Remaking the City, Unmaking Democracy: The Afterlives of Urban Renewal in Rio de Janeiro

Over the past three decades, scholars have studied everyday forms of violence in the peripheries of Brazilian cities to expose a disjunction between the formal structures of democracy and the substance of democratic citizenship. In the 1980s, as political democracy consolidated in Brazil, various forms of systemic violence began to colonize Rio’s working-class peripheries (favelas & subúrbios). By the 1990s, residents struggled to survive armed conflict, police violence, institutionalized racism, and the criminalization of poverty. For these citizens, the everyday violations of both civil rights and the democratic rule of law evinced the embodied experience of democracy as highly unequal and uneven across the city. Today, Brazil is facing a new political transformation: the rise of a radical conservative movement that openly threatens democratic structures and glorifies the violent “order” of the former military dictatorship, further entrenching existing inequalities./nThis dissertation examines the contemporary erosion of liberal democracy in Brazil by following urban revitalization interventions in the lead-up to the 2016 Olympics in Rio de Janeiro. Drawing on 26 months of ethnographic fieldwork between 2013 and 2018, I juxtapose the lived experience of green city-making in two different working-class peripheries to explain changes in democratic values and performances of citizenship amidst a growing economic and political crisis. I argue that, while these public works projects symbolically “democratize the city,” they in fact deconstruct the very democratic project – in varying degrees depending on class, race and geography ¬– that made them possible. These more targeted forms of erosion paved the way to more general experiences of de-democratization by 2019. To make this argument, I follow the desvios of plans, funds, land, laws, and rights that are bypassing democratic procedures to build “sustainable” urban futures in Rio’s peripheries. From 2015-2017, the term desvio proliferated in the media and in everyday conversations. It was used to denote the process of deviation from an established norm, law, or plan. Desvios are never explicitly planned, yet quietly divert public funds, blueprints, resources, and lives by using privileged access and tools to bypass the law and cover their tracks./nOver the past decade, as Rio prepared to host a series of mega-events, securing, upgrading, and greening Rio’s poor peripheries through public works became key to both producing an image of success for international audiences, as well as securing votes from the largest electoral group: the sub-urban lower-classes. Interventions in subúrbios and favelas were branded with a rhetoric of rights, promising a social legacy just on the horizon, yet never fully reached. These expectations were constructed on unstable ground, and these government efforts were often realized through less visible deviations of urban plans, diversions of public funds, and bypassing laws that protect citizen rights. This dissertation follows such local experiences of desvios through the lives and afterlives of two different public works, juxtaposing them spatially and temporally. Both urban planning interventions integrate tools from the modernist paradigm, including security strategies, distancing them from the neoliberal democratic paradigms of the 1990s. As government actors work with architects and engineers to control social ‘disorder,’ reconstructing the city to reshape their citizens, each case expresses a distinct yet shared link between urbanization to securitization processes. While only one of the two public works examined here was finished, the afterlives of both interventions index how the violent scars and hopeful nostalgia for a politics past – whether democratic revolution or military dictatorship – destabilizes the city of the future. Thus, I argue that while these public works projects symbolically democratize the city by investing in working-class green space, housing, and services, they in fact demonstrate the dismantling of the very democratic project that made them possible.

Advisor: Holston, James