Mobility, Death, Stadiums, Strikes: Normalcy

GEOSTADIA MILESTONE: 25,000 HITS!!!! 120 Countries!!! Thanks everyone!

Good news first – there is a plan to extend the Metrô across the bay to Niterói and São Gonçalo. The linha 3 project video link is here and is a much, much, much needed improvement in metropolitan mobility. No timeline has been set, but at least the state government has recognized the impossibility of transporting tens of thousands of people across a narrow bridge. There will even be a stop at the Universidade Federal Fluminense. Holding one’s breath for this project to be completed is not recommended.

Bad news. Really bad news. The quaint and picturesque bonde that shuttles people around Santa Teresa has had yet another accident. Remember that last year a bonde collided with a bus, crushing a woman to death. Last month a French tourist fell to his death off the aqueduct in Lapa. Ten days ago, five people died instantly and more than fifty were injured when the bonde brakes failed on its way down the hill. In most places in the world a major transportation line killing a handful of people and critically injuring others would be a major and permanent scandal – especially when the secretary of transportation blames the dead conductor instead accepting any kind of responsibility when only 7% of the maintenance budget had been spent. Apparently, instead of using nuts and bolts to secure the brakes, something else was used as a temporary fix. Rumor has it that instead of replacing the wheels of the trams with the same size, used wheels from the SuperVia trains were put on and these were perhaps too large for the bonde tracks. Who knows? What we do know is that the total disregard for public safety inevitably led to the evitable deaths of five people. There are some criticisms being launched in the proper directions but no real outrage, no one demanding the Governor’s head on a platter. The Transportation Secretary retained his post despite massive evidence of incompetence.

That there was a disaster waiting to happen is evidenced in this video that shows the bonde heading downhill against traffic.

More ridiculous news coming out of the Ministério do Esporte. The MoS, responsible for the governance of all sport in Brazil, paid R$6.2 million to register soccer fans. The money was delivered, the project never was. The problem is not only in that the project was not carried off or that the company hired to do it pocketed the money (at least temporarily) but that it never should have been considered in the first place. The Brazilian government has consistently and incrementally implemented a policy of criminalizing all football fans, but especially those who are members of the torcidas organizadas. The “registration” of torcidas organizadas is another step along the way to the hyper-surveillance of all fans and curiously one that the torcidas of Rio de Janeiro are willing to accept. For those interested in the minutiae of Brazilian football culture, the torcidas of Rio e Janeiro are the only torcidas in Brazil that are not affiliated with the national association. I’ll save the explanation for another post.

Not surprisingly, and as I predicted here, there is a shortage of qualified labor for the 2016 Olympic projects. It is a very good time to be a civil engineer in Brazil. The shortage of labor is being used as a justification by the Olympic Organizing Committee to elevate the salaries of the personnel that they already have under contract. This will also necessitate the imporation of more expensive experts from abroad, so those of you thinking of making the jump to Brazil , come on in, the water’s lovely, although you’re still likely to get your electronic goods stolen on the street (an Italian friend of mine was robbed twice yesterday, the second attempt, obviously, not as fruitful as the first as there was nothing left, coitados).

The general strike at the Maracanã continues! There was a brief resolution last week, but all work has stopped again and the Consorcio Maracanã (Odebrecht, Delta and Carioca) is making no attempt to re-start negotiations with the union. One of the major complaints of the workers is that they were being served rotten food and that even after the last round of negotiations, the food provider was not changed. There are likely two sides to this story, maybe even three, but serving rotten food to one’s workers is certainly not in the best interests of the nation. Come on Dilma, get your petit-bourgeois party back to the left it left ten years ago!

After strikes at the Maracanã and Minerão, threats of striking in Cuiabá, there is now the possibility of a strike at the Fonte Nova in Salvador. Salvage capitalism meets head to head with relatively strong syndicalism! Drama total!

In case you thought that no one in the government was watching what is going on with these insanely inflated budgets, the Tribunal das Contas Da União (TCU) identified some price inflation in the Maracanã project. The official cost is now around R$859 million, or R$11.300 per seat. By contrast, the new privately financed Grêmio stadium in Porto Alegre will only cost R$6.600 per seat and Palmerias’ Palestra Italia stadium in São Paulo will privately finance 45.000 at R$6.670 per seat. Corinthians’ publically financed stadium in São Paulo will cost at least R$12.000 per seat.  Lesson: where public money and post-Cup privatization contracts are happening, the pigs are at the trough. Where the private sector is involved, costs are much lower. Does this mean that all the WC stadiums should be privately financed? No. But it does mean that there is a pervasive culture of getting hands in the till as often and as deeply as possible and that there is little or no control over public spending in the pursuit of mega-event legacies [sic].

The World Cup and the Elimination of Public Memory

The Maracanã is one of the most famous stadiums in all of human history. Constructed to host the 1950 World Cup final, its official capacity was 179,000. Brazilians happily referred to the colossal stadium as “O Maior do Mundo” – the biggest in the world. Over the years, hundreds of thousands gathered in the Maracanã to watch football. To create football. To live football. It was in the Maracanã that Santos F.C. and Pelé won the World Club Championship in 1961. Flamengo and Zico did the same in 1981. Pelé chose the Maracanã as the place to score his 1,000^th goal. Since then, the goal itself has been known as the “Gol de Pelé”. The other goal is known as the “Gol de Garrincha” because that is where, in the 79^th minute of the World Cup final in 1950, with the score tied 1-1, the Uruguayan winger killed the dreams of a nation.

This is not a tale of romanticized melodrama, it’s culture. It’s living, breathing, screaming, flag-waving, carnavelesque culture, and it’s being killed as you read this. . The reforms underway to “prepare” Brazilian stadiums to host the 2014 World Cup are literally eliminating the spaces where Brazilian football culture takes place. The Maracanã has undergone a series of hatchet jobs. In 1999, the capacity was reduced from 179,000 to 129,000. Before the FIFA World Club Championships in 2000, the Maracanã suffered the idiocy of “luxury boxes” that only served to cut off the air circulation and eliminate the use of the monumental ramps that define the stadium’s exterior.  In 2004-2005, a R$450 million reform reduced the capacity to 85,000, eliminated the standing only section, lowered the field by 3 meters, and installed big screen tvs that are about to be thrown out. Why? Because the “Maior do Mundo” is undergoing a projected R$720 million reform that will reduce the capacity to 75,000, install a roof so no one but the players get wet, and will actually reduce the length of the field by 7 meters and its width by 5 meters. Both the Gol de Pelé and the Gol de Garrincha will die. Those spaces, those places, the goal line where history and culture were made and remembered and recreated and forgotten and relived and renewed week after week, season after season, year after year, for six decades – gone. Poof. Já era. Public memory, public culture, one of the constituent elements of civil society – extinguished with a torrent of public money.

This is not only happening in Rio de Janeiro. The Minerão in Belo Horizonte is undergoing the same process. The Fonte Novo in Salvador, already reduced to rubble. The Vivaldão in Manaus is no more. The stadiums that are going up in their place are temples of consumption, sanitized environments that facilitate the circulation of capital, VIP salons where culture is consumed and not produced, air-conditioned fortresses, highly securitized off-worlds, crystalline shopping malls that require one parking spot for every six spectators. The 2014 World Cup stadiums in Fortaleza, Cuiabá, Manaus, Natal, and Brasilia will have no post-cup functionality. The World Cup stadiums will have such high maintenance costs that they can only be supported though public subsidy. We just saw this happen in South Africa, where residents of Cape Town are debating whether or not to implode the Green Point stadium. This is as revolting as it is sickening and immoral.

Why are public officials so willing to invest BILLIONS in public funds to erect stadia that :

1)      have no relationship to the urban environment?

2)      have no post-event uses?

3)      are undertaken with no input from those who use the stadiums?

4)      forcibly dislocate communities to make way for a “clean” television shot?

5)      will never have any economic viability, never make a return on the public investment?

6)      become privatized during the World Cup, where only FIFA security forces operate, where the only profits accrue to FIFA and their rapacious partners?

7)      destroy the very places where public culture and memory are created, preserved, lived, and transformed?

It doesn’t have to be this way. There is a different model. There is a way to make the democratically elected officials wake up from their soporific state of infatuation with corrupt FIFA overlords. The Minster of Sport and Culture, a member of the Communist Party of Brazil, is leading the way towards the destruction of sport and culture. O que isso?!?!! The project of ANT (torcedores.org) is to change the direction of these projects, to democratize the World Cup, to make it something Brazilian, not something from Switzerland. Within two weeks of ANT’s foundation the association has nearly 1,000 members throughout Brazil. One by one, the march of the formigas (ants) will grow, and by sheer force of numbers the white elephants will be consumed.

2014, General Silence.

There's not much to report on Brazil's preparations for the 2014 World Cup.

Marcia Lins, the Rio State Secretary of Sport, Tourism and Leisure has delayed the closing of the Maracanã until December, the third such delay this year. She continues to guarantee that the R$720 million reform will be completed by December 31, 2012. There has been no public debate regarding the project, no explanation of what the money will go to, no reason given for the poorly executed reforms of 2005-2007.

The best case scenario (if best case involves hundreds of millions of public R$ combined with private investment towards a stadium that will be too expensive to maintain and too big for the crowds it attracts) appears to be Belo Horizonte, which has closed the Minerão and actually begun work on the stadium reforms. The cost estimates vary, but appear to be in the range of R$650-R$800 million. In the meantime, no one is going to the games of Atletico or Cruzeiro (BH's big local sides) because the games are happening in stadiums at least 70km away.

The situation in São Paulo has not changed. Brazil's largest city is without a stadium for the World Cup. I don't think this is so bad,  as the WC would have a minimal impact on SP's economy, the city is a terrible place to move around, there isn't much in the way of tourist infrasturcture, the airports are in total chaos, and there is no functional public transportation to the Morumbi (not there shouldn't be, but it's not even in the plans). The hidden story here is the political clash between the president of São Paulo F.C. Juvenal Juvêncio and Ricardo Teixeira of the CBF. Juvêncio is the president of the Group of 13 which represents the financial interests of the 13 largest Brazilian clubs. There are in a constant battle with the CBF over the (dis)organization of Brazilian footy, television contracts, etc. The party line, and the one most often repeated in the media, is that São Paulo has not put together a package that meets FIFA's requirements. The reality is much more complicated. My guess is that the Morumbi project will start late, cost 5x the initial budget, and will host the opening game.

In a sign of radical awakening ahead of the announcement for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups, two prominent Belgium politicians had the audacity to question whether or not FIFA should be granted tax-exempt status and be allowed to completely privatize the public space around public stadiums that have been privatized for FIFA's event. There was no such outrage here in Brazil when Lula signed into law a tax-free exemption for EVERYTHING that has to do with hosting the 2014 WC and 2016 Olympics. Open the doors boys, we're hosting a party for the super rich (but don't do anything until after the elections and then let the gringos through will all of their tax exempt goods). Meanwhile the USA jacket my mom sent me for my birthday, in June, is being held for a R$275 ransom by the Brazilian post office. I tried to go challenge the estimate...

The tabulations, results, balance, and rap sheets from South Africa are beginning to trickle in. There won't be much need for journalists four years from now as we will be able to copy and paste what our South African colleagues are finding. We will also be able to save our collective words by repeating what a few intrepid souls have been saying about the 2007 Pan American Games. Que vergonha! Fala seh:rio! Não dah para acreditar! Pô! Você está brincando!  Tá bobo? Vai tomar banho meu filho tu fede demais!

FIFA makes me sick

FIFA has asked that the State government of Rio de Janeiro change the architectural plans for the Maracanã project, asking to cancel this week's call for construction proposals to "modernize" the stadium. Why? The architectural plans for the lower seats are "not inclined enough". I had assumed that there had been an error of some kind in the drawings, or that the presence of the new luxury boxes would have changed the angles, or something more obvious, like the seat backs for the FIFA overlords weren't high enough, or wide enough, or didn't vibrate with a Swiss twizzler, French tickler option button. But it was worse than I imagined:


As reported by Lance! and passed on at copa2014.org.br:
"O problema principal é a mudança da altura das placas de publicidade instaladas ao lado dos gramados, de 90 cm para um metro, definida pela federação internacional de futebol. Com essa barreira visual mais alta, toda a visibilidade dos torcedores seria alterada e daí a necessidade de reestruturar os projetos de arquibancadas."


The principal problem is the change in height of the advertizing boards that line the field, from 90cm to one meter, as defined by FIFA. With the higher visual barrier, all of the sightlines of the spectators will be altered and as a result the entire structure of the stands will need to be changed. 


Let me get this straight. FIFA is demanding that at least 4 of the current stadium projects (Brasilia, Sao Paulo, Rio, Belo Horizonte), worth billions of public Reales, be delayed and their architecture refigured (increasing their already astronomical prices), so that their advertisers can have 30cm more height during the 64 games of the 2014 World Cup? Pelo amor de Deus gente! It's a crime! It's the most rediculous thing I have ever heard! The website that reported the news is sponsored by the national syndicate or architecture and engineering (SINAENCO), and not a sound of protest! Hey! FIFA! Vai tomar no c*!

Let me repeat: FIFA is demanding that at least 4 publicly funded World Cup stadiums change their architectural plans and delay the start of construction so that their "partners" can have ads that are 30cm higher. Hey! FIFA! Vai tomar no c*!

As I have catalogued here time and time again, the projects are already behind schedule, which will increase the cost of every stadium project. Since 2009, the total bill for the 12 stadium projects has increased by 20% and South Africa has just reported that their stadiums cost twice the original estimates. Can you imagine what the cost of the Brazilian stadiums will be 4 years from now? The obvious well and truly boggles the mind.