Socio-spatial legibility, discipline, and gentrification through favela upgrading in Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

This paper contributes to global perspectives on gentrification by interrogating the experiences of urban redevelopment and transformation in the global South. Through unpacking the contradictions of public space revitalization and upgrading in two favelas in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, we critically examine changes to the socio-spatial fabric of informal settlements over time. Our analysis reveals that upgrading projects, when combined with state-led favela pacification, create socio-spatial legibility through three inter-related pathways of physical, symbolic, and economic discipline. In the outset, favela upgrading increases property prices and produces an urban scenario molded for outsiders while simultaneously invisibilizing traditional cultural and social uses. For favela residents, however, upgrading is experienced as iterative processes of securitization and restriction, which involve strategies such as environmental clean-up, property enclosure, police violence, and new exclusionary forms of investments. As a result, the most socially vulnerable residents are controlled, coercively driven away, and slowly erased. Over time, the apparent integration of the formal and informal city, of the rich and the poor, of the 'asphalt' and the 'hill' in Rio de Janeiro produces new forms of separation, segregation, and fragmentation.

A Cultural History of Youth in the Modern Age

“…Rather, it is a feature of settler colonialism, past and present. More contemporary are cases of racial gentrification in cities across the Global South (Comelli et al 2018). Regardless of context or case, communal living provides an interesting lens by which to discuss multiple and overlapping manifestations of youth and family, as well as categorically fluid spaces-those that are simultaneously domestic and public.…”

GAMONALES WHO MAKE A CITY: Intimate Interactions in City Building

“…5 5It is important to acknowledge the extensive literature on different modes of legalization with its different trade‐offs for residents (see Dias and Eslava, 2013; Comelli et al ., 2018). …”