Legacy participation and the buried history of racialised spaces: Hypermodern revitalisation in Rio de Janeiro’s port area

Abstract

Scholars have documented how financial capital has produced displacement driven by hypermodern urban spaces characterised by luxury and exclusivity. In this article we highlight how hypermodern public–private partnerships (PPPs) often re-write history, creating a futuristic global city image. Our case study of Porto Maravilha’s PPP reviews a dualistic narrative in the context of changes in Rio de Janeiro in preparation for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. Porto Maravilha aimed to position Rio de Janeiro as a centre of global competition and capital. However, this narrative re-framed the history of the transatlantic slave trade through discursive tactics that diluted and undermined the brutality of slavery in Rio’s port. Furthermore, this hypermodern PPP reinforced the post-abolition discriminatory urban planning policies that dislodged Africans and Afro-Brazilians from their places of residence, work and culture in the port district. The result is the erasure of the experiences of Black Brazilians in the port area for touristic consumption, selling the city on the world stage. Given this contradiction, we develop the concept of ‘legacy participation’ to secure the rights of Afro-Brazilians and their organisations to make decisions about their own territory.

HOUSING BEYOND THE METROPOLIS: Inhabiting Extractivism and Extensions in Urban Amazonia

“…Research on housing precarity and segregation, for instance, has largely been conducted from a metropolitan perspective-from seminal studies of 'urban spoliation' (Kowarick, 1979) and state housing projects in metropolitan peripheries (Maricato, 1987) to contemporary patterns of spatial segregation (Marques, 2015), housing precarity (Marques, 2017;, fortified enclaves (Caldeira, 2001) and urban occupations (Amin, 2014;Nascimento, 2016). While the analytical focus on peripheral subdivisions has dwindled over past decades, studies on metropolitan favelas still predominate in Brazilian housing studies (Ribeiro, 1993) in relation to myriad questions such as revitalization projects (Friendly and Pimentel Walker, 2022), insurgent planning (Friendly, 2022), claims on the right to the city (Pilo', 2017) and, more recently, mega-events (Richmond and Garmany, 2016) and evictions (Sørbøe and Braathen, 2022). 2 The same can be said of studies on the financialization of housing and urban space, which investigate financial circuits and operations taking place in Brazilian cities and are attentive to how the housing question is defined through alignments between the state, finance capital and construction companies (Shimbo, 2019), 3 particularly in relation to the mass housing program Minha Casa Minha Vida (My House My Life) (Pereira, 2017;Rolnik, 2019).…”

“…Research on housing precarity and segregation, for instance, has largely been conducted from a metropolitan perspective—from seminal studies of ‘urban spoliation’ (Kowarick, 1979) and state housing projects in metropolitan peripheries (Maricato, 1987) to contemporary patterns of spatial segregation (Marques, 2015), housing precarity (Marques, 2017; 2019), fortified enclaves (Caldeira, 2001) and urban occupations (Amin, 2014; Nascimento, 2016). While the analytical focus on peripheral subdivisions has dwindled over past decades, studies on metropolitan favelas still predominate in Brazilian housing studies (Ribeiro, 1993) in relation to myriad questions such as revitalization projects (Friendly and Pimentel Walker, 2022), insurgent planning (Friendly, 2022), claims on the right to the city (Pilo’, 2017) and, more recently, mega‐events (Richmond and Garmany, 2016) and evictions (Sørbøe and Braathen, 2022).…”

Writing the Latin American city: Trajectories of urban scholarship

“…Using qualitative analysis of the experience of Bolivian migrants in informal settlements in Buenos Aires, she unravels the exclusionary mechanism used with migrants that reproduces ethnic divisions. In contrast, Friendly and Pimentel Walker (2022) explore the erasure of racial histories of the transatlantic slave trade inscribed in the transformation of Porto Maravilha in the context of changes in Rio de Janeiro in preparation for the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. The debates around urban segregation in the pages of this journal have focused mainly on Santiago (Chile).…”

Sport mega-event fantasies to financialization: the case of Porto Maravilha

“…For more than three centuries (midsixteenth century until the mid-nineteenth century), slavery was the heart of the Brazilian economy. Brazil received approximately 4.9 million enslaved Africans through the transatlantic slave trade, representing roughly 40% of the 10 million enslaved Africans brought to the Americas (19). Archaeological studies estimate that roughly 500,000 to 1 million enslaved Africans entered Brazil via the wharf known as Cais do Valongo [Valongo Wharf], established in 1811.…”

“…Construction typical of autoconstructed communities was also regulated (22,23). Decree 391 (10 February 1903), for example, established new requirements for construction approval, including renovations and repairs to buildings and façades, and stipulated which materials were allowed (19). Furthermore, professional builders and building and floor-plan permits became mandatory (24).…”