ABSTRACT
The competitive management of contemporary metropolises promises a world of dreams through extreme architectural and urban forms, large real estate projects and mega-events broadcast worldwide by mass media screens. Spectacular images of the cityscape and new buildings are produced for global circulation, displaying a civic mobilization of achievement and overcoming. In Rio de Janeiro – host of the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Summer Olympics – the new museums and cultural centers designed by star architects and framed by paradisiacal backdrops have renewed a tropical fantasy that has always titillated the western colonial imagination. The harbor renovation, only partially completed, has sought to gentrify a region adjacent to the downtown, connecting it to real estate global financial flows directed at new business districts. In this city of the spectacle, the control of impoverished populations through cordons sanitaires, the removal or ‘pacification’ of favelas, or their management and high-tech surveillance by militaries, paramilitaries and private security companies, has brought Brazilian apartheid in line with 21st-Century standards for urban warfare. The riofication of global megacities is a trend that combines spectacle and control, real estate and paramilitary extortion, global mega-events and regressive fundamentalism – a political and urban formula that transforms cities into a monstrous amalgam where contemporary capitalism is revealed.
