The Violence of Urban Planning: Rio de
Janeiro's Port Revitalization Process
MARTA ILL RAGA 20/06/2016
Supervisor: prof. dr. R.K. (Rivke) Jaffe
Second Reader: prof. dr. C.G. (Kees) Koonings
Author: Marta Ill Raga (Student nº: 10862203) Contact e-mail: marta.illraga@gmail.com
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This thesis is the result of a marvellous two-year long journey that, in many ways, has changed my life. A journey that had a stop in three different cities: Amsterdam, Rio de Janeiro and Barcelona. It is in these three places that I have had the luck to meet and share experiences with many different people, friends and colleagues, whose support and cheerfulness gave me the energy I needed to write this thesis.
I would like to start by thanking all the people I met in Rio de Janeiro, during my fieldwork period, starting with my respondents and residents of the Port Region, whose real identities I promised to keep anonymous. Without their generosity none of the lines written below would make any sense. Special thanks go to the two organizations that hosted me during my short but intense stay in the field: many thanks to Theresa Williamson, for letting me take part in a group of international young people eager to learn and make a change in CatComm and RioOnWatch. I want to also thank Orlando Junior, for opening the doors to his world of critical and inspiring researchers, and great social activists; thanks to the people in the IPPUR, Mariana, Larissa, Ana Paula, Patricia; and to the people of the Comitê. I would also like to thank all of the new friends that I made in Rio: the comrades of ‗the Spanish federation,‘ Mats, Javi and Noel; thanks to Sterre, for her constant support, and the ladies of the ‗Pink Panther,‘ my new home. And many thanks to Ernesto, for his affection and our travels.
Amsterdam was the base-camp where an exciting intellectual journey started, thanks both to the professors at the UvA and to my colleagues from the Masters‘ program, ‗the social and study crew‘ and also my four good anthropologist fiends that I call ‗the Anthropopack‘. Special thanks to my supervisor, Rivke Jaffe, for her patience, her time, but most importantly her valuable feedback: her critical eye and eagerness to push the intellectual limits of my writing capacities made this an exciting project and intense learning process.
And finally, everything comes back to where it started, Barcelona, my hometown, with family and old friends. Writing this thesis has only been possible thanks to the warm and cosy moments that compensated the long library hours. Special thanks to Maria, whose undeniable skills as a comedian made me laugh even in moments of stress and panic. Infinite thanks to my parents and granny, for their many ways of support, and their unconditional love. This thesis is dedicated to them.
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ABSTRACT
In anticipation of hosting mega sports events, Rio de Janeiro is currently going through accelerated parallel processes of urban transformation and pacification, respectively implying the implementation of neoliberal urban developments, and a change and strengthening of security and public order policies, particularly with the deployment of Pacifying Police Units in
favelas. Taking the Porto Maravilha project as a case study, this thesis offers an exploration of
how security bodies, the municipality, and private parties work together to re-shape power structures and the urban political economy of Rio de Janeiro‘s Port Region. Drawing from a historical perspective of violent planning practices based on accumulation by dispossession, the thesis connects current neoliberal planning with violent pacification and public order policies in the context of police and state-induced gentrification.
Results are drawn from a blend of ethnographic exploration of the field based on observations, and in-depth interviews. The study shows how, effectively, both the pacification process in the favela Providência, and the Porto Maravilha Public Order Unit not only secure spaces within the favela and the surrounding areas for capital investment, but also reinforce historical forms of segregation, and control the productive lives of residents, turning them into model citizens through specific forms of governmentality. Therefore, as the main conclusion of the thesis suggests, beyond gentrification, the implementation of the Porto Maravilha project implies the installation of a new governing order, differentiated from other parts of the city, which is maintained through diverse types of violence. Profiled as a first experimental Public-Private Partnership to manage such a large region of the city, the Porto Maravilha experience might serve as an example to follow for policymakers in future redevelopments taking place in Rio de Janeiro. In this context, the study sheds light over emerging structures of power that manage and control the every-day lives of inhabitants at a local level, while questioning, in the end, what the effects of these governance practices on urban segregation and the formation of citizenship are.
KEYWORDS: urban planning, revitalization, violence, security, neoliberalization,
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INDEX
INTRODUCTION ... 1
CHAPTER 1. Violence and Urban Planning: An Analytic Proposal ... 5
1.1 A Historical Overview on the Violence of Urban Planning ... 6
1.2 The Violence of Neoliberalizing Cities ... 11
1.3 Creating the ‗Model Citizen‘ ... 14
1.4 Conclusion ... 17
CHAPTER 2. Reflecting on the Methods and Ethics of the Field ... 19
2.1 Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Port Region of Rio de Janeiro ... 19
2.2 Building Research Relations ... 22
2.3 Redefining Research in the Moving Map of Revitalization ... 23
2.4 Limits and Limitations ... 25
CHAPTER 3. Approaching the Field: A Historical Background of the Port Region .... 28
3.1 From the Colonial Port to the Imperial Capital ... 29
3.2 The Coming of the Industrial City ... 32
3.3 The Passos‘ Era and the Rise of Modern Planning ... 34
3.4 Revolt and Discipline over the Port‘s Peoples ... 36
3.5 Modernist Planning, Democratic City and the Road towards Neoliberalization .. 38
3.6 Conclusion ... 41
CHAPTER 4. The Porto Maravilha Urban Operation and the Violent Penetration of Neoliberal Planning ... 44
4.1. Prelude: The Porto Maravilha Urban Operation ... 45
4.2 Destructively Creating: Displacement, Threat and Infrastructure ... 47
4.3 The Necessary Revitalizing Arms of Police ... 55
4.4 Conclusion ... 64
CHAPTER 5. The Creation of a Polity: A Marvellous Port is for a Model Citizen ... 66
5.1 Prelude: The Porto Maravilha and the Deployment of a New Governing Order . 67 5.2 Framing the Population-Problem ... 70
5.3 The Making of Legible Spaces and Governable Subjects ... 73
5.4 Changing Lifestyles and Cultural Displacement in the Porto Maravilha ... 81
5.5 Contesting and Negotiating the Advance of Revitalization ... 86
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CHAPTER 6. Conclusion ... 90
BIBLIOGRAPHY ... 96
LIST OF FIGURES Figure 2.1 Location of the Port Region within the Boundaries of Rio de Janeiro….….19 Figure 2.2 Geographical Limits of the Porto Maravilha Urban Operation……….……20
Figure 3.1 ―Débarquement‖, the Landing of the Enslaved...30
Figure 3.2 The Transformation of the Port Region‘s Geography after Passos………....35
Figure 3.3 The Building of the Elevado da Perimentral and the New Av. Presidente Vargas………..39
Figure 4.1: Informal Reconstruction in Morro da Providência, Three Years After the Demolitions……….48
Figure 4.2 Forced Evictions and Displacement………...51
Figure 4.3 Absolute Deaths due to Direct Confrontation in Morro da Providência……57
Figure 4.4 ―After the Brute Force, the Construction Works‖……….…….60
Figure 4.5 Area of Influence of the UPP Providência……….……61
Figure 5.1 Area of Influence of the UOP Porto Maravilha and Locations of CCTV Cameras………...73
Figure 5.2 The Revitalized Praça Mauà………..76
Figure 5.3 The Contrast Between Street Vendors and Food Trucks………...79
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INTRODUCTION
„The Olympic Games will leave the biggest legacy since the Barcelona Olympics. This will be the most inclusive Games in history.‟ The words of the president of the IOC (International Olympic Committee), Thomas Bach, acknowledge the efforts of the city since it became the Olympic site: using the event to transform the lives of people, above all, the lives of the poorest ones (Eduardo Pães, Mayor of Rio de Janeiro).
These are the opening lines of an article that the Mayor of Rio de Janeiro, Eduardo Pães, wrote for the newspaper ‗Folha de São Paulo‘ on 15 September 2015, entitled ‗The Inclusion Games‖ (Paes, 2015). The publication of the article generated an enraged reaction among the members of the Popular Committee of the World Cup and the Olympic Games (Comitê Popular da Copa e das Olimpíadas, CPCO) a social movement that has been struggling, for years, against the changes and social drawbacks that the city was undergoing in the face of holding mega-sports events. Since the emergence, in summer 2013, of nation-wide protests, the holding of mega-sports events has been highly socially contested. A few months later, the CPCO published a report entitled ‗Rio 2016: The Exclusion Games‘ in which they summarize the years of struggle against the human rights‘ violations that the construction of the Olympic Global City brought about (CPCO, 2015). The CPCO, together with a myriad of NGOs and social movements firmly denounce a wide range of socially harmful developments that are associated with the building of the Olympic City: the displacement and marginalization of poor populations; the violation of the right to work; the environmental degradation of the city; and the militarization of Rio are found among this long list of grievances that disavow the words of the Mayor.
The object of study of this thesis is the violence that the urban planning process of the Olympic City incorporates. There is no doubt that the city of Rio is going through major urban transformations in its race to gain a place in the list of internationally renowned Global Cities. And one of the main challenges that the Olympic Legacy had to address was the cleaning of its image of crime and insecurity that the hegemonic discourses place in the existing informal settlements, favelas. Apart from the building of infrastructure, one of the major planning policies included in the transformation of the city is the deployment of Pacifying Police Units (UPPs) in favelas. The case study
2 addressed in this thesis is the Porto Maravilha project, the largest entrepreneurial mega-project that is being implemented to change the façade of the city of Rio de Janeiro, in the Port Region. Aside from the deployment of the largest Public-Private Partnership in the history of Brazil, and the undeniable neoliberal nature of the Porto Maravilha project, its geographical overlapping with the ‗pacified‘ favela Morro da Providência make the revitalization of the Port Region a particularly interesting case of study.
Most of the research and literature addressing the planning of the Olympic City focuses on the displacement provoked by forced evictions and demolitions of informal communities (Faulhaber & Azevedo 2015) and the social imbalances generated by the neoliberal urban restructuring of the mega-events development model (Garcia et al. 2015). Research also addresses the effects of urban restructuring on the gentrification of inner city favelas, and the central role of the state and the UPP in the revalorization of real state (Cummings 2015; Freeman 2012). The Porto Maravilha project has also received some attention, particularly the neoliberal nature of the political and governance alliances that gave rise to the project (Werneck 2016), and the importation and deployment of an unprecedented and exceptional entrepreneurial model (Vainer 2011; Broudehoux 2013; Teixeira 2015).
Building up on previous analysis and broader discussions on neoliberal urban planning from a critical urban theory perspective, this thesis does not address the detailed examination of neoliberal urban policies and instruments that are deployed in the Porto Maravilha Urban Operation. Rather, the focus is put on the examination of the governmental rationality that lies beyond them and that unfolds violently. The aim of this thesis, therefore, is to offer a fundamentally political and historically situated reading of the urban restructuring processes, considering the historical continuities and discontinuities of the violent and repressive rule related to urban planning as a comprehensive governmental action. Taking the Porto Maravilha Urban Operation as a case study, the specific aim of the thesis is to uncover the different types of violence that neoliberal planning incorporates. Such violence gradually emerges in a spectrum that goes from more direct forms of physical violence, through control, disciplining and security policies, to expressions of symbolic violence and cultural displacement.
Moreover, plans that are developed by policy-makers project images that foresee the end product of revitalized spaces, their uses and the citizens who should occupy those.
3 Beyond the building of new infrastructures, cosmetic and cultural changes or the political-economic restructuring, neoliberal urban planning imposes a new political territorial unit and rule over the governed populations living within the revitalizing parts of the city.
Having presented the general aims of the research, the thesis specifically answers three main research questions through which the general narrative of the work is structured:
i) What is the relationship between violence and neoliberal urban planning?
ii) What historical precedents to this contemporary relationship between
violence and urban planning can be identified?
iii) How does neoliberal urban planning affect segregation and the meanings of
socio-spatial belonging?
Following the above-mentioned aims of the research the thesis is structured into 6 chapters. Chapter 1 proposes a theoretical lens through which I later analyse the study case. The theoretical discussion already introduces the general narrative through which the whole of the thesis is structured. Departing from the historical violent role of urban planning as a governmental action aimed at controlling and disciplining populations I later introduce the different types of violence associated with processes of urban neoliberal restructuring. Finally, I present neoliberal urban planning as being productive of new political territorial units. Chapter 2 presents a methodological reflection of the process of ethnographic fieldwork in the Port Region. Chapter 3 offers a historical introduction to the field, summarizing from a perspective of planning and its associated violence, the processes of urban restructuring that the Port Region has historically been going through since colonial times. Finally, Chapter 4 and 5, through the analysis of the data collected in the field, narrate the violence of the contemporary historical chapter of neoliberal urban planning and revitalization of the Port Region, leading to the conclusions in Chapter 6.
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CHAPTER 1. Violence and Urban Planning: An Analytic Proposal
This chapter proposes a theoretical lens through which we can interpret and examine the inherent violence and different technologies of power that are deployed in the processes of urban planning and transformation. Although the thesis focuses on contemporary neoliberal planning practices, the first section of this chapter offers a historical perspective on how planning violently unfolds as a tool of power and domination in different cultural and geographical contexts already in colonial times, parallel to the emerging industrialization of capitalist societies.
Planning practices are processes that generate and maintain urban segregation and exclusion, and they facilitate capitalist accumulation by dispossession. In the second section I introduce the current debates on the neoliberalization of cities, and the violent logic of privatization and creative destruction that accompany this. We see how certain types of violence result reminiscent of previous historical chapters (e.g. the demolition of ‗unsafe‘ or ‗unhealthy‘ settlements, the deployment of discourses of fear and criminalization against subaltern populations, the emergence of infrastructural violence, etc.). However, other forms of contemporary gentrification represent intensified or new forms of symbolic and cultural dispossession largely based on aesthetics, reinventing new mechanisms for governing, normalizing, displacing and segregating populations. I conceive that planning practices involve a wide diversity of types of violence that go from the more physical and disciplinary imposition of the sovereign power to the more subtle forms of symbolic violence and governmentality techniques.
Violence in planning is not only expressed through direct coercion but also through symbolic violence, that is, ―the subtle imposition of systems of meaning that legitimize and thus solidify structures of inequality‖ (Wacquant 1998, p.264). Physical and infrastructural violence on the one hand, and symbolic violence on the other, do not represent, therefore, a binary categorization, but rather different modalities placed along the same spectrum. Following Bourdieu‘s definition of the term, symbolic violence is understood as reproducing relations of domination that have been generated through history, and that generate systems of meaning that justify the use, in some cases, of physical violence (Bourdieu 2002).
6 Finally, in the third section I reflect on how the violence of neoliberal planning are instrumental for the creation of a new political territorial unit, that is, a polity. The design of ideologically loaded revitalized spaces, far from being neutral, represent the deployment of citizenship agendas. Definitions of ‗good citizen‘ also often entail a symbolic violent framing of the possibilities for societal membership, seeking to homogenize public space while excluding difference and the subaltern.
1.1 A Historical Overview on the Violence of Urban Planning
At any time in the history of humanity, the way in which cities are built and their spaces distributed tells us something about how this particular society is politically organized; who is in power and what the dominated groups are. The central hypothesis of this thesis holds that urban planning is deployed by different means of institutionalized violence, given that the spatial ordering of cities is a central function of government and a means to create and maintain dominating relationships between social groups. Urban planning has historically been reinforced by state violence, through regulations, infrastructural works and the re-ordering of the built environment, through the deployment of discourses of fear especially against poor populations, and through the coercive power of police. This historical introduction gives a broad perspective of planning as an emergent centralized state-led practice related to the consolidation of the industrial-capitalist mode of production.
Early examples of planning practices as violent mechanisms of governmental domination already emerged in the late 16th century, with the building of Spanish colonial towns such as Intramuros (Manila) in the Philippines or the ‗reducciones‘ in Perú (Scott 2004; Gomà 2012). Although everyday practices of colonial cities show that these were not as coherent as a domination project that reflected the binaries of colonized – colonizers (Scott 2004), both the massive resettlement of Andeans, and the building of fortified cities such as colonial Manila were governmental tools for subjugating, controlling and protecting colonial elites from native populations (Gomà 2012). Replicating a ―boomerang effect,‖ (Graham 2013) practices of spatial domination hitherto attributed to colonial towns had progressively been applied to industrializing Europe, being the first paradigmatic example that of Paris‘ 1851 ―urban revolution‖ led by the Baron of Haussmann. Both colonial planning practices and the
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Haussmannization of European industrializing cities had popular classes (colonized
peoples or the proletariat) as the main problematic subject to which planning had to be done, in order to prevent or as a response to the threat of political violence.
The Hausmannization of Paris was authoritarian (as it was the political structure of the Second Empire) and violent, in as much as it implied the bulldozing of entire working-class quarters and the displacement of populations to other parts of the city. But, beyond the evident violence that accompanied planning practices, the building of wide avenues in the place of narrow streets suitable for barricades, facilitated the policing and (military) control of city spaces that were now freed for the use and leisure of the bourgeoisie (Harvey 2008). Even though construction works provided with jobs to the working class, during this period, large portions of violence and surveillance where deployed against the latter, who were seen as dangerous and potentially insurrectional, capable of destabilizing the bourgeois order after 1848. Furthermore, the debt-financed rebuilding of the city centre had a critical positive impact on the absorption of capital surpluses, and lead towards the construction of a new way of life and urban persona transforming the old medieval city into a modern, monumental city made of wide avenues and spaces for leisure, tourism and consumerism (Harvey, 2008a:25; 2008b). Also in the 19th century, planning in Indian and African colonial cities was deployed as a violent central function of government, and as a tool for ‗civilizing‘ native populations. Apart from the revolutionary potential of popular classes, colonial elite planning discourses were geared towards the fear against sicknesses and epidemics, or, in other words, ―the contaminated city‖ (McFarlane 2008). Drawing from European knowledge, 19th century British-Indian sanitation plans sought to restructure urban centres through the provision of sanitary infrastructures. These had the double aim of protecting European elites from the dangerous ―miasmas‖1, and of ‗civilizing‘ native poor populations, whose habits, cultural practices and living environments were seen with disgust, uncivilized and polluting.
According to McFarlane, planning for sanitation ―was not just the domain of government, but was productive of government‖ (McFarlane 2008). Beyond the preoccupation with pollution and health, colonial officials sought to deploy various
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‗Miasmas‘ were considered dangerous vapours carrying deathly sicknesses. For the elimination of those, there was not enough with the spatial segregation of Europeans and natives to protect the former, but the sanitation habits of the latter had, in the viewpoint of colonizers, to be readdressed.
8 technologies of power (infrastructure, new regulations, norms of behaviour in public spaces, etc.) with the aim to influence the agency and subjectivity of popular classes, changing their conduct and habits in a way that would not only create ‗civilized‘ individuals but also productive ones. When infrastructure and rules were not sufficient to influence such expected changes, the coercive arm of the colonial state, embodied by the police (and other officials like sanitary inspectors or tax collectors), would have to force the acceptance of colonial norms (McFarlane 2008).
Moving from Indian to Southern African colonial cities, Njoh notes how European colonizers built ―psychologically oppressive‖ infrastructures of ―intimidating monumentality which symbolically represented their domination over native populations. Such processes were also accompanied by the destruction of indigenous monuments, although the preservation of certain native symbolism was strategic for the consolidation of the colonial rule (2009, p.308).. Urban planning represented a complex and comprehensive form of exercising power over native populations. Although such a power relationship could be established through seduction, manipulation and segregation, the author sees coercion and the imminent threat of the direct use of force as the main rationality underpinning colonial planning logic (Njoh 2009).
Although representing different socio-cultural, geographical and discursive contexts, the examples given on modern colonial and Haussmann-like planning, share several characteristics that might result useful for the general understanding of urban planning practices up until the 21st century. First of all, urban planning was seen as complementary to policing, by creating wide neat spaces that facilitated surveillance and the ordering of potentially-subversive populations through segregating them and (in the case of colonial cities) creating racialized spaces. Secondly, planning processes were accompanied by violence both in the implementation or building phase —i.e. the destructive violence of demolishing ‗unclean‘ areas of poor quarters— and the maintaining of the already built order by the violent enforcement of law. Thirdly, by imposing physical structures (a new built environment) and legal-normative structures (new regulations), the ultimate goal of planners was the final moral, ethical and even aesthetical internalization of such structures by imposing a new habitus: a population capable of governing itself, that adapted its reproductive and productive lives to the new established order.
9 Lefebvre‘s radical understanding of the city as a collective oeuvre, whereby its value is derived from the uses of urban space given by those who inhabit the city sheds some light on the criticism of modern (and for extension, colonial) urban planning that sees this inhabitant-population as a problem, a chaos that needs to be resolved and ordered (1991). This ordering is interpreted as urban planning subordinated to industrialization processes that will result on the dispossession of the city to the majority of those who created and lived in it, the expulsion of popular classes to secure the dominance of ruling ones. Reflecting on the experience of Paris, Lefebvre points out at the violence inherent to modern urban planning: ―Later we will be grateful to him for having opened up Paris to traffic. This was not the aim, the finality of Haussmann ‗planning‘. The voids have a meaning: they cry out loud and clear the glory and power of the State which plans them, the violence which could occur‖ (Lefebvre, 1991:76).
Such violent planning practices left path-dependencies not only in Europe but also in the other parts of the world touched by the modern ideologies of spatial ordering, which created constraints and continuities during the 20th century with the implementation of modernist planning ideals of western material and political progress and economic efficiency (McFarlane 2008; Njoh 2009; Davis 2014). In the first half of the 20th century, and led by Le Corbusier a progressive planning movement institutionalized in the International Congress of Modern Architecture in 1928, sought to transform cities into rationalized and civic spaces with the inclusion of the industrial working class. Nevertheless, as well intentioned as the CIAM ideals were, as Davis (2014) notes, in the Latin American context the existence of segregated cities with large informal settlements, and the authoritarian nature of government-developers led to the partial implementation of modernist plans. This resulted in the deepening of the divide between the formal and informal city, further marginalizing the bottom-line poor populations whose labour power could not be absorbed by industrialization (Davis 2014).
Already in the second half of the 20th century, the rapid urbanization of world‘s cities created the questionable distinction between megacities of the Global South, implying chaotic growth, and Global Cities of the Global North, as sites of command and control of the global economies (Robinson, 2012). After one century of urbanization processes Harvey (2012) compares Robert Moses‘ large-scale regeneration of post II-WW New York to Haussmann‘s urban revolution: the processes of suburbanization of New York
10 (followed by other North American cities) provoked the hollowing of city centres in favour of the suburbs, which promoted and advertised a new life-style based on a new type of commodity consumerism (e.g. cars, refrigerators), and that resulted in the (also racial) exclusion of poorer populations that could not afford it. The emergence of social movements and protests in the 60s were a reaction against the exclusionary logics of this city-model, as the Paris Commune had been a reaction against the Haussmannization of the French capital (Harvey, 2012).
Since the late 16th century building of colonial cities up until 20th century urban restructuring processes, planning emerged as a critical function of government, ordering territories and people‘s lives. Lefebvre‘s words reflect the historical continuity of planning as violent domination: ―And still: repression (constraints, including violence) and persuasion (ideology and advertising)‖ (1991:85). Different historical planning strategies are reflective of ideologies and rationalities derived from different knowledges backing their decision-making. Most of the above-mentioned cases exemplified political domination, the exercise of violent governmental power, covering a large spectrum of types of violence that go from direct physical coercion to the physical and symbolic construction of oppressive structures that seek to create new habits, more profitable lifestyles, and easily governable subjects.
In the next section I address the rise of neoliberal urban planning and the violence it purports. Nevertheless, to conclude this historical overview of planning practices it is relevant to point out that social movements (such as the ones presented by Harvey) were not the only reactions to the rising implantation of accumulation-driven regimes of (neoliberal) urban restructuring. Actually, as Goldfranck and Schrank (2009) note municipal socialism, particularly in Latin America has provided with a governance toolkit to counter the socially harmful effects of national-level neoliberal adjustments, being the case of Porto Alegre‘s participatory budgeting a clear example of socially-oriented alternatives that aim at countering segregation. Nevertheless the same authors also point out the convergence of the municipal socialism and neoliberalism (Goldfrank & Schrank 2009), with the pervasiveness of the market logics of the latter representing an obstacle to promote progressive forms of planning and urban governance.
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1.2 The Violence of Neoliberalizing Cities
As I have commented in the previous section, for the last four centuries urban planning has become a main tool of government which developed governmental rationalities underpinned in the functions of policing and controlling of populations as well as ordering them in accordance with political-economic needs of capitalist accumulation and industrializing societies. The aim of this section is to address the specificities of the evolution of violent urban planning practices parallel to the developing neoliberal governmental rationality and ideology.
The emergence of neoliberalism as a contemporary stage of capitalism is mostly seen as an ideological-political project of the capitalist elites for the restoration of class power through the dismantling of welfare-state structures (Harvey, 2005). In this sense, what neoliberalism apparently proposed was the active destruction (as opposed to
production) of state-governmental capacities for the liberation of markets. Nevertheless,
the governmental productive capacities of neoliberalism are already made clear in the late 1980s and 1990s. The concept ‗creative destruction‘ describes the dynamics of neoliberal governmentality which combines destructive movements of deregulation and state rolling-out with creative moments when state structures roll back to re-regulate, legitimize and institutionalize the new governmental practices, such as the privatization of public sector functions (Brenner & Theodore 2002; Peck & Tickell 2002).
As studies on the geographies of ―actually existing‖ neoliberalism show, the continuous processes of neoliberalization, although globally spread, have been particularly localized in cities which acted as ―institutional force fields‖ for regulatory reform and experimentation (Brenner & Theodore 2002; Peck et al. 2013). Moreover, since Paris‘ Hausmannization urban settlements have become strategic arenas for capital accumulation, or, more precisely, of accumulation by dispossession, that is, the forceful (and violent) enclosure (e.g. through privatization or displacement) of hitherto public or common goods (Harvey 2012, 2003). Gradually, and parallel to the convergence trend pointed out above (Goldfrank & Schrank 2009), cities around the world engaged in a neo-Darwinian inter-urban competition to attract international capital, which is reflected in the move from a managerial government to copy-cat forms of entrepreneurial governance that would ensure a ‗good business climate‘ (Harvey 1989; Robinson 2012).
12 Urban entrepreneurialism developed different strategies and instruments that have gradually become mainstream policy-practices and generated global circuits of knowledge and policy-mobilities which had differentiated results when reassembled in specific local contexts (Healey 2013; McCann 2011). Urban entrepreneurialism bases its planning practices on the idea of strategic planning of cities which normally aims at regenerating only certain strategic or ‗degraded‘ parts of the city (different from the all-encompassing modern or modernist plans) through the means of revitalization, place-marketing and tourist promotion. The adoption, to implement and design plans, of quasi-governmental development corporations formed Public-Private Partnerships and led by technical experts is a common entrepreneurial governmental instrument that results in the privatization and de-politisation of urban planning (Harvey 2005:77). For Vainer (2011), the unruly issuing of legislation and zoning laws that bypass local or national legislation and constitutional precepts to benefit corporations are also a critical entrepreneurial planning instrument that reflects a constant state of exception, borrowing Agamben‘s definition of the term, underpinned by the need to satisfy the market rule of competitiveness and survival. Following the exception and emergency logics, the commitment to hold mega-events has also proven strategic as a catalyst for implementing urban regeneration mega-projects based on top-down models of planning and implementation, and resulting in the building of infrastructures that are not responsive to the social and long term needs of city residents (Kennedy, 2015; Varrel and Kennedy, 2011; Rould and Lefebvre, 2013).
The invocations of exception and emergency in entrepreneurial planning practices, according to Graham (2012) turns into reality the metaphor of war when the militarization of cities is considered. ‗Urbicidal violence‘ (a multifaceted form of political violence designed to ‗kill‘ cities), and the forms of military destruction it involves, are, according to Graham, mechanisms for the active creative destruction of ‗threatening‘ urban environments, ―clearing new spaces for the exigencies of global-city formation‖ (Graham 2012, p.147). The militarization of cities, that is, ―the visible integration of security elements into the built environment‖ (Jaffe & Grassiani 2014, p.51), is part and parcel of the emergence of a neoliberal ―security paradigm‖, whereby states increased their coercive and disciplinary capacities in order to ―impose a market rule upon all aspects of social life‖ (Brenner & Theodore 2002, p.352; Goldstein 2010). The merging of processes of securitization, militarization and entrepreneurial urban
13 development of cities have been particularly directed against criminalized poor, subaltern or marginalized populations (Wacquant 2010; Wacquant 2008).
While entrepreneurial revitalization and consequent gentrification of revalorizing urban areas have opened up spaces for capital accumulation and the taking-over of city spaces by upper-middle classes, these have been accompanied by the revanchist displacement of previous poorer urban dwellers from the neighbourhoods they used to inhabit (Smith, 1996). Such processes of displacement and forced evictions are backed with police violence, massive demolition due to slum-clearance policies, and the violent construction of new infrastructures in what Rodgers (2012) has termed as ‗infrastructural violence‘, that is, the building of material forms that obstruct social contestation and maintaining or in some cases deepening the segregation inherited from previous historical periods.
Nevertheless, the violence of entrepreneurial planning or urban revitalization schemes is not only based on the forms of abject infrastructural urbanism, ‗urbicidal‘ military destruction, incarceration, or displacement of ‗undesirable‘ residents. Beyond the physical and despotic violence of urban planning schemes, the concept of ‗infrastructural violence‘ also considers the ‗infrastructural power‘ capacity of the state to make itself present, maintain and impose its rule over the targeted populations and territories (Rodgers 2012). Contemporary urban planning presents itself, as in the 19th century, as ―productive of [a] government‖ (McFarlane 2008) that is being newly deployed as a ―spatial technology of domination‖(Kamete 2013). Planning, therefore, is being directed towards the correction of identified ―spatial pathologies‖ embodied in the informal livelihoods of the subaltern in cities of the Global South (e.g. street vendors) (Janoschka & Sequera 2016; Kamete 2013) or homeless citizens in the Global North (Macleod 2012). ‗Zero tolerance policies‘ of surveillance and control, reflective of those applied in neoliberalizing New York of the 1990s (Macleod 2012) are still being implemented, provoking a constant the ‗violence of hyper-security‘ that scrutinizes revitalized public spaces (Janoschka & Sequera 2016). These also represent a form of
biopower that subjugates the bodies and controls the populations (Kamete 2013) to
inculcate ―‗acceptable‘ patterns of behaviour commensurate with the free flow of commerce and the new urban aesthetics‖ (Macleod 2012, p.605).
14 The aforementioned forms of physical and disciplinary violence, in the context of gentrification and entrepreneurial revitalization are also accompanied by other types of more subtle, indirect symbolic violence. Analysing the gentrification trends in Latin America, Janoschka and Sequera (2016) have pointed out different ways in which such symbolic violence is being institutionalized and purported alongside with more direct, physical forms of violence. Examples of that are what they call ―touristic violence,‖ referring to the symbolic and material dispossession of undesired identities from place, specifically linked to the question of historical cultural and material heritage that becomes a tourist attraction; and the broader idea of ―cultural violence‖, which directly refers to the devaluation of popular culture (Janoschka & Sequera 2016, pp.9–10).
What we see in all the cases exposed above is the repression of certain groups of citizens whose productive and reproductive lives are not in harmony or fully integrated into the ‗normal‘ of formal capitalist economy, and how this violence has a spatial dimension especially through the deployment of planning technologies to revitalize and control revitalized spaces. This, as we will see in more detail in the next section, has implications over the regimes of citizenship inasmuch as planning practices, as spatial technologies of domination, also bring with them an ideal of ‗good citizen‘ which ―produces ruptures with popular habits and habitats as alternative ways‖ (Janoschka & Sequera 2016, p.16).
1.3 Creating the ‘Model Citizen’
As we have seen in the previous section, contemporary urban planning and its governmental rationality produces neoliberal exclusionary spaces through the deployment of different technologies of power and domination, which seek to alter the conduct of individuals by violently subjugating and disciplining them, mostly by direct threat or coercion. Furthermore, we see how these technologies of power are complemented by technologies of sign-system, which considers the symbolic dimension of power relations, and which relates to the idea of symbolic violence and cultural dispossession. Beyond the displacement and cleansing logics through direct coercion, the building of ‗revitalized‘ public spaces through the deployment of symbols privileging certain cultural practices and consumption-production pattern is not
value-15 free or neutral, but go in line with the ideals or ideologies of governments and land-developers (Delgado, 2011).
The building of ideologically loaded revitalized spaces is therefore interpreted as a ―governmental instrument through which populations are managed‖, and by which the state, together with non-state actors, are putting forward a citizenship agenda, that is, a framing of ‗the good citizen‘ (de Koning et al 2015:122). The values and norms that are attached to revitalized city spaces define what uses are correct and virtuous, and what bodies can occupy such spaces, demarcating the line of what might be considered as
uncivic, out-of place, criminal or morally wrong. Cities, therefore, appear as strategic
political arenas for the definition of substantive citizenship, understood as concrete and relational: citizens are situated individuals that express their citizenry through their practices, and have a gender, race, class, differentiated access to resources, cultural practices, etc. This idea of citizen is contrary to the highly abstract construct of liberal citizenship that intends to set aside differences and diversity and attach political agency to an empty, disembodied national citizen (Holston and Appadurai, 1999; Sequera and Janoschka 2012).
Beyond the specific norms and regulations of revitalized spaces and their enforcement by state agents, their moral values are also symbolically made visible through the aesthetics of place. Such spaces are built as an ‗aesthetic arrangement‘ formed by symbols, discourses, messages and representations that advance the political, productive and ideological functions of these (Batista, 2003). As instruments of governmentality that influence behaviour, public spaces should be ―readable‖: they should have a clear text and discourse (Sequera, 2010) that informs and makes the urban dweller feel what is expected of him as a ‗good citizen,‘ preventing any alternative appropriations of space. Beyond the understanding, through reason, of societal regulations and norms, city-dwellers and specifically, subaltern classes are compelled to ―feel,‖ through their eyes and their senses, their place in the organization of a class-society, their possible space of citizenship, and the spaces they should occupy, and how (Batista, 2003). The homogenization of ―autonomous antagonistic subjects‖ through aesthetics and arts, according to Batista (2003), is a tool of power, for maintaining and reproducing the hegemonic order of inequalities and subjugation. Although this is not an exclusively contemporary development, what we are witnessing today is a ―radical aesthetization,‖
16 due to the commodification of arts and the birth of an actual arts industry in the 20th century (Batista, 2003:77). As several decades of studies on gentrification show, the process of revitalizing old city centres or decayed parts of the city often have cultural and artistic transformations as a key element and asset, which signifies more than a pure aesthetical change. It often implies the implantation of new types of production based on cultural services and creative industry, and the commodification of historical material and cultural heritage (Harvey, 2012; Smith, 1996; Sequera, 2010:131; Zukin, 1989:103-4).
The revitalization of old city centres by the means of the culture (and arts) that is being imported with it attracts middle-class newcomers whose productive and consumption patterns contrast with those of working-class residents (Janoschka et. al., 2014; Zukin, 1989; Smith, 1996). Cultural practices and appropriations of spaces common among the working or poorer classes that lived in a neighbourhood before its revitalization, turn to be seen as uncivic, and inappropriate after revitalization (Chaskin & Joseph 2013). Furthermore, the transformation of neighbourhood spaces into ‗spectacularized‘ places empties them of political significance provoked by the encounter of opposed and conflicting uses (Berenstein, 2013). ―The strict ethics of ‗consumerist citizenship‘‖ is the only one accepted in such spaces (Macleod 2012).
The non-coercive governmental dimension of revitalization is directed towards shaping and influencing the reproductive and productive lives of residents, adapting them to the changing model, to make them profitable subjects both in terms of their productive-creative and consuming capacities. It is expected that working-class, poor and other marginalized residents will either leave the revitalized neighbourhoods due to their inability to adapt and gain societal membership, or adapt to the new political economy, and middle class habitus (Sequera 2010; Macleod 2012). Not being able to subscribe to these principles, or acting in an expected way or manner are seen as individual failure, ―interpreted in terms of entrepreneurial virtues or personal failings (such as not investing significantly enough in one‘s own human capital through education) rather than being attributed to any systemic property (such as class exclusions usually attributed to capitalism)‖ (Harvey, 2005:65). Differentiated citizenship appears when certain individuals can adapt their lives to the framings of ‗good citizen‘ expressed by planners and that materialize in the built environment (Holston, 2011). The other groups
17 of city dwellers that cannot fit into the established tabulations are the victims of ‗urban hygienist global processes‘ that target subversive behaviours, through the impoverishment of the physical experience of the city ―in a bodily sense, when it comes to everyday ordinary practice‖ (Berenstein, 2013:287).
Nevertheless, individual citizens are ethical subjects that have the possibility to act independently and in a subversive way, against the established aesthetic order and official state citizenship agendas. As Batista notes, aesthetics is an ambiguous and unstable space: ―there is something in the body that can revolt against the inscribed power‖ (2003:77). The construction of counter-hegemonic citizenship agendas open new spaces for the possible, and represent ―an aspiration that fuels struggles against exclusion and inequality‖ (de Koning et al. 2015, p.126). Citizenship, as well as spaces are a product of contentious politics: a citizen can be in the situation of dominated or empowered, in subjugation or in revolt (Sequera & Janoschka 2012). Neo-liberalizing cities therefore produce spaces and ideals of the ‗good‘ or ‗model‘ citizen always in a process that is contested and negotiated. There is always a latent possibility for the subversive appropriation of spaces that challenge ―growth-machine-domination representations‖ of revitalized spaces (Macleod 2012) and their exclusionary logics.
1.4 Conclusion
In this first chapter I offered a theoretical introduction in which I intended to link, through a revision of literature and different theories, violence with urban planning. The structure of the chapter follows the general narrative in which the thesis is structured. In the first section I presented a brief historical overview of how the organization and planning of cities was deployed violently, and with the aim of governing and controlling populations, particularly in the expressions of modern haussman-like planning and colonial strategies. Nevertheless, I also presented the idea that planning evolves parallel to political ideals of modernity, progress, and finally exposing the duality between socially-oriented and entrepreneurial or growth-oriented planning practices.
This historical overview ends in the current historical chapter of the neoliberalization of cities, and entrepreneurial urban planning practices. Following the narrative of planning and violence, I presented how the current exceptional and emergency logic of
18 entrepreneurial planning also unfolds with a diverse array of violence, related to gentrification, revanchism, and militarization. Nevertheless, in general terms, I want to propose a reading for the historical expressions of urban planning whereby planners seek not only to dominate by sovereign force and violence, but to derive knowledge from populations under their rule, to finally ―conduct [their] conduct‖ as the Foucauldian definition of governmental rationality is presented (Gordon 1991, p.2). In the final section of the chapter, I therefore present how the violence of planning takes on softer symbolic forms, which are not exceptional to the current neoliberal period but are deeply entrenched and pervasive in entrepreneurial planning.
Cities, beyond being arenas for capital accumulation, are spaces for the realization of political projects, and where the state makes itself present in the everyday lives of citizens. Urban planning, the design of spaces and the socio-economic restructuring of cities, therefore, install a political order, and rule over (problematic) populations that delimitates the possible spaces for citizenship, and the kinds of subjectivities that are allowed to be part of a city-polity.
Making use of the theories and concepts introduced in this chapter, the following chapters address the specific case study of the Port Region of Rio de Janeiro, in which I narrate how the actually existing violence of urban planning influence people‘s lives and represent a transformation in the way that the state makes itself present in this part of the city.
19
CHAPTER 2. Reflecting on the Methods and Ethics of the Field
Some of my colleagues think that by reading books they‟ll learn everything about Providência. Reading books you won‟t learn everything about Providência; you must have experiences in Providência. (Heitor).
2.1 Ethnographic Fieldwork in the Port Region of Rio de Janeiro
The empirical chapters of this thesis are based on ethnographic data that I collected during 5 months of fieldwork, from August until December 2015, conducted in the Port Region of Rio de Janeiro, specifically in the geographical boundaries of the Porto Maravilha Urban Operation. Access to the field was conceived differently for the Port Region as a whole than for the favela territories of Morro da Providência and Pedra Lisa.2 Favela is the word to designate informal communities of self-built houses in Brazilian cities that often are partially (in the case of Morro da Providência) dominated by different fractions of organized drug trafficking.
2 Technically speaking Morro da Providência and Pedra Lisa are two favela territories that are adjacent to
each other. Nevertheless, colloquially, people refer only to Morro da Providência or Providência to talk about the favela that is located in the middle of the Port Region, as I will also do in the rest of the thesis.
Figure 2.1 Location of the Port Region within the Boundaries of Rio de Janeiro
20 Whereas in the asphalt3 territories of the Port Region I could freely walk around to do
my observations, access to Morro da Providência was more restricted. Especially during the first month of fieldwork, it was very helpful to have a contact, or what I could call, a ‗gatekeeper.‘ Gabriela, a resident of the favela with whom I got in touch during the first days in Rio de Janeiro, was happy to show me around and explain the power dynamics of the favela, where the permanent presence of traffickers and the Military Police determined mobility, and made me aware of the tensions, that could result in occasional shootings in this part of the Port Region. The generosity and openness of Gabriela, who was interested on my research as I was interested on her social projects in the favela, were very valuable to introduce me to the community. As months of fieldwork went by, the fact that several people of Morro da Providência knew me and that I was more aware of the power dynamics of place, I gained sufficient confidence to freely move throughout all the Port Region, including the favela territories.
At the start of my fieldwork period I was confronted with the question of where to
3 Asphalt, or ―asfalto‖ is the Portuguese-Brazilian designation for the formal neighbourhoods.
Figure 2.2 Geographical Limits of the Porto Maravilha Urban Operation
Legend: the map shows the internal boundaries of the six neighbourhoods affected by the Porto Maravilha
project. The favela territories are highlighted in dark red, in the centre.
21 ‗observe‘ the linkages between revitalization, violence and securitization. In that sense, a similar dynamics to the snowball sampling method that I used for the interviews determined the places, events and meetings that were useful settings to conduct observations. An interesting setting for observing power dynamics and gathering data about the impact of revitalization were community meetings, particularly the ones mediated by police officers both in Morro da Providência (the so called Community Council) and in the Port Region administrative level (the Public Security Council), in which different themes regarding the advance of revitalization, security and services provision were addressed. I also joined regular meetings of organized groups such as the Cultural Council of the Port Region, as well as the meetings of the Comité Popular da Copa e das Olimpíadas (CPCO), the second being a city-wide social movement in which I also became personally engaged, and provided with fruitful data to contextualize the processes that were taking place in the Port Region within the city of Rio as a whole. In the meetings, topics that I had individually addressed with my respondents were directly discussed between the involved parties, providing rich data to be contrasted with the information I got from the interviews.
I held 32 in-depth semi-structured interviews with a wide variety of respondents and all of the interviews were conducted in Portuguese and tape-recorded (with one exception due to technical issues). Residents of the Port Region and Morro da Providência, community leaders, local researchers and academics, policy-makers, police officers, cultural agents, activists, are found among my respondents. Most of my interviewees devoted up to two hours of their time to speak to me, and I was never constrained in terms of topics and time to address those. Specific questions varied depending on the social position and role of the interviewee, as well as the natural evolution of our conversation. Nevertheless, during the interviews I always tried to cover at least the following broad topics: revitalization, security, relation with authorities and, in some cases, culture and future opportunities. Questions were broad enough to let the speaker frame the topics in his or her own words and ideas. Finally, I never asked directly about ‗violence‘: I let the topic emerge by itself during the interviews, as well as observations. Although I did not integrate with the field as a resident, I lived a walking distance from the Port Region, a fact that made it easier to conduct daily observations in public spaces and informal conversations with residents and workers in the Port Region. Beyond
22 formal research situations such as attending community meetings or the setting of interviews, resident respondents often invited me for social gatherings or spontaneous situations of informally hanging out with them. These situations provided with rich ethnographic material and helped build up a more tacit understanding of everyday life in the Port Region. Finally, I decided to use pseudonyms to protect the identities of my interviewees.
2.2 Building Research Relations
Power relations are not only the main object of my research, but also part and parcel of my research process and methodology. In this section I offer a brief reflection on how, throughout the fieldwork process, my position as a subject on the field and in relation to my subjects of research was built, and how it affected my research. For the that, I would like to make use of Bourdieu‘s concepts of ‗field‘ and ‗habitus,‘ as suggested by Kalir (2006). Following Kalir (2006), I will reflect on the by-directional influence that my agency and ‗habitus‘ had on the field, as well as the impact that the rules and nature of the ‗field‘ had on my research and my adapting subjectivity.
A part from observing the field from a ‗safe distance,‘ doing ethnographic research means building up relations of trust with subjects. As my first experience ever doing ethnography, it was during the fieldwork process that I gained awareness of the emotional and ethical implications of doing research, beyond the sensitivity of the topic per se. My habitus, that is, ‗my socialized subjectivity‘ as a foreign researcher in a general sense played a positive role in opening doors but also implied that I had to learn the rules and politics of the ‗field‘ in order to approach my respondents in a sensitive manner that would not have a negative impact on either their personal-professional lives or my research aims.
Contrary to what I had expected, approaching policy-makers and police officers was easier than residents, both in terms of access and in relation ethical or emotional concerns. My position as a foreign researcher who was interested in understanding the policies that were deployed in the region was sufficient to gain access to police officers and policy makers, with no need to build-up sensitive meaningful relations of trust. In
23 general terms, officials were interested, from a corporative point of view, to promote their message and the ‗goodness‘ of the policies that they implemented or represented. Contrastingly, building up trust relationships with residents was more difficult, especially in Morro da Providência. Forced evictions, dramatic transformations in public spaces, the installing of a new type of policing with the everyday presence of military police officers, the remaining authority of traffickers, the emerging new economic opportunities, and a long list of other critical processes that were condensed into the last five years made evident the complexity of a community of residents which is split into different groupings and rivalries.
In the first weeks of fieldwork I built up a trust relationship with my initial gatekeeper, Gabriela. Although it was very positive to introduce me to the community, in the long run this resulted in an impediment to gain access to other potential respondents who were not particularly sympathetic to Gabriela, and saw me as her friend. Moreover, Morro da Providência had been the focus of much research and journalism due to the impact of forced evictions and the pacification process. I also tried to find respondents who were keen on talking to me, and who were not tired of answering questions from journalists and other researchers, as was the case with affected residents. In this context, in the following weeks, I had to maintain a wary distance from the internal community disputes, and profile myself as an interest-neutral observer concerned about the future of the community. Nonetheless, during my interviews I was transparent about my political views, and sometimes I even made explicit reference to my academic-political positioning aligned with critical urban theory, and my interest in researching power-relations and power-relations of exploitation or oppression.
2.3 Redefining Research in the Moving Map of Revitalization
In the previous section, making use of the concept of ‗habitus‘, I reflected on how my subjectivity played a role and had to adapt to the reality of the field. Often, when ethnographers reflexively engage with the politics of representation, they acknowledge the power imbalances of the nature of writing ethnographic representations. Nevertheless, instead of focusing on my power, as a researcher, to represent the realities of others after fieldwork, I want to reflect on how the relationality of writing and doing
24 ethnographic fieldwork affected and determined the shape of my research. Building up on Kalir‘s conception of the by-directional influence of ‗habitus‘ and ‗field‘ in the ethnographic making, in this section, I reflect on how ―the power of the field‖, that is what I encountered in the research setting and my respondents actually influenced my research design and focus (2006, p.244).
The observations, interviews, and informal conversations that I conducted during the first months of fieldwork made me realize that the reality of the ‗violence of revitalization process‘ was constructed in a much more complex manner than my initial focus on the interaction between the pacification process (that is, the specific role of the Military Police) and the deployment of the Porto Maravilha project. Mainly two broad themes that I had not envisioned before starting fieldwork emerged and made me re-adapt my research design and focus.
First of all, the importance of the historical background of the Port Region was critical to understand many of the discussions and references that my respondents would make. When seeking to analyse the current violence of neoliberal urban planning I realized that some of the answers I was getting were to be found in the previous two centuries in which the Port Region was taking shape. Therefore, beyond a simple emerging theme history became a fundamental method, a tool through which the present developments should be analysed. The implementation and effects of ‗travelling‘ neoliberal policies are path-dependent, contingent to the history, culture and specific socio-political contexts in which such policies are deployed (Shatkin, 2007; Robinson, 2012). Furthermore, as I show in the following chapters, history and the colonial heritage of the Port Region are considered an asset for the revitalization project, becoming an object of political disputes over the re-signification of its slavery past.
Secondly, following the discourses of my respondents, their concerns, and also paying attention to their practices made me realize that the violence of neoliberal planning was not restricted to the physical violence and threat related to the permanent presence of the Military Police in Morro da Providência, or the demolitions and displacement. The cultural-economic aspect of revitalization and the mechanisms of control implemented in public revitalized spaces emerged so frequently during the months of fieldwork that provoked a natural thematic spill-over of the research focus towards a more symbolic understanding of violence and power relations. Instead of keeping my research plans
25 untouched, I decided to allow myself a certain methodological openness and practice a form of ―studying through‖ the research object, focusing on actual governmental practices and reactions to these, and ―tracing ways in which power creates webs and relations between actors, institutions and discourses across time and space‖ (McCann & Ward 2012, p.46).
Following the multiple effects of the revitalization process, and acknowledging the processual nature of the deployment of neoliberal urban planning or neoliberalization of the Port Region (Peck & Tickell 2002; Brenner & Theodore 2002), also made me change the conceptualization of the geographical extension and relations of the studied area(s). At the start of my research, departing from previous desk-research, my focus made me perceive the geographical extension of the Porto Maravilha as it being determined by a simple binary looking at the contrasts between Morro da Providência, where most of the violent processes had been taking place, and the surrounding asfalto neighbourhoods. Nevertheless, the geographical advance of revitalization and its varied effects on different parts of the Port Region reflected the blurriness and moving boundaries of the object or the territorial unit of my study. The aforementioned ‗thematic spill-over‘ was, therefore, also reflected on a geographical spill-over in which the incorporation of certain themes through the following of my studied subjects revealed the emergence of violence in the asphalt revitalizing territories, and even their relation with processes at a city level.
In conclusion, I would like to make reference to Law‘s idea of acknowledging the ‗messiness‘ of the social research method, and conceiving it as a ―hinterland‖ that activates and de-activates certain realities. Thinking about the method, therefore implies thinking of the realities that we want to research, relationally understand, and analyse (López 2008). In the case of my research, the activation and de-activation was done in relation to the themes I addressed, the subjects I related to, and the sites where my research was focused.
2.4 Limits and Limitations
Setting the boundaries, or the ‗hinterlands‘ of research undeniably means deciding what themes, and what parts of the observed realities will be included in the research project,
26 and what will fall out of the scope of research.
One of the main thematic limits of the present research, and probably the most relevant one, is the exclusive treatment of collective violence that comes from the side of the state and formal authorities. The segregated reality of Rio de Janeiro, as with many other Latin American cities involves the existence of urban collective violence related to the presence of militarily armed illicit groups that have territorial control over the informal favela communities. Such urban violence is interpreted, by many scholars, as an inherited consequence of previous negligent modern planning practices and the political violence of the authoritarian military regime that could not be readdressed by the (social)democratization of Brazil, and that have left landscapes of violent socio-spatial segregation, and differentiated citizenship (Davis 2014; Koonings 2014; Koonings & Veenstra 2007).
Although the focus of this thesis is the violence of urban planning, and therefore, the violence of formal state-actors, the conscious omission of drug gang members and their actions from the scope of this research is not justified by their falling in the category of ‗informal‘ authorities that were absolutely unrelated to planning whatsoever. Actually, the informal authority of gang members is not at all parallel to the formal authority of the state, but it rather is entangled forming complex webs of power (Arias 2006). As months of fieldwork have also revealed, traffickers in Morro da Provicência were also negotiating parties and partially powerful actors within the processes of revitalization in the favela. Nevertheless, the added complexity of researching power relations involving drug traffickers, as well as the not-direct association of gang members‘ violence with revitalization process provoked the limitation of the research design, and I decided not to delve into the power webs of traffickers with state actors and other private parties.
The conscious limitation of complexity in relation to the treatment of drug-traffickers‘ violence was parallel to the decision of adding profundity to the genealogy and historical understanding of violent urban planning as a governmental action, and how the conditions were created for the existence of segregation. Nevertheless, I did not conduct extensive archival research, and the historical overview is limited to the information drawn from secondary Brazilian sources. Finally, I myself have translated,
27 from Portuguese to English, literal citations of both the Brazilian sources and the interviews. Considering the fact that implies the translation from my fourth into my third language, some of the nuances of the original Portuguese-Brazilian words or Carioca expressions might be lost in the following representations.
