long term so that the short and medium term effects aren’t so disastrous.

The costs for the mega-events are manifold and magnified by pushing the creaky old legs of the city onto center stage. Perhaps the building wouldn’t have undergone a hurried renovation if it weren’t in the most expensive real-estate market in the Ámericas. Perhaps more rigorous oversight by the city government would have saved some lives. Maybe, just maybe, they should have accounted for all of the bodies before scooping up the rubble. They found a few later in the city dump. Some parts of the story are unimaginable, some structural, and some things just can’t be explained. 

An easy solution? The World Cup, Olympics and their minor offspring cannot occur in any city that does not include them as part of an existing, long-term, integrated metropolitan urban plan that folds the events more seamlessly into its varied fabrics. It’s nice to dream, não?

Ymenjá might have appreciated the blackout the other night, but she would probably be happier if the bay were clean.

Mega-events don’t exist

Mega-events don’t exist.

There is no point in using the term “mega-event” except as a convenient placeholder for the impossibly complex, intersecting, mutually dependent and independently functioning elements that come together to produce whatever the “mega-event” is.

Deconstructing the World Cup and Olympics and organizing them into intelligible, digestible bits that can be understood is, perhaps, within the realm of possibility. Understanding the hundreds of millions of moving parts and how they come together to give us something like the 2014 FIFA World Cup is impossible. Pulling on a loose thread may begin to unravel the general structure, but without understanding the whole at the end of the day you’re left with a pile of micro-fibers.

So, let’s stop talking about mega-events and start talking about “accelerated process of socio-spatial transformation punctuated by signature global events”. Not very catchy, I know. How about “vicious circles of creative destruction marked by overlapping sovereignties, deliberately vague responsibility frontiers, and the imposition of homogeneous and globalized consumer cultures”. Perhaps something more pithy? Hmmm…”the normalization of a condition of political exception that generates the compulsory acceptance of a consumptive ritual decoupled from its ontological moorings.” Hard to put an acronym on that.  Oh well. Perhaps my degree in philosophy will come in handy while discussing the non-existent.

It must be because the mega-event doesn’t exist that no one can take ultimate responsibility for the processes it unleashes and the impacts it generates. FIFA can’t be blamed for the transportation infrastructures that cities choose to install. The cities can’t be blamed for wanting to host the World Cup. The state can’t take responsibility for the way that FIFA goes about its business, though they could refuse to get on their knees to bring the event. Sponsors can’t be blamed for the human rights violations that pave the way for their profits.  The security demands of the event attend to the real and perceived risks that the event itself generates. No event, no risk? Or is the risk in not having the event?

I am not trying to hedge my bets here, but trying to make sense of the arguments, displays, discussions and presentations from Soccerex over the last three days. There are billions of dollars of public funds in play. This money, although also fictitious and conceptual, has very real effects and could be put to uses other than hosting a month long soccer tournament. Because no one has ultimate responsibility over the way in which this money is spent and the effect it has, before smashing the Cup on the ground to see what it’s made of we’ve got to continually step back to look at the Cup as an object: an object of desire, a goal in and of itself, a process, a social construction, a symbol, a moment, and a means to various, valorous and nefarious ends. In Brazil, this Cup runneth over with problems, contradictions, intransient bureaucracy, narrow political agendas, nepotism, corruption, graft, conflicting interests, ill-conceived projects, forced removals, rule by decree, a lack of effective urban planning and the funneling of public money to private hands in one of the most unequal societies in the world -  quite a lot for something that doesn’t exist. 

Laws, Speculation, Eminent Domain, Stadia

The scenario – in Brazil it typically takes about 38 months for a government-funded project to go from approval to payment for services. The bureaucratic hurdles to implementing infrastructure projects and social programs are so formidable that even the gods of Olympus would have to take a few extra running steps to clear them. The three year delay between approval and implementation has the house of FIFA in a fine lather, so Dilma’s left-center government has come up with a solution to the bureaucratic bottleneck: RDC.

The RDC (Regime Diferenciado de Contratações Públicas / Differentiated Regime for Public Contracts) is a fundamental element of the Medida Provisória 527, a Provisional Measure that comes from the Executive branch and requires approval from both houses of the Legislature. The original purpose of MP 527 was to create the Ministry of Civil Aviation, but as it was moving through the halls of Brasilia it picked up the RDC.

The alteration of “normal operating procedures” is a hallmark of mega-events which install states of exception and emergency in the cities and countries where they pass. The time pressures of the event and the contracts signed with Swiss-based NGOs allow for the dribbling of democratic processes and the installation of extra-legal authorities that disappear after the events, leaving no one accountable for the wreckage and debt left behind. Greece is burning in large part because of the huge debt spending for the 2004 Olympics, but no one points the finger at the IOC, the government, or the sponsors of the event. No money left in the public coffers? Austerity for the people. 

There are conflicting needs expressed in the RDC and MP 527. Brazil is woefully late and staggeringly over budget in the production of facilities for the 2014 World Cup. There is a need to have a mechanism that lowers, or at least controls, the costs of stadium and infrastructure projects at the same time that the contracting and payment process can be accelerated. There is also a need for greater transparency in the bidding and contracting processes. The problem with "acceleration" or "differentiation" is that it opens the possibility for even more corruption than usual. The main concern of those opposed to the RDC is that it will make secret the price of the projects until after the projects are awarded. This information will be “secret and will only be available to internal and external organs of fiscal control”. Basically, this means that we will never be able to find out how much projects cost.

Worse, these budgets can be kept from public scrutiny forever if they are considered to be relevant for “state security”.

On the bright side, it appears that the “super-powers” of FIFA and the IOC which would have allowed them to demand significant modifications to projects after the contracting process, potentially increasing their cost. Also on the side of transparency and democracy was the inclusion of Federal financial control organs in the list of agencies that could have access to the budgets: Tribunal de Contas da União (TCU), Controladoria-Geral da União (CGU) and Ministério Público (MP).

The Senate should vote on MP 527 this week and there may be some alterations to the final version, so more on that soon. The extreme content of MP 527 has generated significant debate about the role of transparency for mega-event installation. This is a good and necessary debate, but again, one that should have begun back in 2007 when Brazil was first handed the task of preparing for the 2014 World Cup.

See, we're sending those poor people to the puta que pariu!

In Rio, the real-estate speculation boom continues apace. This week, the city announced the winner of the Porto Olímpico contest, a massive re-urbanization prject that will bring millions of square meters of office space and upper middle class residences to the Zona Portuaria. Of course there are the normal references to the “inspiration of Barcelona” and the role of the Olympics in revitalizing the port area. Left out of the celebrations are the reports that many of the Zona Portuaria's traditional tenants and residents are being forced out to make way for the “revitalization”.

One of the most egregious examples of the approach the city is taking in their maniacal desire to re-make space and culture is the expulsion of the Samba schools that have traditionally occupied the region. Twelve schools will have 30 days to leave the area which the Porto Olímpico project will occupy. Out with the old and traditional, in with the new and consumerist. In addition to the samba schools, families and small businesses that occupy the old Federal Railway Depository (RFF) will also have to find somewhere else to go. This is all directed by CDURP, the private enterprise that is responsible for the “re-urbanization” of the Zona Portuaria with R$ 7.6 billion in stimulus from the Caixa Econômica (in addition to several billion more from the FGST, a public workers pension fund). That is to say, uma porrada de dinheiro público para lucros privados.

Speculation and "Re-vitalization", the winning project for the Porto Olimpico

To round off the post, there is a report in today’s Valor Econômico (1.7.11, A7) about the financing of São Paulo’s World Cup stadium, the Itaquerão. In addition to the low-interest R$400 million loan from BNDES, Corinthians (Lula’s team) will receive hundreds of millions from the city as well as a R$30 million exemption from ISS (Taxes for Services Provided). The cost of the stadium, which a few weeks ago was R$700 million, has jumped to R$ 1,07 billion. The city is only guaranteeing financing if the Itaquerão manages to attract the opening game of the cup, further politicizing the already highly charged relations between the CBF and the host cities.

Big White Men in Small Black Boxes

This week is the XIV Congress of the National (Brazilian) Association of Urban and Regional Planning. (Link to conference here.) On Tuesday, I attended a session entitled Order/Disorder: violence and the politics of security in the city (Ordem/Desordem: violência e políticas de segurança na cidade). The main attraction was a possible clash between Marcelo Freixo, State Deputy of the PSOL political party (the only remaining progressive party in Brazil) and Rio State Secretary of Social Assistance and Human Rights, Ricardo Henrique.

Freixo was preceded by Julita Lemgruber (fomer head of the Rio State penitentiary system) who talked about the challenges and benefits of the UPP (Police Pacification Units) being installed in select favelas in Rio. While I touched upon many of the same points in my earlier discussions of the UPPs, what follows is what I took away from Professor Lemgruber’s talk.

Benefits of UPPs:

Residents look to resolve their conflicts through legal mechanisms

Stimulation of micro and neighborhood economies

Reduction of lethal violence

The rivalry between Rio’s two major drug factions, the Terceiro Comando and the Comando Vermelho has been eliminated, allowing for more freedom of movement between favelas

Increase in home values

A sense of tranquility

Challenges:

How can the installation of UPPs in favelas result in a consolidation and expansion of territorial control in the city? This is expecially true in the vast areas of Rio that are controlled by milicias (the subject of the Tropa do Elite 2 film).

Is it possible to control the violence and corruption of the police? The police are poorly trained and always have their fingers on the trigger. There is almost no presence of non-lethal weapons in the UPP forces and NO police will consent to move through the favelas unarmed. When will the police cease to fear a re-taking of the hills by drug gangs, even though such an event has never occurred and start non-lethal policing of the favelas?

How is it possible to turn the regime of the UPP into something that is non-authoritarian? The UPP commanders determine what can and cannot occur in the favelas. There is a generalized ban on baile funks, one of the primary source of weekend entertainment and a source of cultural identity.

When will an effective social politics take the place of an effective security politics?

How will the UPPs be used to stimulate the political and administrative roles of community leaders?

How will the police trained and paid to enter the UPP project be convinced that their job is worthwhile? As it stands, 70% of the police think that the UPP project is directly associated with the impending mega-events and that they have become “doormen of the favelas”. There is a distinct lack of esprit de corps among the UPP police and 70% are actively looking for another posting within the MP.

The activity that the MPs most engage in is the revision of suspects. There is a popular saying in Rio that goes something like this: “Young, black and standing: suspect. Young black, and moving: guilty.” The culture of extreme violence that characterizes the Rio State Police is not meted out evenly across the population.  

In talking with several people about the installation of UPPs over the last several days, there is no question that they have brought a generalized sense of tranquility to both the places in which they have been installed and their surrounding areas. However, the generalized feel-good nature of the “change” has not significantly altered the ways in which favela residents (primarily poor and black) are treated by the government. There is a sickening infanitlization of favela residents which suggests that everyone who lives there, if given half the chance, will turn to crime as a way of life and that without the strong hand of the state behind a gun, the chaos and violence will return. The sense of security is limited to those who are not in the way of massive construction projects, who own their own homes, and who are not subject to the spray paint cans of the Municipal Secretary of Housing.

One of the more astounding figures mentioned by Professora Lemgruber was that only 8.5% of MPs working in UPPs have completed high school. 63.5% have completed middle school. With this level of education, how is it possible to begin to address all of the above problems? To make matters worse, the MPs live in sub-human conditions, have little or no orientation about their project, and lack training specific to the job. It’s hard to tell where this UPP project is going but it is far from the unqualified success that the government is portraying (big surprise, I know).

Ok, on to Marcelo Freixo. Friend of Apa Funk, supporter of the ANT, a man with a price on his head for taking on the Western Milícias, Deputado Freixo is one of the most sought after speakers in Rio and has long been a champion of social justice. For those of you who have seen the Tropa I and II movies, the intelligent agitator who goes into the prisons is based on Freixo’s character. Some highlights from his talk:

Two things occurred around the same time in the mid 1990s: Brazil was consolidating as a democracy and becoming hard-wired as a neo-liberal regime of flexible accumulation.  

What does it mean to have a secure city? Freixo drew attention to the fact that 100% of BOPEs actions take place in favelas and that in the new center of operations that is currently under construction in Maré, there will be a “favela scenario” for the most lethal and well-trained urban fighting force in the world to train. In Rio, the question of security is relative and localized and needs to be expanded if effective and coherent public policies are to be developed.

In Rio, dying while resisting arrest, is called an “auto de resistência”. That means, for those of you who have seen the movie Bus 174, cross paths with the cops with no one around and it’s curtains. The data: Under the Anthony Garotinho government (he who was so recently convicted of a slew of charges yet managed to take office), there were 2209 such deaths, or around 550 a year. His wife, Rosinha, was the next governor. Under her watch the body count doubled to 1900 auto-de-resistências per year. The current governor has kept pace with around 4400 deaths while resisting arrest during his first term in office.

Worse are the staggering numbers of homicides and disappeared. Under Rosinha 18.300 people were killed or disappeared in the State of Rio de Janeiro. Under Cabral, 20.600. In eight years, 38.900 people have been killed or disappeared in Rio de Janeiro state. That is more than during the dictatorship in Argentina, in less time. So, the question is, for whom is the city being secured and how?

There is a clear attempt to follow the USAmerican model of incarceration in Brazil. Between 2000-2009, Brazil had an 11% increase in its population and a203% increase in its prison population. Like the USA, a huge percentage of the prison population is wither awaiting trial or stuck there for non-violent offences. For those not familiar with the film Carandiru, there ain’t no cable tv, weight room, or laundry service in Brazilian prisons.

The issue of the UPPs and “security” is very much related to the Olympics and the World Cup. The discussion and discourses surrounding “security” are woefully limited and tend to be dominated by notions of physical security in the face of criminal elements. What most people in Rio (and the wider world) mean by security is the right to private property and personal integrity. This goal has largely been accomplished in the Olympic Ring (O-Ring) of Rio through the installation of UPPs and a public policy of extreme violence exercised against a highly select population. However, the real issues of security and society are unfolding in the West Zone of Rio where the milícias have taken control.

The spectacle of security is very much part of the spectacle of the mega-event. The invasion of the Complexo de Alemão last year was as much a highly coordinated media campaign as a military exercise. The abandonment of the Zona Oeste and the new public housing complexes in Campo Grande and Cosmos to the milicias is a deliberate public policy. As Feixo pointed out, there is not a parallel system of government in the favelas or in the areas controlled by the milicia. Evidence for this was that Sergio Cabral’s candidate took 75% of the votes in the Complexo de Alemão in the 2010 elections. His question to the audience was: who is in charge there? Traficantes or the Governor?

Following in the left-foot-heavy footprints of Freixo was Ricardo Henrique, state secretary of Social Assistance and Human Rights. In beginning his talk about the theoretical roots of the UPP Social program, Henrique drew a line between the “secure city” and the “integrated city”. This division, he suggested, has resulted from the fragmentation of the urban and social fabrics as a result of different practices and politics aimed at different publics and social sectors. The result of these policies has been to reproduce divisions both horizontally and vertically within spheres of government as well as within civil society. Thus, the UPP social project is an attempt to retake the project of developing a republic based on equal rights and accessibility to rights before the law through a more consistent implementation of public policies directed at social development.

Fine. I agree. UPP Social is a necessary but not sufficient condition for reconciling the structural conditions that result in social and spatial fragmentation. What Henrique failed to address in any way, was that at the same time that UPP social is working towards a project of regeneration and de-fragmentation, the rest of the government is working in the opposite direction. While the UPP social programs may be benefitting the 14 favelas in which they are (partilly) implemented, the BRT lines are fragmenting and re-territorializing the rest of the city…FOREVER!

The result: while we can be optimistic that where the UPPs are installed we have seen a sharp decrease in violent crime and a slew of economic and social benefits, there is much work to be done to make these benefits permanent. The lack of long-term planning in Rio’s political system is endemic, systemic, and generalized. There are no guarantees here, only hopes. There are 1.020 favelas in Rio de Janeiro, the UPPs have been installed in 14 of them – the vast majority of which are within the O-Ring and designed to protect Rio’s zones of accumulation and to project the spectacle of security to the world-at-large. The transportation and stadium projects getting crammed into the city are intentionally fragmenting and dividing the city, not attending to effective demand, and benefitting select areas of the city. All of this through the erection of extra-legal forms of government that use the mega-event as a state of emergency to justify extraordinary measures similar to a state of war.

The city government is operating with a heavy, autocratic, and brutal hand as a slew of international media reports have recently shown. Last week the UN commission on housing rights and evictions paid multiple visits to communities that are being brutalized by the city. The tactics are Machiavellian, the results Dickensian. People throughout Rio de Janeiro (and the rest of the World Cup cities) are living in fear and insecurity. When the SMH comes with their spray can, the scarlet letters do not indicate a brighter future but imminent removal at the hands of an authoritarian state whose strings are being pulled by huge white men hidden in small black boxes.

The impossibility of everything

The impossibility of keeping up with EVERYTHING that is happening in Rio de Janeiro is increasingly clear. Today I drove with Fabricia Herdy as my grad-student co-pilota along the trajectory of the Trans-Carioca BRT line (also known as the T5) that will supposedly link the international airport (Galeão) with the Autódromo. This is the link to the official and brutally crisp video. http://oglobo.globo.com/rio/video/2011/22724/

I have many impressions after driving these streets. In sum: Nooooosssssaahhhh Senhora. The project appears to be moving, or rather, the city government has started putting up big blue signs. There are mergulhões to be sunk, houses and businesses to be bulldozed, viaducts to be shot into the air, voids to be bridged, tunnels to be dug and an unimaginably complex project to be carried off in four and a half years. Officially mid-wifed this week by O Principe do Rio, the Trans-Carioca is budgeted at R$1,5 billion and will consume at least 3,200 buildings. It is a massive urban transportation project and will DEFINITELY change things along its 39km trajectory. (In the Grandes Projetos Urbanos (GPDU) laboratory in the Graduate School of Architecture and Urbanism at the Universiade Federal Fluminense, we are working on a project that will analyse these transformations. We’ll present our preliminary results at LASA 2012 in San Fransisco. If you want abstract, send me an email). 

But wait, there are three more BRT lines planned. One is blasting its way across swamplands and through mountains to connect Barra da Tijuca and Santa Cruz, and another is headed, lock-step from Barra to the military compound in Deodoro. The third, and least likely to leap off paper is the Trans-Brasil that will link Santa-Cruz and Caju. These are all supposed physically manifest before the 2016 Olympics? The T-5 alone is going to demand an incredible amount of equipment. Are there enough qualified laborers in Greater Rio to build all of these things? What about all of the other things under construction? If I were a skilled road-man, fore-man, or oil-man with a mouthful of Portuguese, I would get myself to Rio asap.

Eduardo Paes calls the T-5 “An urban revolution”. He’s right. There’s a half a billion set aside to pay people for the homes the project will destroy. The Minha Casa Minha Vida housing program for the whole country is only R$7,6 billion (just cut back from R$12,7). So, to build one BRT line, one in every 15 reales of public housing money will go to destroy housing stock. If they manage to connect all of these segments before the opening day of the Olympics, I will be well and truly impressed. It will take years to untangle what is being rolled into these BRT projects. Caution and three sheets to the wind boys!

Politically, the bicho esta pegando também. For Portuguese readers, the following is a link to a great description by Nelma Gusmão de Oliveira of the lack of change in the basic form, function, and force of the APO (Public Olympic Authority). There was some shuffling of papers and a few hundred public functionaries fell into the dustbin of the future, reducing the budget of the APO by a few million a year. In a budget that begins at R$29 billion, that’s nothing. But never fear! The former head of Brazil’s Central Bank (all 8 years under Lula), is taking charge, damnit. Bankers are honest and know how to manage many billions of your money! There's not too much noise coming from opposition, but there are a few snarky figures lingering about. Don’t tremble because the Rio Military Police is there too…

Rio police spray little kids in Niteroi, nice work fellas. Oglobo foto.

Let’s hope that the MP doesn’t start turning its attention to the Social Movements mobilizing to fight the World Cup and Olympic Project the way they’ve been treating the Obama protestors and the people from Morro da Bumba in Niterói that have yet to move into permanent housing following last April’s mudslides.

Oh, FIFA. Oh, CBF. Oh, the Copa.  You know it has to be bad if a headline in OGlobo about the 2014 World Cup is: White Elephant of the Forest. This refers to the absolute and complete lack of utility for the Arena Amanônia after the World Cup. It’s a pity that they destroyed a functional and elegant stadium in the process. Much like the HSBC Arena in Rio (built for the 2007 Pan-Am. Games), the 47,000 seat R$593 million stadium will probably only be used for shows. Air Supply in Manaus anyone? Get your tickets now. We knew this was going to happen. It was planned this way. There was never any doubt about the result. But it didn’t have to happen this way, and no one is going to do a thing to prevent it from happening again or hold officials responsible for their pig-hgeaded, short-sightedness. Or are they? 

In a refreshing switch on its coverage of favelas being the main source of pollution for the lakes of the Olympic Development Region, OGlobo has finally started reporting on the saw sewage and waste that condominiums are pouring into the waterways. There have also been occasional reports about the pollution caused by the various chemical and pharmaceutical plants in the region. Nothing, of course, about how the changes to the city’s master plan which will allow for more and denser condominium development, more cars, more consumption, more sewage, and more waste will affect the regions already stressed water system. That’s for IBAMA and Imanjá to deal with.

I started off this column by reflecting on how it was difficult to keep up with everything that is going on in Rio. This is true everywhere, but at times, Rio de Janeiro seems to be moving so quickly and in so many directions that it’s difficult to know where to sit and watch it. This is part of the challenge of finding an apartment in Rio: to find a place that is quiet but close to transportation, on a side street but with a view, close to entertainment, restaurants, parks, plazas. Someplace to work, play, eat, study, sleep, feel comfortable. Too much to ask? There are great streets in crappy neighborhoods and crappy apartments on great streets. Some are too far, some are too low, the buildings from the 60s and 70s and 80s are cramped, the new buildings without personality and the roomy apartments in older, elegant buildings from the 30s, 40s, and 50s are too expensive. There is a general sense of urgency and scarcity that is clapped on the ear with the open palm of bureaucracy. Most of the apartments I have seen have had between 4 and 12 other people looking at them at the same time. Looking to rent an apartment in Rio? Here’s a word you need to know: fiador.

Your fiador will be someone who owns at least one property in the city of Rio de Janeiro and who is willing to provide you with all of their original personal documents, including the value of their apartment, how much money they make, etc. This person will act as the guarantor of your rent for your 30 month contract. You flee the country, or move to the interior of the interior, the rent is on them. The problem, in addition to what I feel is a tremendous invasion of privacy and the commensurate need for a long-standing friendship (or family relation) to even ask someone to be a fiador, is that it takes a lot of running back and forth, here and there, copies, orginals, stamps, signatures, proof of residence, bank accounts, getting everything together, and the first person (of the 10 of you standing in line to see the over-priced apartment where you will never speak to or meet the person who owns it), the first person to deliver all of their documentation will be the one who gets the apartment. So, get your fiadores lined up now, or be prepared to pay Porto Seguro the equivalent of one month’s rent per year for two and a half years. You will never see this money again. This word you already know and it needs no italics: mafia.

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!

Wikileaks, the USA, Brazil, military operations, profit, and mega-events

Yeah, Wikileaks. http://wikileaks.ch/cable/2009/12/09BRASILIA1383.html

¶1. (S)SUMMARY: On November 10 at 22:13, Brazil experienced a blackout that plunged 18 of Brazil's 27 states into darkness for periods ranging from 20 minutes to 6 hours. A government commission is investigating, with a draft report and recommendations expected mid-December. GOB has recently begun to focus more attention on infrastructure security, both within the President's office and at Mines and Energy (MME), while an intensive process is also underway to develop recommendations to avoid outage problems in the future. The newly heightened concerns about Brazil's infrastructure as a result of this blackout, combined with the need to address infrastructure challenges in the run-up to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics, present the United States opportunities for engagement on infrastructure development as well critical infrastructure protection and possibly cyber security. Mission encourages USG agencies, including DOD, DHS, FCC, TDA and others, to explore these opportunities in the near-term. END SUMMARY

Some notable phrases from the summary: "Opportunity for engagement"; "infrastructure protection", DOD = Department of Defense, DHS = Department of Homeland Security, FCC = Federal Communications Commission, TDA = Trade and Development Agency. The wikileaks site has an excellent summary of the extended posting written by Natalia Viana.

Viana explains: The U.S. is not alone in the effort to profit from the Olympics. On November 11, 2009, Israeli President Shimon Peres led a delegation of 40 Israeli companies to Rio de Janeiro. "Just as we did with the Olympics in Greece and China, we are offering special technologies of communication and security," he said during the visit.

And it is good to know that jorunalists and researchers are not the only people having trouble getting in touch with officials from the Ministry of Sports: 

Kubiske also complained that the Brazilian government has made many promises but done very little planning or taken any other action to date. "Articulating the big picture goals and leaving details to the last minute may be a typically Brazilian approach, but could lead to problems,” Kubiske wrote in her cable. She complained that the U.S. embassy has not been able to get in touch with the Brazilian Ministry of Sports, noting that the UK government - which will host the Olympics in 2012 – has also been unsuccessful in such efforts.

Athough I was optomistic about the chances of getting to explore the archives of SUDERJ and get access to information from the 2014 LOC (which three years after Brazil was selected as WC host still does not have an official website), I have been ignored in all of my attempts via phone and email to gain access to people and information. Not entirely true: I received this email from Saint-Clair Milesi, press secretary for Brazil 2014: 

Dear Mr. Gaffney,

Thanks for your contact. The Local Organising Committee is 100% funded by FIFA and does not build stadia or infrastructure. Construction work is a responsibility of the owners of the stadia and the three levels of governments.

We are structured in three main areas: Strategic Planning and Operations Support (headed by Joana Havelange), Operations (headed by Ricardo Trade) and Communications (Rodrigo Paiva). The committee is growing as necessary and we have about 40 people working with us, but we also work with consultants Ernst&Young and Arena (stadia consultants).

Best regards,

Saint-Clair

My reply which has yet to be answered: 

Dear Saint-Clair,

Thank you for your reply. I understand that the construction work is the responsibility of the owners of the stadium projects, but these projects are heavily influenced by FIFA and the LOC (in terms of financing, architecture, locale, etc). I have several questions regarding the organization of the 2014 World Cup.

Does the LOC have information regarding the 12 projects and how they are being managed within the structure of the LOC? 

Though there are of course many people working within the LOC, am I to understand that the executive committee itself is run by 4 or 5 people?

What is the role of the consultancy groups? Do they provide economic analyses or work with urban planners to ensure that the stadia will have post-cup uses? Does FIFA pay these consultancy groups as sub-contractors or does the CBF finance the work of Ernst&Young and Arena? I also understand that the CBF receives money from the Minstry of Sport. How does this money go into the financing of the World Cup?

Is there a website that identifies the structure of the LOC and the roles, responsibilities and qualifications of the people involved? If not, will this information be made available? Is there information regarding all of the World Cup stadium projects and their associated infrastructures that the LOC will make available to the general public? How are the positions within the LOC filled - by concurso publico or by ad-hoc hiring?

Thank you in advance for your help and I look forward to our continued communication.

Warm Regards,

Chris Gaffney

Question about mega-events for Lula

(This morning there was a collective interview for the foreign journalists in Brazil with President Lula. My question made it into the list and I was able to get it across to him. For the moment I am going to leave the question and response up here without my commentary as there are many other questions that he responded to that I am going to weave into a larger post.)

A couple of notes to contetualize the question and response. 1) BNDES, the National Development Bank, is providing R$400 million in sub-prime loans to states who are building World Cup stadiums. 2) Any and all materials having to do with the World Cup are exempt from import taxes and employees are expempt from income taxes. This is a requirement of FIFA and one that several Dutch and  Belgium PMs called attention to, undoubtedly blasting huge holes in their bid for the World Cup 3) Brazil has passed multiple laws at all levels of government that allow for the 'dribbling' of constitutional processes that would interfere with the expediencies required to host mega-events. 4) Lula is the head of the Worker's Party which formerly represented the political left in Brazil.

Pergunta Para Lula ; Question for Lula

Em 2007 seu governo, atravez do ministerio do esporte, guarantiu que não haverá dineiro publico para construir estádios pela copa do mundo. Hoje em dia o governo está disposto gastar bilhões nos estádios alem de dar isensão fiscal a todo que tem que ver com a Copa, qual é um evento privado de FIFA. Em 2009, o senhor assinou um contrato com COI  garantindo R$29 bilhões pela realização dos Jogos Olímpicos no Rio. Para realizar esse eventos é preciso altera leis nacionais, estaduais e municipais para permitir que esses eventos se-realizam. Na face dos grandes prejuiços que sofreram Grecia e Africa do Sul depois dos mega-eventos é possivel que os mega-eventos vão atropelhar processos democraticos e aumenta desigualidades sociais no Brasil?

In 2007 your government, via the Minister of Sport, guaranteed that there would not be any public money spent on World Cup stadiums. Today, the government is prepared to spend billions on the stadiums in addition to giving full tax exemption to everything that has to do with the World Cup, which is a private event run by FIFA. In 2009, you signed a contract with the IOC guaranteeing R$29 billion for the realization of the Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro. To carry off these events, it is necessary to alter federal, state, and municipal laws. In the face of the economic damages that Athens and South Africa suffered after mega-events, is it possible that mega-events are going to harm democratic processes and increase social inequalities in Brazil?

Resposta ; Response

Se a Copa do Mundo fosse tããão desastrosa economicamente, não teria tanta gente atras dela. (ironicamente)

If the World Cup was such a financial disaster there wouldn’t be so many people after it. (ironically).

Todo pais deveria fazer uma Copa do Mundo não é apenas uma cuestao de dinheiro porque é um espectáculo que da dimensão a um pais. O que a gente ve quando vemos o que aconteceu na China, em quanto conheciamos a China antes e quando connheciamos depois?

Every country should host a World Cup and it is not merely a question of money because it is a spectacle tat gives an added dimension to a country. What did we see when we saw what happened in China, how much did we know about China before [the Olympics] and how much did we know after?

O governo não está colocado dinheiro publico. O governo abriu uma linha de financiamento à cada estado que de responsibilidade de cuidar dos estádios porque os proprios governadores apresentavam os projectos para poder conquistar o direito cediar a Copa do Mundo. O que nos fizemos foi colocar a disposição do cada estado uma quantia em dinheiro financiado pelo Banco nacional de desenvolvimento. Por tanto o governador vai pegar o seu dinheiro e vai contrair um empréstimo e vai pagar.

The government is not spending public money. The government opened a line of financing for every state that is taking responsibility for building the stadiums because it was the governors of the state that presented the projects in order to conquer the right to host the World Cup. What we did was to place at the disposition of every state a quantity of money financed by the National Development Bank (BNDES) [R$400 million per stadium]. From there, each governor can take their money, assume the loan and then pay it back.

E obviamente nos interesse baratear o custo das coisas para que a copa do mundo será o mais barata que..o seja. Acho que e incompensible que tenha pessoas que faça a vida inteira dizendo que nos fizemos reduzir impostos, reduzir impostos, reduzir impostos...quando a gente redizimos impostos, quando a gente reduz impostos pra fazer um estádio as pessoas falam que o Estado está perdendo.

It’s obvious that it interests us to keep the costs low so that the Cup will be as cheap as possible. That is, I think that it’s incomprehensible that we have people that go their entire lives saying that we need to reduce taxes, reduce taxes, reduce taxes, and when we reduce taxes to build a stadium people say that the state is losing out.

O mundo deveria ter copiado o Brasil. O Brasil foi o primeiro pais a tomar todas as medidas anti-cíclicas que foram tomadao depois pela China, e ai rediuzimos impostos para o povo poder comprar uma escada, para o povo comprar mais carro, para o povo comprar a geladeira, para o povo comprar uma maquina de lavar, para o povo comprar uma televisão. Reduzimos tantos impostos de construção civil. Então, é importante que a gente reduze impostos para a construcao dessas obras que depois que depois de estiverem prontas elas vao ser motivo de aumento da arrecadacao do proprio estado seja o estado, seja a cidade, e seja a União.

The world should have copied Brazil. Brazil was the first country to take all of the anti-cyclical measures that were taken after by China. We reduced taxes so that people could buy a ladder, but a car, buy a refrigerator, buy a washing machine, buy a television. We reduced civil construction taxes a lot. It is therefore important that we reduce the taxes [and tariffs] for the construction of these projects so that after they are ready they will be able to contribute to the increase in the receipts of the state, city, or country.

Vamos fazer uma extraordinaria copa do mundo. Eu tenho certeza absoluta que cada entity federativo vai cumprir com a suas obrigações. E que vamos fazer uma copa do mundo exemplar e que espera que muita gente vieram aqui para ver de o que estamos capaz.

We are going to have an extraordinary World Cup. I have absolute certainty that all of the federal entities are going to meet their obligations. We are going to put on an exemplary World Cup and I hope that a lot of people come here to see what we are capable of.

O que não pode acontecer e o Brasil perder a Copa do Mundo aqui no Maracanã como foi em cinquenta, vai ser um disastre economico. E vamos nos preparar para que Brasil seja campeão.

What can’t happen is that Brazil loses the World Cup in the Maracanã like we did in 1950, it will be an economic disaster. We are going to prepare ourselves so Brazil becomes champion.

Interview on Edge of Sports about World Cup and Olympics

http://edgeofsports.com/audio/media/10-22-10_segment3.mp3

The above is a link to an interview on Edge of Sports radio (Dave Zirin) about the ANT, the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. More coming soon!

Also, next week is the International Conference Mega-Events and the City to be held at the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Niteroi. Check the website for the schedule and details. I'll be publishing exerpts from my conference paper here over the next week.

For new readers, there's several years worth of posts to read up on while you're waiting for the next installment.

E para os/as Brasileir@s, vou começar postar mais em Português para que pudessem ter mais acesso aos acontecimentos em relação a Copa e Olim-piada.  Tenham paciência, estou demorando dominar a língua de vocês.

Looking back, looking forward, going nowhere

The 2010 World Cup is history. Spain were deserving winners over a preternaturally violent Dutch side that should have been sent to Robben Island for a week of rock breaking. The juxtaposition of the villainous anti-football of Van Bommel and De Jong to the heroic jogo bonito of Xavi and Iniesta gave Spain well-deserved moral and sporting triumphs.

By most popular accounts, the 2010 tournament was a success: relatively safe streets, beautiful stadiums, decent organization, and incredible hospitality on the part of South Africans. FIFA agrees: the South Africans really were wonderful hosts, spending public money freely so that the Swiss-based monolith could rake in a record profit. It won’t take long for FIFA to count their US$3.3 billion in revenues (for the month); it will take South Africa many decades to pay off the party. The tourists have gone; the hotels, stadiums, airports, communications facilities, transportation lines, cultural attractions, and debt remain.

In order to make sense of what has happened in South Africa one has to get rid of the idea of the 2010 World Cup as a month long football tournament. A mega-event is not an “event” but a multi-year process that has residual effects that most people can’t, don’t want to, or refuse to acknowledge. In reading the responses to a recent article that draws attention to Brazil’s poor state of preparedness for the 2014 World Cup, one is struck by the degree of ignorance, short-sightedness, and willful disregard about the way the World Cup functions in the local context. While we distract ourselves about notions of “Fair Play” and contribution to cultures of deceit (i.e. the Suarez handball against Ghana), the dirtiest, cheating-est, most dishonest game is in the very production of the World Cup itself – where the laws that govern society are changed, violated, and ignored so that “we” can consume the inherent drama of sport in safety and comfort.

     1)   FIFA is a corrupt institution of organized criminals that bullies national and local governments into financing a private party. FIFA is very explicit about the private nature of the event. Everything within an x-kilometer radius of a World Cup stadium is FIFA’s private domain: a sanitized and securitized world of private accumulation where only certain signs, symbols, and behaviors are permitted. Worse, this FIFA-world is controlled by public and private security forces that act to ensure the smooth production of a global spectacle.

     2)     The Local Organizing Committee (LOC) has little or no public accountability even though they receive and direct all public funding for the event. This closed organization is neither elected nor subject to public regulatory agencies. In South Africa, one of the 23 SA2010 LOC  members was shot dead outside his home on his way to a whistle-blowing deposition. Once the event is over the LOC will dissolve, forever eliminating the possibility of legal action or public accountability.

   

      Brazil 2014 is a story of corruption foretold. The Brazilian LOC only has 6 members. For the first time in the history of the event the head of the national football federation (Ricardo Teixeira) will head the LOC. His daughter is the Secretary-general. Her grandfather is João Havelange, president of FIFA from 1974-1998. 

     3) Transportation infrastructures are constructed with only short term mobility and use in mind. FIFA does not employ urban planners. A LOC does not hold public meetings. In Johannesburg, for example, the construction of BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) lines linking the tourist zones with the stadium had two effects. One, it eliminated employment for thousands of informal and formal transportation providers, who later opened fire on the BRT. Secondly, the BRT will be almost completely unused after the World Cup, draining public coffers to maintain the linkages between the five star hotels and the Ellis Park Coca Cola Park Stadium (itself a totally unnecessary construction).

In Rio de Janeiro, the construction of BRTs linking the Zona Sul and the International Airport with the Olympic Zone in Barra de Tijuca is underway. There is also much talk of a bullet train linking Campinas-São Paulo-Rio de Janeiro (at a cost of R$45 billion). Presently, there is no passenger train service at all! Fala serio.

     4)   Most World Cup stadiums are isolated from the urban and cultural contexts, have no programmed post-cup use, and are very expensive to maintain. The anticipated maintenance costs for Soccer City are R1.5 million per month. That is R18 million a year (US$2.5 million) just to keep the thing standing. The average attendance at South African football games in 2009 was around 8,000. Who will pay to keep these stadiums standing?

In Brazil, the idea is that ticket prices are going to increase from an average of R$20 in 2010 to R$60 in 2014. This is seen as part of a necessary and inevitable process of “elitization” of Brazilian stadiums. There are no plans for multi-use stadiums. There are no plans to integrate stadiums into the urban fabric (partially as a result of FIFA’s requirement that there be one parking space for every 6 spectators which creates dead space around the stadiums). There are, in short, no plans that will make the stadiums anything but a perpetual drain on the public coffers.

     5)     While there are short –term employment benefits and increases in civil engineering projects (with corollary booms in commodities like concrete and steel), there is no evidence that mega-events bring economic benefits. While there is a boom in construction jobs, the haste to build the South African stadiums resulted in labor law violations, forceful strike breaking,  and the civil engineering companies responsible for the projects (at least in the South African case) brought in their skilled labor from abroad. Stadiums bring no medium to long-term economic gain anywhere in the world, much less in a country with 20% unemployment.

     6)     The restructuring of urban space and culture for tourism creates a dependency on a tourist economy. The current debt crisis in Greece can be traced, in part, to the massive borrowing for the Olympics plus the global financial meltdown that killed the tourist economy. This begs the question about why public funds are directed to hosting international tourists instead of providing basic necessities for the national population. 2010 World Cup spending equaled what is spent on public housing over a decade. Will more tourists arrive in South Africa? Maybe. Would they have arrived without the World Cup? Maybe. Will the South African housing and public health crises continue? Definitely.   

     7)     The way in which the world outside of the World Cup stadiums perceives and experiences the World Cup has become completely homogenized and controlled by the FIFA production crew. Everyone sees the same thing at more or less the same time in more or less the same way. From replays, to close-ups, to wide angle shots, FIFA controls the narrative. Granted, this narrative is delivered in HD with 36 cameras and super slo-mo, etc, etc, but what is presented to the world as reality is a simulacra of what is happening in the stadiums: an incomplete and fragmented narrative of events that only gives us limited insight into reality.

     8)      It is not only tele-spectators, but also live spectators that are crushed into a hegemonic, homogenous box. FIFA’s stadiums are basically the same. They all have to follow the same “manual”, meet the same “requirements”.  The worst example that comes to mind is the Maracanã. The architectural project submitted to FIFA in March was not approved because the architects did not take into account that the advertizing boards that surround the field for a FIFA World Cup (and occupy our field of vision for the 128 hours of football) are 30cm higher than those commonly used in Brazil. Therefore, the slope of the lower tier of stands had to be readjusted, which necessitated the complete revamping of the stadium project.

     9)     Is there any doubt that mega-events widen the gap between rich and poor? The South African government pail hundreds of millions in advertising to attract people, and then paid hundreds of millions more to control them once they arrived. The South African debt from the World Cup is roughly equivalent to FIFA profit.

    10)   If there is so much money to be spent on public works projects, why not do it anyway? (The event tends to unify coalitions that are usually at odds). By building on a massive scale for a month-long event, governments opt for a strategy of maximizing capital accumulation in the shortest possible time frame. That the public will continue to pay the bills for decades to come is not of much interest to the political power de jure as they will be remembered more for the successful hosting of the event than for the unfulfilled promises of economic and social development.

    11)   This table reflects the current state of the stadium projects for the 2014 World Cup. One year ago, the estimated cost for all of the stadiums was R$ 4,411,000,000. This has jumped by 31.6% - without actually building anything! Stadiums in Cuiaba and Manaus have begun to be demolished, but none of the remaining ten projects have begun.

Cidade-sede      Construção        R$xMilhões        Gestão       Atual (13.7.10)

Belo Horizonte	renovação	657,4	pub/ppp?	não contratada
Brasilia	demolição	702	publico	edital publicada
Cuiaba	demolição	342	publico	contratada
Curitiba	renovação	200	privado	Em duvida
Fortaleza	novo	452	publico	na justiça
Manaus	demolição	499,5	publico	contratada
Natal	novo	400	publico	Licitação pendente
Porto Alegre	renovação	150	privado	procurando dinheiro
Recife	novo	464	ppp	contratada
Rio de Janeiro	renovação	720	publico	não tem licitação
Salvador	demolição	591,7	publico	Contratada ; suspensa
São Paulo	renovação	630	publico	Fora
		5808,6

São Paulo has no stadium project, as the Morumbi has been excluded. Rio de Janeiro has not yet published the Novo Maracanã project (to which we should add the R$430 million in reforms undertaken for the 2007 Pan American Games). Several other projects are held up in the courts. And…the national government just passed a law that will make it more, not less, difficult to track how public money is spent for the World Cup and Olympics.

    12) Mega-events as a model of social and economic development are inherently flawed. These events are promoted by local and national economic and political elites who erect autonomous agencies to direct billions from the public coffers. The restructuring of urban space for capital accumulation is exacerbated by the use of public and private security forces to ensure its unimpeded flow into the hands of multi-national corporations and international sport governing agencies. Once the “event” has passed, there is no public accountability, frequently nothing left in terms of a “legacy”, and massive sporting, transportation and tourist infrastructures that have little to no local context but need to be maintained with even more public money.

    13)  Is a mega-event completely horrible? No. Was the World Cup an unmitigated disaster? No. I nearly died from emotional overload on a number of occasions. Does a mega-event bring intangible benefits to the hosts? Yes. A mega-event is a global party during which a host city or nation is able to welcome the world. The emotions and drama of global sport are captivating and important and form part of our collective human consciousness (especially post-WWII). However, the form, function, processes, and lasting effects of the World Cup and Olympics are, on balance, terrible, nefarious, and destructive. The World Cup and Olympics need to be massively reconfigured, re-scaled, and re-thought, or they will continue to destroy environments, economies, communities, and lives around the globe.