ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a critical examination of the disputed Rio de Janeiro Olympics legacy through the prism of the relation between global urbanism and urban citizenship. Drawing on the conceptual framework developed by the Brazilian geographer Milton Santos, the politics of mega-event planning in Rio de Janeiro is analyzed in a threefold dimension; as fable, as perversity, and as possibility. Firstly, the narrative of the Olympics’ urban legacy is interpreted as a fantastic story involving a number of globalist imaginaries of techno-cultural innovation and neoliberal citizenship, presenting mega-events as an extraordinary opportunity to create a more integrated and modern city. The Olympic-driven City Project is then analyzed as a factory of perversities, that imposes a neoliberal model of governance and an agenda of accelerated spatial transformation. These favour the capitalist interests of transnational and local elites, eroding citizenship by means of dispossession and exclusion. Finally, in terms of the imagining of alternatives, the urban politics of mega-events is discussed as a platform for the expression of social discontent, through which oppositional social movements and popular committees invent and mobilize a number of imaginaries, discourses, and practices of insurgent planning, thus reaffirming the right to the city as a fundamental struggle for citizenship in the Global South.
