Of cable-cars and helicopters: mobility regimes and the politics of visibility in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

Favelas are relatively poor and highly racialised urban areas, historically associated with violent criminality but also with cultural creativity. The cable car and the helicopter, two technologies of transport and surveillance that capture the favelas of Rio de Janeiro from above, are examined here as empirical and epistemological devices that embody the complex ambivalences of visibility that constitute the everyday life of the urban poor. Within the framework of a sociology of the sky and understanding both devices as part of highly uneven mobility regimes, we reflect on how practices of vertical spectacularization produce the favelas both as a landscape-commodity for the tourist gaze and a landscape-warzone for arbitrary killings. We conclude that the relationship between those two landscapes should not be thought of as dichotomous, but rather as a constant and tense copresence in a long history of visibilities and invisibilities that mark how elites deal with the so-called favela problem.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

[1] The typical image of a favela neighbourhood is a steep hill, which is why ‘favela’ and ‘morro’ (hill) are almost synonyms. But that is not the case for the majority of favelas, specially those in the West zone of the city, the area with the highest rates of favela population growth (Cavallieri & Vial 2012).

[2] Official counts estimate that there are around 1 billion people living in inadequate housing conditions. In Latin America and the Caribbean, 30% of inhabitants live in ‘informal settlements’ (Menaga 2009). Informality, however, is not unique to the territories that the state labels as ‘spaces of exception’ (Moassab 2013; Name 2016). What one has, based on a synonymy between poverty, informality and illegality, is ‘the valorization of elite informalities and the criminalization of subaltern informalities’ (Roy 2011, 233).

[3] In Rio this was well reflected on an impressive list: Pan American Games (2007), World Military Games (2011), RIO+20 Conference (2012), World Youth Day (2013), FIFA Confederations Cup (2013), FIFA World Cup (2014), Summer Olympic Games and Paralympics (2016) and Copa America (2019).

[4] Located in a central district of Rio de Janeiro’s North Zone, the Complexo do Alemão spreads over 186 hectares. Data from the Favelas Census (2008–2009) estimates over 85 thousand residents, with a population density six times higher than the average density in Rio. As in the case of the best part of other territories that are identified as ‘favelas’, those who live at Complexo do Alemão have limited access to formal employment and public services. Data of UPP Social Census, conducted in 2010, informs that 59% of residents share accommodation with non-family members, 46% do not own a landline or mobile telephones, less than 8% hold university degrees and only 9% own a regular property title (EGP-Rio 2010).

[5] For more information about the movie see: http://www.autoderesistencia.com.br/police-killing.

[6] In Brazil’s federative unions it is established by law that policing is divided between the military police, responsible for ostensive work, and the civil police, responsible for investigative work. However, various critical analyses of the public safety system have pointed out conflicts regarding the definition of the acting limits between the two police forces, not to mention the dismantling of operational activities, and therefore advocate for the reform of Brazilian police (see Beato Filho and Ribeiro 2016; Sapori, 2016).

[7] ‘Resistance followed by death is a classification routinely used to prevent police officers from being held responsible for the killings, since they claim to shoot in self-defense’ (http://www.autoderesistencia.com.br/problema). Initially regulated by the Order of Service ‘N’, no.803, of 2 October 1969, from the Superintendency of the Judiciary Police of the former state of Guanabara, the ‘resistance followed by death’ was first registered on November 14 of the same year (during the civil-military-business dictatorship in Brazil), following a police action by members of the Special Group on Combating Delinquency in General – a group that had also been formed in 1969 and became known as the ‘Group of Eleven Golden Men’ (Verani 1996).

[8] At the time of the writing of the script for ‘Police Killing,’ (2018) more than 16,000 people had been killed by the Rio de Janeiro Military Police since 1997. Nowadays, this situation is intensified: according to data released in May of 2019, public security agents in the state of Rio de Janeiro killed five people a day, a record for the last 21 years (https://exame.abril.com.br/brasil/lethality-police-in-rio-and-last-21-years/).

[9] Available at: <https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/poder/2019/04/veja-curiosidades-do-datafolha-sobre-apoio-a-militares-no-governo.shtml>.

[10] Cf. https://www.insightcrime.org/news/analysis/death-from-above-police-helicopters-rio-de-janeiro/.

[11] On 17 August 2020, the Supreme Federal Court of Brazil unanimously determined the ban on the use of armoured helicopters in police operations, in response to the request of several civil society entities and social movements that for years have denounced it.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Bianca Freire-Medeiros

Bianca Freire-Medeiros is Associate Professor of Sociology at University of São Paulo (USP) and researcher at the Center for Metropolitan Studies (CEM/USP), where she coordinates the UrbanData – Brazil/CEM: bibliographic databank on urban Brazil. She is the author of Touring Poverty (Routledge, 2013), and in 2018, she co-edited Urban Latin America: Images, words, flows and the built environment (with J. O’Donnell – Arquitexts Series, Routledge). Tinker Visiting Professor at the University of Texas at Austin (2016/17) and Ruth Cardoso Fulbright Chair at Georgetown University (2021), she has published extensively on visual culture, mobilities and urban studies.

LIA de MATTOS ROCHA

Lia de Mattos Rocha is Associate Professor of Sociology at Rio de Janeiro State University (Uerj) and coordinator of the Cidades: Laboratory on Urban Studies. She was Visiting Researcher at The Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies Geneva (2019). Her research interests are: urban violence, militarisation, urban peripheries.

Juliana Farias

Juliana Farias is an anthropologist and works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Gender Studies Center PAGU/UNICAMP, with the project ‘Gender Violence, State Violations: A study on ways to govern territories and bodies’. Since 2004, she has been conducting research on militarisation, genocide of Black people, state violence and human rights violations in favelas and peripheries in Rio. She is the author of Governo de Mortes (Papéis Selvagens, 2020) and alongside Natasha Neri, she co-authored the plot and script for the documentary Police Killing (2018).

Leo Name

Leo Name is Adjunct Professor of Architecture and Urbanism, Comparative Literature and Latin-American Studies at Federal University of Latin-American Integration (UNILA), where he also coordinates ¡DALE!, a research group on decoloniality. He is the author of Geografia Pop (Apicuri/PUC-Rio, 2013), and his writings are on landscapes, visual culture, cultural geography, and urban studies through decolonial lenses.