Remaking Rio: favela tourism and the tourist narrative: part I
The above video shows a new tourist attraction in the famous favela Santa Marta: paintball. Brought to you by Off the Track Rio, a collaboration between a Santa Marta resident and a US-exchange student. Some of you may be shocked or even appalled by the moral implications of a bunch of rowdy, privileged foreigners playing war games in what used to be a favela controlled by a notorious drug lord. (If so, feel free to debate it out on the blog of the co-creator, where he has addressed such criticisms). I myself am fascinated, because through this project they are making a space of leisure and fun in which residents and ‘outsiders’ engage with one another through play. As a side note, at 25 reais a game (about 15 USD, and residents play at a “steep discount” according to the co-creator), paintball in Santa Marta is far more economical than any favela tour I have ever seen advertised.
- Favela Paintball in Santa Marta. Source: http://wp.me/p1XQo2-13
Front cover of the UN report critiqued by Gilbert.
Like all social categories, concepts, identities and definitions, slum is not static but constantly reproduced and contested (locally and globally). In a recent paper, Gareth Jones examines aesthetic representations of slums and how spatial and territorialized stigma can be challenged through art and what he calls “aesthetic work” [2]. With a global approach, Jones offers examples from Accra, Durban, London and Rio de Janeiro. The Rio example of Projeto Morrinho is especially interesting. What started as a small project by local youth Read More…
Who’s Afraid of the Informal?: slum as an analytical category
Photo montage by Dionsio Gonzales
Following Lubiana’s post about urban informality as a form of protesting economic inequality and my own post praising the social relations engendered by informal spaces both in Occupied space and favelas, Sylvia Soonets, from Proyectos Arqui 5 in Caracas, passionately cautioned against romanticizing informal housing settlements based on political sympathizes or allegiances to various local–global Occupy protest movements. She is right to critique discourses that seem to characterize slums as sanitized bastions of the creative and resourceful human spirit. A romantic portrayal of poverty manifested as slum was not my intention. Instead I voiced enthusiasm for resistance to the hegemonic ordering of the city in forms that benefits the few at the expense of the many. A healthy debate concerning the doubts raised by Soonets is productive, for it touches on current debates and critiques in urbanist literature questioning the trendiness of slum studies as well as sensationalism in popular media.
The encampments of Occupiers (turned squatters?) in cities across Europe and North America (inspired by movements in Latin America and North Africa) make visible, in a purposefully spatial manner, economic inequality in the ‘Global North.’ Unplanned slum settlements that are ubiquitous to the cityscapes of many ‘Global South’ cities are a continual reminder of unwarranted inequality in the world over. In fact the persistence of the dichotomous socio-spatial categories city/slum–formal/informal signifies a codependent relationship; that one does not exist without the other.
Prominent Latin Americanist Alan Gilbert has long been critical of development discourse and recently has questioned the continued use of the slum as an analytical category from which to study urban poverty [1]. The danger of validating the slum as a legitimate object of study and policy risks essentializing the urban poor as well as encouraging the modern developmentalist idea of a city without slums. The idea of a city without slums fortunately has not taken center stage in Latin America, but it Read More…
New Socio-Spatial Relationships Produced Through Urban Occupations, ‘Informalizing’ the City
Following Lubaina’s post on the current urban occupations as protest, I too will blog about the importance of the Occupy movement, paying close attention to its informal nature. But I do not think such a discussion is wholly separate from those fostered on FAVELissues. Beyond the implications of the growing economic divide in the United States and Europe and beyond applauding the protesters for adopting a ‘right to the city’ framework, I think we can draw parallels between the occupations in the Global North and informal housing settlements in the Global South.
Urban informal spaces in the form of favelas and shantytowns tend to produce socio-spatial relations distinct from those of the formal city. Government sponsored projects that benevolently attempt to integrate or formalize slum-housing settlements often change the way people interact with each other as well as with the built environment. Sometimes these changes constitute project goals and other times they are unintentional. Adriana’s recent post on the aerial cable cars in Medellin revealed that residents identified the new transport system as having a negative impact on their daily lives. While the steep climb up the hills of favelas and slums are physically taxing, they also tend to foster basic human interaction and community; see for example Kirsten Larson’s post on stairs (and lack thereof) in São Paulo.
In London, New York City, Barcelona, Santiago and hundreds of other cities around the world, protesters are making public spaces, and in some cases private spaces, informal. These processes of informalization of the city, be it temporary or indefinite, reproduce socio-spatial relations distinct from those previously fostered by the very same spaces. We should not overlook these new spatial relationships. In the face of increasingly violent State-repression, they may be some of the most important results of the occupations.
Front page of the first edition of "The Occupied Times of London". 'Here to Stay' represents an important shift towards permanency in the discourse adopted by the protesters.
A couple weeks ago I attended a talk by David Harvey at the Occupy London Stock Exchange (OLSX) encampment at the famous St. Paul’s Cathedral (embedded below). Harvey sees the tent cities as Read More…
Resistance to Rio’s Celebrated Gondolas, Fetishizing the Teleferico
Intro Post by Tucker Landesman
Photo credit: Agustin Romero.
I’m not an architect. I’m not an urban planner, an engineer or a transport specialist. Rather, I study human behavior, and I come to FAVELissues and studies about geographic informality from a rather unique history of public health and community activism. When it comes to the topic of favelas (read generally as informal settlements), I am interested in the political power dynamics between community residents, state actors and other political players (private corporations or international organizations, for example). I research questions concerning citizenship and democracy, participation and resistance. What are the socio-political conditions necessary for successful and democratic integration? How can favela residents organize in order to exercise the greatest possible influence over what happens to their neighborhoods, homes and livelihoods? As Brazil assumes an increasingly prominent international profile, how does Rio de Janeiro emerge as a “global city” and cope with the fact that one-third of its residents live in informal slums and squatter settlements? These questions will be central to my blogs on FAVELissues.
The above questions were also present in my mind when I recently visited Complexo do Alemão, a “complex” of 13 conjoining favelas in the city of Rio de Janeiro (zona norte). The purpose of the visit was to see the new teleferico, a cable-propelled transit system (a Gondola), funded by the federal government at a cost of around R$210 million (roughly 120 million US dollars). Running at full capacity, the system can transport up to 30,000 people a day in 152 cable cars between 6 stations, a total distance of 3.5 kilometers. Below is a short video of the teleferico with interview with residents (portuguese w/o subtitles, sorry).
Gondolas (also called cable cars) have been the subject of praise on this blog and many others. Steven Dale, an urban planner and researcher, even created a website solely committed to cable-propelled transit around the world called The Gondola Project. This often over-looked form of public transport can be a cost-effective means to transport people and goods over tricky terrain (both mountainous and flat, as it turns out).
The teleferico in Complexo do Alemão is lauded as a highly visible public works project that will have immediate and long-lasting benefits to residents. In the mainstream media and urban planning circles alike, the attention has been almost exclusively positive both in the national and international press. The Read More…
Adriana Navarro Sertich
Lubaina Rangwala
Jennifer Renteria
Kirsten Larson
Proyectos Arqui5
Tucker Landesman
Namrata Kapoor
Paula Restrepo-Cadavid
Andrew Carman
Jose Antonio Ramirez
Fernando Luiz Lara
Bethany Opalach
