Interview with Al Jazeera

Interview with Al Jazeera

4 December 2009

Rio de Janeiro

AJ: Al Jazeera

CG: Christopher Gaffney

AJ: What is taking place on the ground here as you see it in relation to the Olympics and the World Cup?

CG: In regards to the Olympics especially, I think they are reforming territory in order to put the projects in place. This involves rezoning, redesigning infrastructure, and creating an Olympic City – that is a very limited vision of the city. In order to build projects, in order to get tourists to come, you have to build infrastructure. That is what is going on right now, they are preparing the ground.

AJ: Right, and in this preparing the ground, you have denounced things that are taking place, could you tell us a little bit more about it?

CG: There have been some laws passed by the city government that have reformed the plano director , the master plan for the city of Rio, that have happened through unconstitutional processes, without public audiences, that have rezoned strategic parts of the city and set off a series of real estate speculations without taking into account the people that live there already. Most of the targeted areas are poorer communities that are threatened with forced relocation in order to allow the real estate projects to move forward.

AJ: And these forced relocations, would you say there is a pattern, how generalized are they?

CG: There is a pattern that happened during the run up to the 2007 Pan American Games when members of the housing commission would come through communities and try to cadastrar or register people and households, saying “we’re here to register your houses” and then the next week would come back and say “ok, now that you’re registered we know you’re here illegally and it’s time to remove you.” If you want to go peaceably we’ll give you a check for x amount of Reales and you can be on your way. In the Canal de Anil, they forcibly removed sixty families in 2006 in preparation for the Pan American Games. These people had rights and title to their territory but were forcibly evicted.

AJ: Right, how may people are we talking about in this case for the Olympics?  

CG: Certainly in the hundreds if not one or two thousand people. I’m not sure how many people, I know that 30 communities have been targeted by the city as targets for removal or at least identified as “areas of concern” in relation to the new zoning laws in relation to the Olympic project.

AJ: As we were talking about before why are people not organizing to prevent this from happening?

CG: The people in the communities are trying to organize. There’s a lot of co-option that goes on of course, clientelist politics in Brazil are still very much alive and well, and then the hegemony of the media outlets prevents the story from getting out there. The forces allied in favor of the Olympics are quite strong and those against it almost nil. There are social groups organizing but they have very little coverage in the general media.

AJ: And we saw that because of the violence taking place here almost all the time but now with the Olympics coming I’m sure they’re doing loads of things to improve the situation but I’m sure there’s going to be other consequences in terms of speculation, I don’t know if you could tell us a little about that aspect as well. Not in terms of human  rights and other controversial aspects along the way to making things peaceful but what can we expect in terms of other consequences?

CG: There are many other types of violence that are also going on. The mere threat of being removed is a kind of violence and then there’s the actual act of removal. People are already experiencing the threat of forced relocation which is causing considerable stress. People have to take time out of their ordinary lives in order to mobilize with the same intensity as the forces that are mobilizing against them. This is quite a different level of fight for an individual or a small community versus say the International Olympic Committee which has money, a strong bureaucracy and political clout. We can expect that these dislocations will probably happen and will probably happen with violence that will be resisted, but in the end the dislocation will be carried out. In the end, around 30 communities will lose the rights to part or all of their territory in the Olympic region in the southwest part of the city.

AJ: And more generally, the Dona Marta favela and other “pacification” projects aren’t going to be part of the Olympic project are they?

[Dona Marta is a showcase favela in Botafogo. It has been occupied by BOPE (shock troops) since 2008. Madonna made a visit there last week].

CG: There will be tourists going there now as part of their Olympic experience and now that it’s “pacified” it will be a protected area. Every place that becomes pacified, controlled, settled, becomes then fair game for part of the project.

AJ: Is that part of the Games?

CG: It’s part of a generalized project to make the city safe for capital.

AJ: Can you tell me a little bit about that? What is the plan and how are they going to achieve it, basically?

CG: The plan, as with any Olympic city is to create infrastructure so that capital can arrive and circulate fluidly. That includes tourists, information infrastructure, media centers, people arriving through airport infrastructure, moving people thorough the city via metros and bus systems and private Olympic lanes. Part of the pacification programs, such as the BOPE occupation of morro Dona Marta, Pavão-Pavãozinho in Copacabana and trying to settle things down in the Complexo do Alemão is to make the city safe for capital. This is unabashedly the project of the governor, the mayor, Lula, etc…this is the Olympic project in Brazil – to make the city a market, to put it in the shop window. If you can have places in the Zona Sul on the mountainside with beautiful views where tourists can go and have a nice bed and breakfast while they go to the Olympics or World Cup, that’s also part of the project.

AJ: Is there already real estate speculation?

CG: We have seen real estate speculation in Dona Marta already. If it’s peaceful and it’s close to beautiful areas, people want to live there and you’re going to see a rise in rents. That pushes people who lived there in the first place because they needed a cheap place to live close to centers of employment, that rise in rents pushes them further out. A generalized “settling” of the favela in Rio will then dislocate that poverty somewhere else and as long as that poverty is not in the Olympic city, fine. They become forgotten. The real estate speculation in Barra de Tijuca and Jacarepaguá is part of the larger civilizing mission of the Games .

AJ: Do you think that the erecting of walls around the favelas is problematic?

CG: The strategy is problematic for a number of reasons. One, it’s penning people in, it’s animalizing a class, it’s criminalizing poverty. By walling someone in you’re limiting their ability to move freely. Of course, aesthetically no one wants to live next to a wall. Secondly, the rationale is that the favela is destroying the environment, that be erecting the wall, they’re preserving the environment. If they want to preserve the environment, they should put social services in, have water and sewage and trash collection – this would be preserving the environment. Building condominiums with a highly consumptive lifestyle in a fragile wetland in Barra de Tijuca destroys the environment much more than people living on a hillside or a favela expanding into the Floresta de Tijuca. Of course, every human settlement has its environmental impact, but a highly consumptive lifestyle in a car dependent landscape creates another level of impact where people are, just by their mere existence, destroying the environment more.

AJ: Can you talk about the method by which Rio is going about taking over these places in the city? How does this process work? What are the critical steps they are taking?

CG: The emblematic person for this process is Rudy Giuliani who was here in Rio yesterday and has been employed as a private consultant in the lead up to the World Cup and Olympics. The “zero tolerance” policy that he implemented in New York criminalizes ordinary behavior, but only in certain areas of the city. The idea that by enforcing the law with maximum authority, you create a situation by which those who can afford to evade the law or have knowledge of ways to avoid it, or those who create the law themselves, don’t have to obey it – so in the end you are further criminalizing poverty. This is what happened in New York and is what is happening here as well. There, you had a massive real estate boom because poverty and “disorder” was pushed away from Manhattan into smaller and smaller areas of the city where the “zero tolerance” policies were rigidly enforced. So Manhattan island becomes a massive area for real estate speculation and a global symbol of consumption. That is the idea here with the “Choque de Ordem” that Eduardo Paes has instituted. The more you can isolate and contain certain groups and their undersirable behaviors, the more real estate is going to rise in the south of Rio, in what is becoming an increasingly limited Olympic City.

The major problem for me with the Olympic planning is that it only touches a very small segment of the city. The imagination of Rio is this: the beach, beautiful mountains, Christo, futebol, samba, etc. but there is a whole other world of Rio that exists beyond that imagination that also needs to be included in the project. This lack of inclusion is accomplished by pushing people out, or conducting what the call a faxina social or social cleaning, and that is how these communities feel they are being treated. Step by step, moment by moment, that is what is happening to the point that now you can’t even drink a coco on the beach. For me it’s not a whole conception of the city. It’s dealing with little pieces that you can target, isolate, and exterminate and to me it’s complete violence against the poor.

AJ: Who benefits from this violence?

CG: The beneficiaries are real estate speculators, private security forces, wealthy merchants, bullet proof car manufactures, arms dealers. Military spending will increase.  Oglobo will benefit from selling the idea of fear, real estate speculators and security companies will benefit by selling condominium compounds far from the “poor parts” of the city. We see this in the United States, one of the most fearful societies in the world, that faces no real threats but people are scared continually. When there is not a threat you have to invent a threat. The threat here is the poor: the dirty, poor person that is going to steal your purse on Copacabana – that’s the threat. The people who live with the daily violence are the poor, not the middle and upper classes. They have violence touch them from time to time but it’s not …they’re the people gaining from that violence.

AJ: Is the drug problem being used as an excuse?

Yes. The drug problem is being used as an excuse, but the drug problem is also a problem. It creates violence within the favelas. It creates separate worlds within the favelas. Most people that live within the favelas are lower middle-class people living in communities that have been there, in some cases, for a hundred years. They’re not criminals, they’re just working people who want to live in a place that is close to where they work. The traffic is stimulated by those who have money for recreational drugs. There’s this link between extreme poverty and extreme wealth that circles around itself in Brazil and this drives all kinds of social, political and economic relations. It serves the police, it serves the traficante, it serves the upper-middle class kid going to the disco with his little bag of cocaine on the weekend, it feeds real estate speculation and car sales in Barra and there’s no real exit from it. The mechanism of capitalism and the mechanism of democracy in Brazil are such that these processes are interlinked and mutually re-enforcing. The World Cup and Olympics are only going to exacerbate the problem.

AJ: Is there anything else you would like to comment on?

CG: Yeah. I think that transportation and the issue of mobility are fundamental. The major problem that I see with both the World Cup and the Olympics is the issue of mobility in the city. In order to get from the Baixada Fluminese to the Center of the city or Zona Sul to work have to travel two hours, one way on a bus or non air conditioned train. One of the most frequent protests you see in Rio is either the burning of a train or the burning of a bus. This is a tradition that goes back to the nineteenth century, when people would burn forms of transportation in order to protest a hike in fares, poor travel conditions and things like that. Transportation here is fundamental. The plans in place for the Olympics do not link any part of the Olympic city, this Olympic ring, to the North, where the majority of the people in the city live. Or the West which is the fastest growing area of the city. The idea is to create specific Olympic lanes within existing traffic infrastructure. So for the three weeks of the Olympics, they are planning the transportation for the next fifty years and the idea of not linking the metropolitan region through effective transportation is serving to isolate and fragment the workforce. Where you are condemning people to live far from places of employment without mechanisms to get there and so you are keeping a workforce docile and immobile by limiting their transportation options. This is a form of violence equal to any other that needs to be addressed in a hurry before these plans really take off.

AJ: It sounds like a really bad idea for Rio to host the Olympics.

CG: The Olympics are never good things for anybody! This is the great myth of the Olympics. Who wins with the Olympics? Barcelona is the paradigmatic example of a brilliant Olympics but it transformed the city into a tourist spectacle. Barcelona lost a lot of its character it lost it’s working class population in the middle of the city. It turned into a city to be sold somewhere else and not a city to be lived in. Atlanta was a disaster, Sydney and Homebush Bay was a nightmare, Beijing, nem falar. The Olympics come around every four year and put an authoritarian regime in place. In Brazil the Olympic Authority is going to direct a budget of 30 billion Reales and it’s a parallel government and has not democratic responsibilities. They are in charge of planning the city for the next fifty years without consulting planners. The Olympics is three weeks. The Olympics brings a lot of money and reshapes and reinforces the spatial dynamics of the city for a long time.

AJ: Thank you very much!

Big Football Sunday in Rio de Janeiro

This is the most important weekend of football in Rio de Janeiro in many, many years.

Rio de Janeiro has many dozens of professional teams, but four major clubs: Botafogo, Fluminese, Flamengo and Vasco da Gama. This is the final weekend of the Campeonato Brasileiro Serie A, or Brasileirão.

Botafogo is in the relegation zone, playing at home against Palmeiras (São Paulo). If Botafogo wins, they escape relegation. If they lose, they go down to the second division for the second time in five years. In addition to being the team with the most draws (14) they are widely perceived to be the team most harmed by bad luck, poor referring, and general levels of incompetence on the part of club management (despite receiving a massive subsidy from the city for their stadium contract). Palmeiras is three points off the title chase and win might give them the title if other results go their way. They will come with everything they have especially since they were leading the competition by six points six weeks ago, have spent hundreds of millions on transfers, and have very little to show for it.

Three months ago, the odds of Fluminese falling to the second division were 97%. Since the return of their talismanic striker Fred, they have won ten league games on the trot while getting to the final of the Copa SulAmericana. Flu sit one point ahead of both Coritiba and Botafogo and a draw will be enough to keep them in the Brasilieirão. Fluminese plays Coritba for the right to stay in the first division. After losing a heartbreaking final to LDU of Ecuador on Wednesday night they might not have the spirit to stay afloat. If they fall, Rio’s oldest club might not return to the first division for some time.

15	Fluminense	45	37	11	12	14	48	55	-7
16	Coritiba	44	37	12	8	17	47	59	-12
17	Botafogo	44	37	10	14	13	50	57	-7
18	Santo André	41	37	11	8	18	45	57	-12
19	Náutico	38	37	10	8	19	48	70	-22
20	Sport	31	37	7	10	20	48	67	-19

Flamengo are the unlikely story of the 2009 season. In August, they sat in 12^th place with not much hope of reaching a continental competition. Since the inclusion of the 37 year old Dejan Petkovic in the starting lineup, week in week out, Flamengo have been the best team in Brazil. Petkovic has been brilliant, combining with ‘O Imperiador’ Adriano and Ze Roberto for some memorable goals. Flamengo idol turned manager Andrade has pulled all the right strings and is about to bring a massive party to the Maracanã.

Flamengo is in first place by two points chased by Internacional of Porto Alegre, Palmeiras and São Paulo. If Inter win and Flamengo lose, Inter will be champion. Problem for Inter: Flamengo is playing Grêmio of Porto Alegre, their arch-rival. Last week the fans of Grêmio began to chant ‘entrega’ to their team, meaning: lose the game intentionally, giving the title to Flamengo so Inter won’t win. It appears that this is going to happen and that a Flamenguista title is a fait accompli.

P	Equipes	PTS	J	V	E	D	GP	GC	S
1	Flamengo	64	37	18	10	9	56	43	13
2	Internacional	62	37	18	8	11	61	43	18
3	Palmeiras	62	37	17	11	9	57	43	14
4	São Paulo	62	37	17	11	9	53	42	11

Rio’s soccer fans have not had much to cheer about in recent years. In recent years, Fluminese fell as far as the third division, Botafogo was relegated in 2004, and Vasco was relegated in 2008. Flamengo, with the largest fan base in Brazil (if not the world) is disputing the title for the first time in 17 years. A Rio team has never won the championship in the era of pontas corridas (running table of points). This in itself speaks volumes about the management of football in this city.

The seasons of Flu and Fogo will be a success if they aren’t relegated. Vasco was champion of the second division and will be retuning to top flight football in 2010. Flamengo is probably going to waltz into the championship because Gremio is going to abria as pernas (as they say) so that their cross-town rivals have no chance at the title. One victory, two escapes?

It’s going to be a big futebol Sunday in Rio.

The Battle for the Vila Autódromo

Rio de Janeiro

December 1, 2009

Not everyone in Rio de Janeiro is excited about the 2016 Olympic Games.

Residents of the Vila Autódromo, on the shores of Lake Jacarepaguá, gathered on a recent Sunday afternoon to launch an international campaign to save their community. They are mobilizing against the forced removal of their homes in the face of development projects for the 2016 Olympic Games. The Resident’s Association of Vila Autódromo is sending a petition to President da Silva and the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, demanding that their constitutional and human rights be respected.

Within 24 hours of Rio’s conquest of the 2016 bid, mayor Eduardo Paes made quite clear that the Vila Autódromo would be demolished to make way for the Olympic Media Center. Since then, the city council has enacted several zoning laws making exceptions to city law in order to stimulate real-estate investment in this booming region of the city. The Vila Autódromo has long been a target of developers and their resistance to forced relocation has been a particular annoyance to the mayor.

The community meeting gained a national profile through the presence of Edson Santos, Special Secretary of Politics for the Promotion of Racial Equality. Secretary Santos, previously a Rio city council member and federal deputy, was surprisingly sharp in his criticisms of the 2016 Organizing Committee noting that the promise of the Olympics had set off a boom in real estate speculation that was destined to turn the Barra de Tijuca region into a new Copacabana. That is, a formerly bucolic setting with disperse settlements of fishermen is designed, in accordance with new zoning laws, to become congested with condominiums and shopping malls in anticipation of the Olympic Games.

Inalva Mendes Brito has always been at the forefront of the community’s struggle to secure their constitutional rights. She penned a letter of protest outlining the resistance of the Vila Autódromo against forced relocation, a battle the community has been fighting since the 1990s. It was her invitation that brought Secretary Santos from Brasilia to Jacarepaguá where he encouraged the community to “create a restrictive environment” for the municipal government to act through protest, occupations, and organized resistance. “Rio can’t pay the bills for the kind of speculation that brings profit to the few,” the Secretary continued, “to what city does the Olympics belong?”

The forty residents attending the meeting enthusiastically received the Secretary’s comments, while organizers circulated through the crowd making sure that everyone had signed the petition.  Children ran about in the playground where a high wall marks the edge of the Autódromo Nelson Piquet.

Once the Secretary had signed the petition, Sra. Brito and Altair Antunes Guimarães, president of the Residents Association of Vila Autódromo, took turns invoking their constituency to action. “Without the constant force of the community, we will lose this battle,” intoned Guimarães. This echoed Secretary Santos’ thoughts, “This is not going to be easy, the forces aligned against you are powerful. However, it is not acceptable to forcibly remove a community of peaceful, working people.”

The battle for the Vila was nearly lost in 2006 when the Secretary of Housing marked all of the community’s homes for demolition. The community lived on because of political pressure from a minority of council members and a supposed lack of funding. The majority of the residents have legal land title and a community history that extends back to the mid 1970s when the Autódromo was constructed.

The project to remove the Vila Autódromo is but one of several forced removals underway in preparation for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games. In addition to the Vila, the communities of Canal do Anil, Gardênia Azul, Parque da Panela, Metrô-Mangueira (near the Maracanã) e Belém-Belém (near the Engenhão) are also under threat of forced relocation. The city government has made critical (and unconstitutional) changes to the plano director (master plan) of the city, allowing gross exceptions to zoning laws that have set off a real estate frenzy in the Jacarepaguá and Port regions.

The city has also begun the process of occupying strategic favelas with shock troops. This is causing other kinds of problems, such as gun battles in the streets, burning buses, and the closing of commercial zones.

There are 6 years until the Rio Olympics. As I mentioned in a previous post, there are myriad problems with hosting a mega-event, the majority of which the city, state, and national governments appear to be content to ignore in favor of advancing private interests, city marketing, and imposing temporary solutions to Rio’s grave problems with physical, economic, political, and social infrastructures.

Postcards from a visit to Rio's Olympic Stadium

27.11.2009

Observações e perguntas em resposta ao trabalho do campo Engenhão

O estádio tem mais nomes que qualquer outro estádio do Rio: Estádio Olímpico João Havelange, Engenhão, Vazião (porque nem a torcida do Botafogo vai ao estádio) e Stadium Rio. Adicionamos “Fechadão” a lista. Como o Maracanã e HSBC Arena, o estádio é muito difícil entrar sem pagar. Para fazer visitas escolares e/ou pesquisas académicas tem que armar o ataque durante muito tempo, ter a paciência de um santo e a persistência de Sisiphus. 

Também chamamos o estádio Fechadão porque ele é rodeado por cercas e muros empenetráveis. Só vimos um guarda guardando uma porta, e ele trabalha por uma empresa privada de segurança contratado por Botafogo (supostamente). 

Perguntamos como entrar, e ele me deu o mesmo número de telefone que eu já tinha ligado dez vezes (Departimento de Marketing de Botafogo 2543-7272). É também notável que o estádio não tinha linha telefônica aberto ao publico em quando o departimento responsável pelo estádio mudou seu escritório lá. Até hoje não existe como dar um toque ao estádio. 

Também podemos assertar que o estádio merece o nome Fechadão porque suas vias de acesso e dispersão são bem limitadas. O barrio tem vias estreitas e sinuosas. Nao obstante que a Linha Amarela passa perto é difícil chegar de carro. Chegar de trem da mais certo, mas o estação só tem uma saída. A situação de clássicos complica o transito ainda mais. Controlar o espaço do entorno para dirigir torcidas rivais é um grande desafio pela policia. 

O Fechadão é monumental em muitos aspetos. Seu custo de R$400.000.000 (sete vezes acima do orçamento) foi um gasto monumental. O metal, plastico e concreta brilham na luz. Sendo o prédio mais alto por muitos andares, o estádio domina o paisagem de região. Agora é mais difícil se perder na rua. Da para ver ele de longe, não está na moita, deixando rabo sair. Seus arcos são elegantes e o tieto que cobre milhares de metros quadrados parece leve. O que esta dizendo o estádio? Sua monumentalidade comunica mensagems de modernidade, exclusividade, espectacularidade, desenvolvimento, reestruturação e reterritorialização urbano. O estádio é também um símbolo do clube, do bairro, de poder politico, de uma falta de planejamento urbano, o futuro palco dos Jogos Olímpicos, esperança, fé e confiança num futuro bem certinho. 

O que é o afeito local?

Aumento de sensação térmica. Não existem refúgios de sombra no entorno do estádio.

Pavimento das ruas e calcadas abeirando o estádio. Os melhoramentos não estenderam ao barrio.

Dia de jogo, moradores abrem negócios temporários, lucram até R$12.000 extra por ano. Não são permitidos os camelôs no entorno. Eles ficam no outro lado de ferro estrada onde também não foram feitos melhoramentos urbanísticos.

Inflação de valor immobilaria e de aluguel. Não é claro ainda o que aconteceu com as comunidades ao outro lado de ferro estrada.

Encarando o estádio e ao lado do comunidade carente Belém-Belém, a empresa Santa Cecilia (www.santacecilia.net, 3206-2930) comprou um espaço arborizado que foi alugado por festas privadas. A mesma empresa construiu um condomínio em frente do Parque Aquatico Maria Lenk em Jacarepaguá. Pode significar uma concentração de especulação imobilario e/ou uma empresa sábia que comprou uns terrenos que não vão perder valor na decorrer aos Jogos Olímpicos. 

Foi notável a quantidade de pixação e grafiti nas paredes. O entorno do estádio é um paisagem de contrastes arquitectônicos, históricos e sócio-econômicos.

O estádio não creou espaço de lazer pela cidadão. Ao contrário, antes do estádio havia um campo de futebol no entorno. Botafogo não permite o público utilizar o estádio de jeito nenhum.

Não melhorou os negócios do entorno. Num lugar só, trés bares abriram e fecharam em dois anos. Se o estádio só pertence ao Botafogo, como hoje, ao máximo sediará 35-40 jogos por ano. É bastante difícil lucrar tanto em poucos dias. Pior ainda é que o acesso de trem passa de estação pelo portão sem enfrentar bar, restaurante ou serviço nenhum.

Perguntas claves pelo futuro: 

As vias de acesso jamais vão sorportar 40.000 torcedores chegando por muito jogos em pouco tempo. Durante o Campeonato Carioca 2011 e pelos jogos Olímpicos aconteceria muito. Então, para reformar as vias de acesso, teriam que fazer um intervenção urbanística massiva – o que e como será?

Enredando o estádio pela saída do trem esta o velho centro de ferrocarilles. O terreno e os prédios pertencem ao governo federal. Os prédios antigos são poucos utilizados, espaço perdido, decadente. Para tornar o estádio mas útil, seria necessário fazer algo criativo e lucrativo com esse espaço. Existe planejamento por o projeto? Quando começariam trabalhar lá?

Os estádios do Rio de Janeiro estão virando tomar seu antiga forma? Ao princípio do século XX, estádios só perteneceriam os ricos, brancos, elites e idosos. Eles demarcavam um espaço privado, exclusivo, encerrado, defendido e fechado. Só podia entrar quem pertencia a aquele espaço, com seus gostos, dinheiro, hábitos, métodos do transporte e cor de pele.  Todos os estádios novos, construído pela Pan 2007 são fechados ao propósito. O Maracanã é muito mais fechado que antes. Todos viravam espaços financiados pelo bolso publico mas dominados por interesses privados. O padrão do estádio (pós)-moderno é esso: cada vez mais caro, espetacular, monumental, separado, exclusivo e muito menos accessível. Existe outro caminho ao futuro?

Obrigado a Ana Elise Coelho para nos acompanhar e informar sobre a historia do Fechadão. Muitas de essas observações foram feitas por ela através de suas pesquisas. Também nos acompanhou Rômulo dos Santos Machado, Tricolor doente.

Expo Estadio

Expo Estádio 2009
São Paulo, Brasil

The 2014 World Cup is four and a half years away and Brazilian officials have promised to build or renovate twelve stadiums to meet FIFA’s universalizing, consumerist, clientelist exigencies. For a country that is football mad but does not have one stadium capable of hosting a World Cup match (according to FIFA), the ExpoEstádio is happening at just the right moment, uniting sellers of stadium components with buyers and builders of stadiums.

The stadium buyers are the Brazilian public. Lula’s government has promised R$400 million for each stadium (400x12=R$4.8 billion). The builders of stadiums vary from privately held entities in Porto Alegre (Estádio Beira-Rio of Internacional F.C.) to municipalities (Belo Horizonte) to state governments (Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, etc). The ExpoEstádio gives us a glimpse of the form and function of stadiums in Brazil for the 2014 World Cup.

For me, the most interesting aspect of the Expo was seeing a stadium completely dismantled into is various elements and spread around an exhibition hall. No element was unrepresented, save for the vending of hotdogs and drinks by mobile vendors. On display were highway crash barriers, huge roadside information signs, traffic flow mechanisms, parking monitoring devices, reflective vests for parking attendants, ticketing mechanisms, turnstiles, metal detectors, metal roofing, plastic roofing, tubular roofing, retractable roofing, drainage systems, security systems, alarms, security cameras, personal identification technologies, synthetic grass, real grass, floodlights, sound systems, plastic seats, vinyl seats, vip seats with cup holders, two way mirrors, structural steel supports, laminate covers for things unheard of, recycling technologies, toilets, point of sale niceties, covered seating for teams and trainers, etc.

The experience of the Expo hall was akin to seeing one's stadium experience segmented into its physical and technological components. From the car or bus journey to the textrure of the seat, the sounds and sights, and the million invisible things that comprise the urban matrix. A bit frightening in some way.

As with most expos of this kind the information was a bit overwhelming and it was difficult to discern who the target audience was for all of these goods. After asking around I discovered that many of the people in attendance were associated with one or another project for the World Cup or were trying to get in on the stadium boom that is apparently coming to Brazil. Some lamented that it may be too late, others were clearly impressed by the four or five different companies that sell the same kind of plastic seat.

The Expo placed the modern stadium [read: E. Asian-Euro-North American] on display in a unique form, presenting a disaggregated toolbox of options for clubs, cities, and states to choose from. As these stadium projects start to leave paper in the coming months in preparation for the 2014 World Cup (albeit without the public audiences and necessary guarantees of transparency and open bidding for contracts) it will be instructive to see how the form and function of Brazilian stadiums change in relation to the rapid integration of the technologies and techniques on display at ExpoEstádio.