ABSTRACT
Copacabana and Ipanema, the renowned beaches of Rio de Janeiro, form a visual metonymy with the city that carries symbolic and real currency within interconnected cultural, spatial, and material economies. Ipanema and Copacabana are located in Rio's Zona Sul, which covers the Atlantic coastal area south from Guanabara Bay to the Tijuca Massif. This chapter explores how the presence of street markets and vendors, licensed and informal, contributes to or inhibits visual and embodied narratives of place, particularly those that present the beaches as sites for consumption. It considers the discursive situating and treatment of informal street vendors along Copacabana and Ipanema beaches, and how this complex of informality, market, and place organizes or disorganizes discursive representation. In the Zona Sul space is a luxury commodity. The tourist markets and the weekly neighbourhood produce markets are authorized by the Prefeitura and through their contribution to the formal urban economy are permitted to temporarily occupy valuable space in the street.
