ABSTRACT
Worldmaking in Rio 2016, on/offline This chapter discusses the ways Rio is re-presented as a vibrant, creative place in its 2016 mega-event’s website, and how this compares with the city’s multiple sociocultural realities offline. Given the contemporary emphasis on mega-projects as stepping stones to urban regeneration via international capital investment – both pivotal for any urban formation’s entering or upgrading in the global city rankings (Sassen, 2001) – the stakes were high for the organisers of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games. Former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva promised during the successful bid (Phillips, 4 October 2009) that the first Olympics staged in South America would make Brazil more closely connected to and embedded within organisations integral to the transnational economy (the World Trade Organization, the United Nations and the G20). One might interpret the clock on the mega-event’s official website to suggest a teleological countdown for the city of Rio: the entry into an international polity only successful Olympic hosts achieve, in line with a set of international standards of well-being, integrity and cooperation. For more critical analysts, Rio 2016’s ‘goals’ can be situated in the ways in which Lula’s policy fit into post-1970s articulations of abertura . This post-dictatorship (19641985) project of ‘opening up’ to the world brought Brazil decades later to global networks of neo-liberal governance, led by Lula’s protégé and president, Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016). If abertura was implicated in increased movements across open borders, its management through the mega-event’s organisation would turn into an urban beautification policy by means of capital circulation (transportation, tourism, cultural events).
