Rio de Janeiro.
If cars were bread, the city would be the world´s largest, moldiest, most
immobile basket. But cars aren´t edible, and therefore we have the blingest,
bestest, most smartest city in the world, full of a thousand hidden treasures
and a million kilometers of traffic jams. We can all thank the brilliant privatization
initiatives and urban operations and mega-events for the wholesale prostitution
of urban space and commodification of our increasingly
bare lives. We are being led into an impossible smart future by the rising star
of hyperbolic, back room, smart guy glad-handing. In the past
weeks, Rio de Janeiro has been selected as “the world´s smartest city” at the Smart
City Expo World Congress and his royal munificence Eduardo Paes was elected
president of the C40 group of the world´s largest cities.
Congratulations, Mr. Mayor. It´s just that the city is
more dysfunctional than ever, the urban future is being built upon car and bus
transportation, the bay and the ocean are too polluted for human use, half of
the city is controlled by militias, the other half by drug gangs and a brutal
military apparatus, the mayor wants
to build a ski slope in the Madureira park and is more concerned with Woody
Allen than with reforestation.
Truly, the
marketing machine of the city and state governments are the smartest elements
of RJ. I have not done a formal analysis, but Rio de Janeiro must be the only
city in the C40 that does not have a map of its bus routes. It must be the only
port city that does not use the water for mass transportation. It is the
largest city in the Americas with one
metro line, which does not a metro make. It may be the world´s largest city
that has privatized all of its public transportation and continues to blast
highways through dense neighborhood fabric without ever having demonstrated
that those lines aattend present or future demand. The Olympic bid books have
become the de-facto urban planning documents. Rule by decree, violations of
human rights, rampant deficit spending, mega event after mega-event, bubbling sewage,
increased congestion, violent police, voracious real-estate speculation
undertaken by the state, attempts to close high performing public schools, the
elimination of Olympic training facilities and tens of thousands of forced
removals. This is the toned and bronzed face of the new smart city.
Now, as we
welcome another gang of “global experts” in the form of the Clinton
Initiative (with Chelsea! and the president of Nike, Otavio Marques de Azevedo, presidente da
Andrade Gutierrez; Candido Botelho Bracher, presidente e CEO do Itaú BBA;
Alessandro Carlucci, CEO da Natura; Sylvia Coutinho, CEO do UBS Brasil; Andre
Esteves, CEO do BTG Pactual; Angélica Fuentes, CEO do Grupo Omnilife/Angelíssima;
Eduardo Hochschild, presidente-executivo da Hochschild Mining; Jorge Gerdau
Johannpeter, presidente do conselho de administração da Gerdau; Kurt
Koeningfest, CEO do BancoSol) - as we receive this cavalcade of the lords of
the planet, we will again hear how great Paes and Cabral are performing for
this brutally limited audience.
On the positive
side, the only really intelligent plan to come out of RJ in recent years has won
an important international prize. The Plano
Popular da Vila Autódromo (link to download), developed in conjunction with
the residents of the Vila Autódromo (whose residents possess title to land and
whose existence has been personally threatened by Mayor Paes for 20 years), has
won the London
School of Economics / Deutche Bank Urban Age Award. The recognition of a
plan that emerged through the collaborative efforts of residents, universities
and urban professionals is an important political statement on the part of the
Urban Age. This will give political muscle to the Plan, forcing the city and state to work with the
V.A. to urbanize. It will also make it even more difficult for Rio 2016 to “clean”
the Olympic site for its London-inspired urbanization project. More, the
recognition that collaborative, grassroots, bottom up planning can have
significant and positive effects on urban environments and social relations
should be taken as proof positive that despite being smart, there is still hope
for Rio de Janeiro.
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