Rio Gets Ready: The Uncertain Legacy of the Olympics and ‘Pacification’ in Rio de Janeiro

July 26, 2016

by Michael Kavalar, as published in the July 2016 edition of Planning Magazine.

The streets of Rio de Janeiro are a lesson in abundance. People abound. Buildings abound. Slow-gliding flocks of seagulls float overhead, pterodactyl-like. So do great bureaucratic profusions of color—the trash collector’s blue jumper, the utility worker’s orange vest, the gray of the municipal guard. Even the variety in manhole covers—different shapes, logos, words, and images—is astounding. History also abounds. Here and there, a weather-worn sticker proclaims “Brazil, Love It or Leave It,” the faded mantra of a 20-year dictatorship that ended in 1985. And on most corners one still finds the faded orange and green of oversized orelhões, or “big ears”—the Brazilian pay phone in the shape of an eggshell sliced diagonally and into which one puts one’s head. Today they lie largely abandoned, eviscerated of their coppery innards, their concave inner walls plastered with explicit sex ads.

Infrastructure and more infrastructure

I’d returned to Rio to see first-hand an abundance of a different sort. Of the 39.1 billion reais budgeted for the 2016 Olympic Games—to be held in Rio this August—R$24.6 billion have been allocated for so-called “legacy projects.” BRTs. Light rail. Subway expansions. Just to name a few. It’s a dizzying bonanza, ballooning from a list of 17 projects in 2009 to more than 30 today. While the rest of Brazil sinks deeper into an economic malaise, spending for the games has largely kept Rio afloat. (The country’s economic woes mean the value of the real fluctuates frequently. For simplicity, all amounts in this story are in reais. At publication time, one real was worth US$0.28.)

Additionally, according to Mayor Eduardo Paes, some 60 percent of costs are expected to come from private funds (although this claim seems murkier in light of recent corruption scandals). For legacy costs specifically, Rio is responsible for some R$14.3 billion spread across 14 projects related to mobility, the environment, urban renovation, and social programs. Rio State is responsible for an additional R$9.7 billion, including a new metro line linking the city to its western regions, with the federal government kicking in the remaining R$110 million for assorted projects.

On a balmy Wednesday morning last November, I wandered over from the Cinelândia stop on Linha 1 of the Metrô, through the dense, impossibly commerce-rich colonial streets of the old center toward the harbor. While the major streets are lined with
taller structures, along the many narrow back streets stand one- to three-story colonial buildings, their open doors overflowing with a tropical effusion of wares. Visitors to the Games will likely find their way onto these same streets, and may feel the same release I did as they emerge, suddenly, onto the slate gray and brown expanse of Praça Mauá at the edge of Guanabara Bay.

Read entire article here: Rio Gets Ready