ABSTRACT
In this chapter, through the case study of Rio de Janeiro, we call the attention for a scenario in which the social and economic centrality of metropolitan space does not translate into a new scalar configuration and, thus, fails to launch a politics of metropolitan rescaling. Despite the fact that it stands out as the second-largest metropolitan region in Brazil, the third in Latin America and the twentieth in the world in demographic terms, concentrating 8.04 percent of all goods and services in the country, the Metropolitan Rio de Janeiro has been living under a regulatory void, without any institutionalized structure of regional governance.
The chapter resorts to a political economy perspective to explain the reasons for the mismatch between the centrality of Rio’s metropolitan region and a scalar politics that does not fit into the metropolitan scale. If globalization is assumed to make economic actors envisage the strategic value of regional spaces and to push forward a new scalar politics that matches those places, we contend that this outcome will depend on the profile of the economic actors. Wherever, as in Rio de Janeiro, the political economy is rooted in the secondary circuit of capital accumulation, that is, wherever the main economic players come from real estate, public works and public services, urban policies are doomed to be punctual and localist in their reach and to fall short of a broader civic concern. The chapter argues that a political economy led by the secondary circuit of capital accumulation creates an environment averse to turning the metropolitan region into a collective productive force, since the production of built space is the very object of accumulation. We argue that, from this logic of accumulation, it is very hard, if not impossible, to expect from economic actors any active engagement with issues concerning the governance of the metropolitan region that could lead to a politics of metropolitan rescaling.
We describe the rationale of this political economy through the analyses of three urban intervention projects: a) the renewal of Rio de Janeiro central area through the reform of the Port; b) the reform of the city mobility system through the concession of bus lines and the construction of four express bus corridors (Bus Rapid Transit System/BRTS); c) the reform and privatization of the Maracanã football stadium. The chapter underlines that these interventions meet a strategy of urban entrepreneurship to enhance Rio’s competitive position within the international division of consumption which is city-centered and that is at odds with the metropolis.
