Black Neighborhood, White Elites: Urban Reform in Rio de Janeiro’s Little Africa

• In Event: From Tech to Informality: Challenges to Traditional Urban Governance

Abstract

Following a global trend toward waterfront “revitalization,” a contemporary public-private urban megaproject known as Porto Maravilha (Marvelous Port) seeks to transform Rio de Janeiro’s marginalized, majority Afro-descendant old port area— home to the remains of the Americas’ largest slave disembarkation wharf and Brazil’s first favela—into a tourist and residential hub through the construction of iconic museums, transportation infrastructure, and high-rise apartment buildings. Based on participant-observation, interviews with protagonists, and discursive analysis of official texts, this paper argues that the current effort to remake and create a new imaginary for this historically sensitive space—the heart of an area referred to as “Little Africa”—represents both change and continuity vis-à-vis more than a century of urban development in Rio, which has seen recurring waves of middle- and upper-class movement away from central neighborhoods that have long been stigmatized for their narrow streetscapes, decaying colonial architecture, and concentration of marginalized, Afro-descendant neighborhoods. In turn, local elites have created a series of increasingly distant new enclaves primarily inhabited by lighter-skinned residents, including Copacabana (the tourist-friendly embodiment of midcentury Rio’s self-styled “glamorous tropical modernity”), Ipanema and Leblon (the epicenter of Rio’s globally exported “tropical chic lifestyle” in subsequent decades), and, most recently—and even further to downtown Rio’s south and west—Barra da Tijuca (which hosted most of the sporting events for the 2016 Olympic Games and is home to a lengthy beach, numerous large malls, and sprawling, U.S.-style suburban housing developments).

However, after decades of elite neglect, and motivated by the lack of additional suitable space for significant real-estate speculation in Rio’s southwestern periphery as well as state support for central Rio’s “revitalization,” nearly 6,000 amenity-rich new apartments have recently been announced for the old port area, which—per city estimates—could increase the region’s population by over 50 percent. I argue that the contemporary potential elite return to—or attempt to “reconquer,” per one of my interlocutors—Rio’s “Little Africa” thus embodies both an enduring quest to remake, reshape, reform, and revitalize Rio in elite-friendly ways, as well as an upending of the city’s longstanding local urban development patterns and racialized, class-infused geographies. Yet while Porto Maravilha and associated construction projects are often framed by local elites as progressive efforts to address deeply entrenched racial inequalities and incorporate into Rio’s social fabric a long-marginalized space, I argue that—through public-private investment in infrastructure and the creation of more upscale residential spaces—the probable outcome is an exacerbation of deeply entrenched racial and class-based stratification.

In addition to analyzing the role of race, class, and inequality in urban redevelopment and global city-making efforts in the Global South, this paper also sheds light on the ideologies and motivations of oft-overlooked political-economic Global South elites, and how they exercise agency.

Author

• Kevin Funk, Columbia University