Vivian Luiz Fonseca (Rio de Janeiro): The Olympic City: narratives about urban projects in the Rio 2016 Games

9.7.2019, Oettingenstraße 67, 80538 München, Raum L155, 18:00 bis 20:00

This lecture aims to analyze the narratives and disputes surrounding the urban projects presented in the process of the organization and the execution of the Olympic Games Rio 2016. In the scope of the official Olympic project, the notion of "legacy" is one of the central points and, because of it, the governments and the Olympics Committees labeled Rio 2016 the “Transformation Games”. From this perspective, the urban changes that have occurred at Rio were presented as “legacies”. Although the words "legacy" and "urban transformation" are present in the narratives of different social actors, the understanding of these categories is very diverse. An example in this sense is the expression "Exclusion Games", a clear counterpoint to the official “Transformation Games”. Finally, we must consider that the Olympic urban reforms are related to political projects developed since the 1990s, a topic that will be also discussed in this paper.