Rio de Janeiro and the divided state: Analysing the political discourse on favelas

Abstract

This article analyses the discourse on favelas produced by Brazilian society and consumed in the political field of local administration. The ideological conception of favelas (slums) determines the creation of public policies that reinforce the prejudicial notion of favelas. This work employs critical discourse analysis (CDA) to analyse several texts extracted from mass-media stories and press releases of the Rio government. It shows that the state of praxis reproduces the understanding of slums as a phenomenon detached from the rest of society. This alienated vision impacts on different utterances blaming the poor (analysis 1); perpetuating poverty (analysis 2); and reinforcing exclusion (analysis 3).

Managing to make market agencements: The temporally bound elements of stigma in favelas

“…Characterised by limited means and strong social relationships, these communities manage local supply and demand (Anderson & Billou, 2007;Weidner, Rosa & Viswanathan, 2010). In Rio's historical development, policy-makers have neglected and segregated favela populations, leading to the stigmatisation of favelas as unsafe and undesirable places, and constituting Rio as a "divided" or "broken" city (Valladares, 2005;Lacerda, 2015;Jovchelovitch & Priego-Hernández, 2013). Stigma has been described as a negative belief attributed to people and places that results in discriminatory actions (Goffman, 1963;Wacquant, 2007).…”

“…In the literature of sociology, the historical stigmatisation of place, and particularly the stigma of Brazilian favelas, has been widely recognised (Lacerda, 2015;Fernandes, 2014). In Rio de Janeiro, favelas suffer from what Wacquant (2007, p. 67) calls territorial stigmatisation marking a shift from the notion of favelas as fixed, human, and culturally familiar places to be feared, lawless spaces, devoid of stability and safety.…”

Coproduced game-changing in transformative social innovation: reconnecting the “broken city” of Rio de Janeiro

“…To them, the favelas are housing solutions (Lacerda 2015). Their informal settlements have for a long time formed part of Rio de Janeiro, as the regular housing capacity repeatedly fell short in accommodating successive immigration waves.…”

“…This is a very sensitive issue: many initiatives toward game-changing have already been undertaken over the heads of the favela inhabitants, reducing them to passive players or even spectators. As detailed in a critical discourse analysis by Lacerda (2015), political and media utterances on the favela game-changing tend to selectively highlight and downplay the agency of players.…”

Transnational Governance and the Trilhos Urbanos: Civil Society's Resistance to Mega-Events in Rio De Janeiro

“…Crime-ridden violent favelas are a common theme in narratives about Rio de Janeiro and other large Brazilian cities. They are a feature of fiction, movies and even telenovelas, and certainly a fixture in media reporting (see Lacerda, 2015Lacerda, , 2016. They therefore constitute an embarrassment and a threat to city planners seeking mass tourism for their megaevents.…”