Evictions and housing policy evolution in Rio de Janeiro: An ANT perspective

ABSTRACT

This article explores Rio’s housing policy transformation over the past 2 decades to reveal how it has contributed to rendering evictions and relocations possible and acceptable in the wake of mega-events. Theoretically, the article adopts actor-network theory (ANT) and the political sociology of public policy instruments (PPI) and delves into the unfolding of Rio’s slum upgrading instrumentation from 1993 to 2012. This article argues that the weakening of slum upgrading as a central policy instrument to address Rio’s housing problem together with the reemergence of housing construction as a suitable solution have contributed to the development evictions and relocations in the wake of mega-events. Therefore, the article highlights that evictions relate not only to capitalist accumulation and the neoliberal paradigm but also to other dynamics, contributing to a more nuanced account of Rio’s urban transformations in recent years.

Acknowledgments

The author thanks Xuefei Ren and two anonymous reviewers for valuable comments on earlier versions of this article. This article is based on the author’s PhD research supervised by Jorge Fiori and funded by CONACYT (National Council of Science and Technology).

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Hector Becerril

Hector Becerril is a CONACYT Research Fellow commissioned at the Autonomous University of Guerrero to conduct research on risk reduction, climate adaptation, and coastal development. His has expertise on policy analysis, urban development, social housing, and governance. Hector holds a PhD in Development Planning from the Bartlett Development Planning Unit, UCL (University College London); an MSc in Urban Planning from the French Institute of Urbanism, University of Paris; and a BArch and MArch from the National School of Architecture in Lyon, France. In 2013 while completing his PhD, he was awarded a UKNA fellowship (Urban Knowledge Network Asia) to conduct comparative research on housing policies in India and Brazil at the Indian Institute for Human Settlements (IIHS). Héctor has working experience in the United Kingdom, France, Brazil, and Mexico and has presented his work at various conferences in the Americas, Europe, and Africa.