Mega events and the city preview

M E G A-E V E N T S A N D T H E C I T Y Critical Perspectives

C a r l o s Va i n e r A n n e M a r i e B ro u d e h o u x F e r n a n da S á n c h e z Fa b r í c i o l e a l d e O l i v e i r a

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C a r l o s Va i n e r A n n e M a r i e B ro u d e h o u x F e r n a n da S á n c h e z Fa b r í c i o L e a l d e O l i v e i r a Orgs.

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Os megaeventos e a cidade: perspectivas críticas © 2016 ETTERN | IPPUR | UFRJ Capa e projeto gráfico | André Mantelli Revisão | Giselle Tanaka

CIP-BRASIL. CATALOGAÇÃO NA PUBLICAÇÃO SINDICATO NACIONAL DOS EDITORES DE LIVROS, RJ M445 Os megaeventos e a cidade : perspectivas críticas / organização Carlos Vainer ... [et al.].

-1. ed. - Rio de Janeiro : Letra Capital, 2016.

502 p. : il. ; 22 cm.

Inclui bibliografia

ISBN 978-85-7785-467-7

1. Eventos esportivos - Planejamento - Aspectos sociais. 2. Eventos esportivos -

Planejamento - Aspectos políticos. 3. Instalações esportivas - Planejamento - Aspectos sociais - Brasil. 4. Mobilidade social - Aspectos sociais. 5. Sociologia urbana. 6. Integração social. 7. Política urbana. I. Vainer, Carlos.

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Letra Capital Editora Av. Treze de Maio, 13 gr. 1301 – Centro CEP: 20031-901 – Rio de Janeiro – RJ www.letracapital.com.br

mega - events and t h e cit y

S U M M A RY 11 Carlos Vainer

Introduction | Rio calamity 2016

19 Anne-Marie Broudehoux

Mega-Events, Revanchism and the Neo-liberal City of Exception

41 John Horne

Sports Mega-Events, the Media and Symbolic Contestation

62 Fernanda Sánchez and Bruna Guterman

Symbolic disputes in the “Marvelous City”: actors, instruments and territorial grammar

88 Helena Galiza, Lilian Vaz and Maria Lais Pereira da Silva

Mega events, building works and population removal in Rio de Janeiro between 19th and 21st centuries

115 Stavros Stavrides

Athens 2004 Olympics: An Urban State of Exception which became the rule

141 Matteo Basso

Mega-Events as Urban Mega-Projects and issues of institutional reconfiguration: evidence from London 2012 Olympic planning process

167 Nelma Gusmão de Oliveira

Sports mega-events and rhetoric of legacy: an accounting operation becomes discourse

194 Fabrício Leal de Oliveira, Giselle Tanaka and Regina Bienenstein

Vila Autódromo’s Battle: “Negociation” and Resistance to forced eviction

224 Brij Maharaj and Ashwin Desai

Viability of Fifa 2010 Infrastructure in South Africa?

The case of the Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban

251 Glauco Bienenstein, Felipe Nin and Rosane Santos

Neither Bread nor Circus: Chronic Over Maracanã in Rio de Janeiro

283 Eduardo Nobre

Sport Mega-Events and Local Development: the impacts of 2014 FIFA World Cup in the East Zone of São Paulo

310 Parry Scott

Planning, Executing, Mitigating: Disputes at different times of construction of the Pernambuco Arena for the World Cup

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Rio calamiTY 2016 Carlos Vainer 1

The Emperor has no clothes In 1837, in “The Emperor’s New Clothes”, Hans Christian Andersen tells the story of a swindler, posing as a tailor, who persuaded the king to commission a splendid suit of clothes that would be invisible to all but the most intelligent. The gold thread, fine fabrics and gems that he called for were all pilfered as, without using any of them, he pretended to weave invisible threads into equally invisible cloth. Neither the king nor his court dared confess to seeing no fabric at all, because that would be to own up to their stupidity. And so it was that the king decided to show off his new clothes in a public parade. The people watching the triumphant procession also held silent, fearful of being thought foolish ... except for one child who cried out: “But he hasn’t got anything on!”

So it is with the people of Rio de Janeiro, their governments and the sports mega-events. For years, they told us they were weaving a new and even more marvellous city. Fine fabrics, gems and 1. Instituto de Pesquisa e Planejamento Urbano e Regional, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro.

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riches were handed over to a few bogus urban tailors ... and now the naked truth is there for all to see.

Some had been warning ever since the failed experience of the Pan-American Games (initial cost estimate – R$ 450 million; final cost – over R$ 4 billion). The child in this story of ours was the events of June and July 2013, when ten million took to the streets in 500 towns and cities across Brazil – particularly where Fifa World Cup games were to be held (which included Rio de Janeiro) – to tell the world that the emperor was naked. Rallying cries, walls, banners and posters proclaimed: “We want FIFAstandard hospitals”, “We want FIFA-standard schools”, “Dilma, call me World Cup and invest in me. Signed: Education”.

Analysts

enthused

over

Rio

de

Janeiro’s

extraordinary

achievement, but are now, belatedly, joining in with the child.

Even Míriam Leitão recognises that the gains with World Cup tourism were laughable, echoing the opinion of the FGV researcher, according to whom “Brazil’s choice to focus on megaevents was a mistake” (O Globo, 17 July 2016). This is the same newspaper that, a few days ago, published a survey by the FGV and the SESC attesting to public optimism (“More than 60% of Rio de Janeiro believes the games will be a success, says poll”, O Globo, 3 July 2016).

But what’s the use of trying to conceal the emperor’s shame with his new clothes? After all, the government itself acknowledges it has brought Rio de Janeiro State to this calamity. Among the 10

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justifications for decreeing the state of public calamity, Acting Governor Francisco Dornelles enlisted “the difficulty in honouring its commitment to holding the 2016 Rio Olympic and Paralympic Games”, “the foreign delegations [that] are starting to arrive in the city of Rio de Janeiro” and lastly “these events are important and have repercussions worldwide, and any institutional instability will entail risk to Brazil’s image that will be difficult to recover from” (Decree-Law No. 45.692, of 17 July 2016).

Undeterred, the Organising Committee pressed ahead and declared that the state of public calamity “will have no impact on the holding of the 2016 Rio Olympic and Paralympic Games.

The Games are guaranteed and will go ahead” (“State of calamity will not affect the Olympics, says Organising Committee”, 17

June

2016,

http://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/economia/

noticia/2016-06/estado-de-calamidade-nao-afetara-rio-2016diz-comite-organizador).

That declaration will certainly not prevent the ignorant public from recalling that, towards the end of 2015, the State Health Department refused to supply a primary health centre in São Gonçalo with eight outpatient resuscitators, used for patients with respiratory problems, on the pretext of economising for the 2016 Olympics (“State economises on PHC material because of the Olympics”, O Globo, 24 December 2015, http://oglobo.globo. com/rio/estado-economiza-material-em-upa-por-causa-deolimpiada-18361786).

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More recently, after inspecting an number of public hospitals, the Regional Medical Council and the Doctors’ Union reported that municipal clinics, considered referral centres for care during the Olympics, are overcrowded and cannot cope with the demand generated by the games (“Hospitals in Rio are not ready for the Olympics, say doctors”, 7 July 2016, http://g1.globo.com/rio-dejaneiro/olimpiadas/rio2016/noticia/2016/07/hospitais-do-rionao-estao-prontos-para-olimpiada-dizem-medicos.html).

The mayor and tailor-in-chief has declared, loud and clear, that the security situation in the city is horrible, terrible (O Globo, 4 July 2016, http://oglobo.globo.com/rio/estado-esta-fazendotrabalho-terrivel-na-area-de-seguranca-diz-paes-19639483).

There can be no hiding the fact that the emperor is stands naked.

Costs Now how much did they cost, these luxury threads and fabrics that our tailors used? The costs of Rio’s candidacy were forecast at R$ 28.8 billion (current values); in January 2016, the Olympic Public Authority announced the amount as R$ 39.1 billion and the Federal Court of Audit has now upped that to R$ 40 billion.

These figures are misleading though, because they disregard a never-ending list of expenditures: the security apparatus and mobilisation of the National Guard and armed forces, supplementary electricity supply for the “arenas”, public 12

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lands transferred to real estate brokers and developers, plus compensations and resettlement costs for the populations evicted, as a rule brutally. To the business consortium responsible for the Olympic Park alone, the city government transferred 1 million square metres of public land, which will be used, after the Games, to set up a huge, closed condominium. The docklands area development project, run by a private consortium (who for?) and baptised the Port of Marvels, took over 5 million square metres (Copacabana covers 4.5 million).

This bill has yet to include the tax waivers, the endless favours that the three levels of government have granted the Olympic cartel of major international and Brazilian corporations. By 2012, when Provisional Order MP 584/12 was approved, formally setting out the tax provisions for the Olympics, the estimated value of the total tax waiver at the federal level had reached R$ 3.8 billion, entailing losses of R$ 350 million to the State and Municipal Revenue Sharing Fund. This law of exception granted exemptions from financial transaction tax, income tax, sectorspecific contributions, social security tax, social integration tax, taxes on foreign services and so on. Also exempt are imports of telecommunications equipment (Globo) and consumer goods for consumption by the “Olympic family�, which will include wines and other dainties to feed the VIP boxes and receptions hosted by the Organising Committee and the corporations themselves.

Then one has to add in the state-level exemptions, from value added tax on operations with Brazilian and foreign products mega - events and t h e cit y

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destined for the games (SEFAZ Resolution No. 742/2014), and the municipal exemptions, including service tax and land tax for hotels until 2020!

We do not know how much it is costing and will yet cost... and we may never know.

The tale of the Olympic legacy At less than 30 days from the Olympic Games opening ceremony, the Federal Court of Audit wakes up. It “sees risk of waste of public funds in the Rio Olympic Games” and discovers that the legacy plan cannot be taken seriously. The recently-installed Minister of Sports, Leonardo Picciani, candidly declares that “actually, very little has been done”. Meanwhile, the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office in Rio has applied for a preliminary order against Union, State, Municipality and Olympic Public Authority for them to produce a substantial plan within 20 days on pain of a daily R$ 10,000 fine”. Prosecutor Leandro Metedieri declares: “Either they have no plan, which is my major concern, or they have nothing that is much good. There must be some reason” (“Court of Audit sees risk of waste of public funds in the Rio Olympic Games”, 8 July 2916, http://istoe.com.br/tcu-ve-risco-de-desperdicio-derecursos-publicos-nos-jogos-olimpicos-do-rio/).

Pollution remediation on Guanabara Bay and Rio’s lagoons is a fairy tale. The sports facilities will be privatised straight away or (like the golf course) help sell real estate developments. In order 14

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to raise the value of major urban land holdings and enable them to be brought into the property market, all the public investments in urban mobility have been directed to the Barra da Tijuca and Recreio neighbourhoods, which hold less than 10% of the Metropolitan Region’s population – while millions suffer from precarious, expensive transport in the suburbs, the Fluminense lowlands and, across the bay, in Greater Niterói.

Not only is the emperor naked, but the tale of the Olympic legacy has been laid bare.

The real legacy of the Cesar Maia Era: urbanicide Over the past 100 years, three periods have been decisive in shaping the socio-spatial structure of the city of Rio de Janeiro.

From 1905 to 1910, Mayor Pereira Passos presided, with an iron hand, over the expulsion of thousands of poor and blacks from the central areas of the city out to the North Zone and the suburbs.

At the same time, the middle class and the wealthy headed for the emerging South Zone, where access was opened up by new highways and modern tramways. The construction of sociourban inequality had begun.

In the 1960s and 70s, under Carlos Lacerda and the military dictatorship, favelas in the South Zone were razed and their residents roughly relocated to housing developments like Vila Kennedy and Vila Aliança, heightening the social division of urban space in Rio. The favelas that remained and municipalities mega - events and t h e cit y

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in the Fluminense lowlands and across the bay received the poor in precarious (and nearly always illegal) settlements.

The third major change is that one that has been worked during the 24 years of the Cesar Maia Era. From the PDMB, the party for which he was first elected, Cesar Maia migrated to the PFL in 1995. He was mayor for three mandates (1993-1996, 2001-2004 and 2005-2008). Luiz Paulo Conde (1997-2000) and Eduardo Paes (2009-2012 and 2013-2016), who emerged into local politics as Cesar Maia’s godsons, maintained – in essence and despite personal conflicts – the same practical and rhetorical orientations. The unity and continuity of this policy is expressed in the option for turning Rio de Janeiro into the city of sports mega-events.

The Rio de Janeiro City Strategic Plan, drawn up during the first Cesar Maia administration with consultancy from the company Tecnologías Urbanas Barcelona S.A. and financed by a consortium of large corporations led by the employers’ associations, FIRJAN and ACRJ, reads: “Rio’s tradition in sports and its natural and human resources allow us to launch its candidacy to host the 2004 Olympic games with excellent chances and, following the example of other cities, to make use of the games to transform the city” (Rio de Janeiro City Government. Plano estratégico da cidade do Rio de Janeiro: Rio Sempre Rio. Rio de Janeiro: PCRJ/ ACRJ/FIRJAN, 1996).

Today, it is clear what kind of urban transformation the games 16

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were to serve for – and have served. In the 1960s and 70s, the forced evictions displaced some 40,000 to 60,000; now – under Eduardo Paes and on the pretext of preparing for the World Cup and the Olympics – 80,000 to 100,000 have been uprooted. From the Olympic Games – or rather from these 24 years of strategically constructing the Olympic Rio de Janeiro – we have inherited a brutal, authoritarian city at the service of business interests. In this disfigured city, young blacks are killed every day by a policy of militarisation of poor neighbourhoods. The Olympic legacy is a more unequal city in which public spaces are progressively smothered and colonised by privatisation.

Here we are not talking just about a financial crisis and the state of public calamity. We are not talking just about net transfer of public funds to a handful of private corporations, to big media and the global cartel of the mega-events. Rather we want to draw attention to the destruction of the social and cultural tissue that gives life and soul to a city. We are talking about the destruction of the very foundations of Rio de Janeiro’s urbanity. We are talking about the crime of urbanicide. That is the most dramatic legacy.

Nonetheless, the city will doubtless survive and turn this game around.

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Mega-Events, Revanchism and the Neo-liberal City of Exception: Notes from Olympic Rio de Janeiro Anne-Marie Broudehoux 1

Introdução In recent years, mega-events such as the World cup or the Olympics have become key instruments of urban redevelopment. With their vast media coverage and strong branding power, they are perceived as an unparalleled source of recognition and prestige, allowing cities to put their mark on the world stage. These events endow local authorities with great leverage in the spectacular reorganization of urban space in an accelerated manner. The sense of urgency generated by their short preparation time justifies the imposition of exceptional measures to reconfigure their territory to suit the needs of visitors, television broadcasters, sports federations, event sponsors and other stakeholders.

If countless resources are used to build a spectacular image of the city, with stunning mega-projects that connote economic success, social stability, discipline and prosperity, vast efforts 1. University of Quebec at Montreal School of Design.

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are also deployed to actively conceal the landscapes of the poor, the homeless, the marginal, and the disorderly. Power is a determining factor deciding how cities are to be transformed. The resulting urban image embodies the desires and aspirations of those who have the power to shape the urban environment, and becomes the material concretization of their cultural imaginings and visual fantasies.

This chapter investigates the politics of event-led urban transformations, in the context of Rio de Janeiro’s 2014 FIFA World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games. It uses Neil Smith’s concept of revanchism to explain some of the city’s sociospatial reconfigurations, especially measures that try to displace, silence, erase and invisibilize, both symbolically and literally, the city’s most vulnerable population groups. The chapter suggests that mega-events are instrumentalized to justify the adoption of neoliberal urban policies, helping them appear at once urgent, necessary, and unavoidable. It argues that megaevents are much more than simple catalysts for entrepreneurial urban regeneration, but they have a powerful boosting effect, resulting in what could be termed “extreme neoliberalism” or, more appropriately in this Olympic year, as “neoliberalism on steroids”.

The first part of the chapter explain Smith’s notion of revanchist in the context of urban gentrification. The chapter then presents different manifestations of revanchism in pre-Olympic Rio de Janeiro, based on empirical work conducted in the city between 20

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2009 and 2014. The chapter concludes on some of the long lasting society implications of such policies and hints at some manifestations of symbolic resistance.

Revanchism, gentrification and neoliberal authoritarism In trying to make sense of the urban impacts of mega-events, recent thinking on the neoliberal city, especially Neil Smith’s notion of the revanchist city, one of his most influential theory, offer some enlightening lenses. Smith (1996) borrows the term revanchism from the late 19th century days of the Paris Commune, when a group of right wing nationalists attempted to restore public order and reinstate bourgeois society, with a strategy that fused moralism and militarism. It was through “a noxious blend of hatred and viciousness” (Smith 1996 : 227) that they intended to exact revenge upon all those who had supposedly usurped their vision of French society. Smith first drew upon the notion of revanchism to talk about neoliberal urban policies in 1990s New York City. The economic recession of the 1980s and 1990s had triggered unprecedented anger among the white middle class, who turned on the poor and the marginal as scapegoats for the failure of liberal policies. Smith (1996) describes the revanchist city as a dual city of wealth and poverty, where the victors are increasingly defensive of their privilege and increasingly vicious defending it.

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is marked by a powerful anti-welfare ideology and a shift away from redistributive policy and anti-poverty legislation (MacLeod, 2002). It marks the departure from the public provision of services towards a re-commodification of collective consumption.

Following Mike Davis’ (1990) description of the neoliberal shift from social welfare to social warfare, Smith underlines the violence and brutality of revanchist policies, often characterized as a war of the rich against the poor. He sees the neoliberal city as a punitive city, where a self-righteous bourgeoisie intent on defending its privilege and driven by an ontological desire for class revenge, attempts to regain control of urban space.

Revanchism is thus characterized by a take back mentality that promotes the violent dispossession of a population thought to have stolen the city from its rightful users. It resonates with Harvey’s notion of accumulation by dispossession (2004), where capital expansion is facilitated by the state’s brutal reconquest of territories and assets, generally from the hands of the poor.

Revanchism testifies to the emergence of a new moral order, marked by a growing de-responsibilization and de-solidarization towards the collective. Don Mitchell (2001) talks of compassion fatigue, which, in a climate of moral indifference to social inequality, has led to a widespread erosion of public sympathy for the poor, and a total lack of remorse and empathy. For him, the benign neglect of the poor is replaced by a malign form of neglect (Mitchell, 2001).

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