Exploring Disaster Eventfulness in Urbanizing Brazil

In a 2013 interview, a senior Brazilian professor of risk, who was also a key government advisor, explained to me, “with that level of rainfall there's nothing you can do. The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) says storms will become more unpredictable and intense, so we must respond.” The urgency with which he spoke followed annual landslides and floods over recurrent rainy seasons in scores of cities across Brazil's heavily urbanized southeast. Two years earlier in 2011, a thousand people died in three cities inland of Rio in what's generally labeled the country's worst natural disaster. Innumerable city districts remain on high alert each and every year, populations dreading the rain and fearing the sirens—if they have them—that call for de-occupation.

This scene is, of course, not limited to Brazil, but is a widespread global phenomenon. Well over half the Earth's humans now dwell in cities, very often in self-build, semi-legal neighborhoods on peripheral hillsides and floodplains, while industrial production, consumption, and risk is increasingly concentrated in these same heavily built up areas. Planetary urbanization, as many have identified, focuses politics and economics at the state level and beyond on sustaining urban growth in an era of high finance capital. The risks and insecurities of urban environments appear ever more linked to political purpose across the globe. With this in mind, how are we to view our expert's comment that when considering projected rainfall patterns “there is nothing you can do?” Are we to blame nature—albeit one enhanced and accelerated by very uneven human emissions—or should we focus our attention on the social generation of ongoing risk and vulnerability that continues to be spaced across an urbanizing planet?

What follows is an effort to explore this contradiction between the “eventfulness” awarded to external nature and the “non-event” of everyday life in the urban margins. State expertise on climate risk appears ever more focused on giving the “nature” of natural disaster the status of being an event, while the urban is simultaneously naturalized as present before water, mud, tree, and concrete descends the mountainsides and rises from the valley floor. Our political status remains fixated on the convenient separation of anything deemed to be social from anything environmental. Drawing on longstanding work in Brazil, I reveal how these discourses set in motion guided material efforts to prolong and endure capitalist urbanization.

The trick of theory, of course, is that it must be qualified, proven, applied, and rethought through empirical work. Was not Brazil the state that had introduced such forward thinking social reforms in the areas of conditional cash transfers, participatory local governance and budgeting, favela formalization, and city integration master plans? Is it right to talk of life in Brazil's urban margins as a politicized non-event in the face of overwhelming forces of eventful nature? Under the Workers Party (PT) of presidents Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff (2002–2013)—as well as to a lesser extent under Cardoso prior to Lula's quasi-revolution—extreme poverty was reduced and inequality indices narrowed. In the medium-sized city of Nova Friburgo, worst hit by the 2011 mudslides, and where much of this research took place, the larger part of “the margins” had access to luxury goods. Everyone had a fridge and many had cars and laptop computers. The poor were claiming social support and had (albeit limited) access to health and education.

We should not denigrate Lula's achievements here, undoubtedly fought hard for amid a disturbing authoritarian legacy. But we must also be alert to a bigger picture. The reductions in poverty experienced during Brazil's “left neoliberal” era—as it is often called—were based on increased agro and mineral commodity exports, principally to China, as well as to amplified production and consumption within thousands of rapidly growing cities. Nationally, land degradation and biodiversity continued, while across urban areas obesity, diabetes, pollution, and depressing traffic gridlocks advanced.

In Nova Friburgo, the workers occupying the steepest slopes and the river margins worked in metals factories, in service industries, and in their own homes within freelance confecções, making clothing and selling it to middlemen serving the consumer buying frenzy. As the urban capitalist machine advanced, the city increased in size both before and after the 2011 tragedy. The risk professor's statement that “we must respond” was amply put into practice through huge investments in securing collapsed hillside slopes and extending river widening and canalization. New housing developments serving industrial growth were simultaneously approved and the unstable housing already occupying half the city still remained. Like other urban areas, the illegal drugs market increased with city size, fueling drugs gangs' manipulations of the underprivileged, and widespread distrust, insecurity, and heavy-duty reinforcement of household fences, grills, and meshes.

Left neoliberalism's reductions in inequality had, of course, been based on reducing mass poverty via consumption, rather than making any dent on the vast wealth and privilege of Brazil's super rich. Indeed, through that lens we can understand how the PT remained in power for so long, as while they had won at the ballot box they also needed to compensate conservative forces at all levels of government. The country's old authoritarian and landowning monopoly was rocked and recalibrated by the PT's rise, but they took their vengeance well in 2016 to topple, at least for the time being, any semblance of mass emancipation.

Since political and economic crisis hit hard in 2015, the margins of Nova Friburgo have suffered the struggle of livelihood in a broken economy of wavering urban consumption, as well as the struggle of life in a space made vulnerable to onslaughts of rain and mud. The effort to make “eventful” the ongoing vulnerability of those living in dangerous locations—as well as the unstable urban ecologies of those very same spaces—contrasts so strongly to the gaze of the powerful on the eventfulness of nature, coming from the skies to wreak havoc “indiscriminately.” Of course, “there is nothing you can do,” as our expert made clear.

The remarkable thing about blaming climate change for current and future exposure to hazards is the fact that it denies discussion of how urban risk and vulnerability was generated in the past. “Eventful time,” as Elizabeth Povinelli warns, is a key political signifier in the perpetuation of late liberal capitalist economies. Discourses of nature are used and abused in the ongoing socioenvironmental rearrangement of space.

All the cities plagued by landslides and floods in southeast Brazil lie within the Atlantic Forest biosphere. The hugely biodiverse forest, Brazil's second largest, once occupied over 3,000 km of South America's Atlantic coast, and extended over the Serra do Mar mountains inland up to 600 km. It's an open question concerning how much of it remains—between four and twelve percent depending on the source—but the consensus is that 500 years of commodity exports, from sugar to gold to coffee and more, eradicated the vast majority.

As I found in Nova Friburgo, part of the discrepancy in its size is due to the fact that pockets of remaining forest are interspersed with eucalyptus—disused plantations that at one time helped cushion repeated collapses in the export price of coffee. Eucalyptus trees notoriously increase landslide risk by drying out the topsoil, which slides off the rock under recurring heavy rainfall. The measurement of forest cover is always open to the question of “when is a forest a forest?” especially when species diversity is repeatedly thinned through selective logging. The largest chunks of remaining Atlantic Forest lie at high altitudes, where land is less valuable to planters and urban developers, but also where tree growth is shorter and thinner. The absence of trees is a key contributor to erosive landslides, given the forest's role in anchoring soil and acting as a physical buffer to descending mud and rocks, as well as via canopy interception of rainfall before it hits the ground.

Nova Friburgo, alongside many other cities, grew amid a boom in coffee production and slavery. The “green gold” led to the loss of around a third of the forest's area, according to best estimates, and was until emancipation in 1888 worked largely by enslaved Afro-Brazilians. Colonial regimes made strenuous efforts to tame and modernize the perceived-as-wild forest, which was inhabited by a dwindling but significant indigenous population—as well as, later, by escaped slaves and the small settlements of illegal gold traders refusing the tax regimes of the monarchy and latifúndia estates. Migration from Europe was incentivized by a Brazilian regime keen to bring more “civilized” populations to work its vast territory, and new colonies were laid out across the Serra do Mar, regardless of the ecological risks they would generate.

The three cities where the 2011 disaster took place were initiated in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and grew through repeated waves of international migration. Regionally, local migration surged due to slave emancipation, repeat coffee crises, and then urban industrialization. Located at an altitude within narrow deforested valleys, the cities suffered endemic flooding from the outset. Visiting engineers were keen to prove that nature could be overcome by sheer brute human force, and unleashed ever more sophisticated versions of river management to reroute troublesome tributaries and to force more human habitation onto the floodplains.

The problem, however, was twofold. Engineering made the floods less frequent but more severe, as heavier storms overwhelmed the infrastructures upon which more settlement had been secured. But secondly, through the twentieth century the influx of rural migrants into hill- and river-side subdivisions and favelas diluted the European ideal cultivated so strongly by power holders, and in turn provided the justification for widespread evictions. Under a series of nationalist dictators obsessed with rapid modernization between 1930 and 1985, urbanization grew inordinately as industrialization took hold and the downtown poor were removed and shifted to the periphery. Living on the hillsides was dangerous enough, but the expansion of cattle ranching on the slopes above degraded deforested land further and exposed the housing below to even greater risk. Erosion across the Atlantic Forest biome was becoming catastrophic by the early twentieth century—gullying, increased water run-off, and slope collapse was commonplace in rural areas—but industrialization brought this risk into the heart of the new national urban project.

In Nova Friburgo alone some 25 serious landslide and flood events were recorded between 1979 and the 2011 disaster, with numerous fatalities. One informant witnessed fatal landslips that killed neighbors in both 2007 and 2011. She had settled on the higher level of the slope as a child with her family in the late 1980s; the forest was cleared by an unscrupulous developer with local political connections, and migrants paid him a fee to self-build their semi-legal properties. Now working freelance at her sewing machine, which brought a basic income but little in the way of employment rights and security, she told me: “what to do when it rains? Get out and run! Except there's nowhere to run to.” Higher up the hillside there was landslide risk; downward there was flooding and no way out.

Flood and landslide disaster in Nova Friburgo and far beyond was a dual creation of degraded soil and uneven urban occupation—and both were governed by a need at the heart of the state to extend capitalist urbanization and cultural modernization in tandem. Climate change may exacerbate risk in these locations, but to begin with climate as both the cause and the object for action appears a convenient manipulation of eventful time: an assertion of power over truth.

After 2011, billions of dollars were amassed from ample federal and state coffers still enjoying the commodity boom, alongside World Bank guidance. It was all destined for the heavy engineering of under-threat urban environments, as well as sophisticated monitoring of rainfall by satellite and, in larger cities, urban control centers complete with an array of experts scrutinizing external threats of nature alongside immobile traffic and incidence of crime. How dare these externalities upset the global project of capital accumulation via the urbanization of space! Anemic alarm systems were sprinkled across the most at-risk, and generally marginal, neighborhoods, warning residents to dispossess their properties and head for scrappy shelters under torrential skies. Needless to say, many I spoke to preferred to risk life in their own home rather than vacate, drenched, and face destitution in case of a landslide.

Federal and state cash destined for hillside and river containment descended into construction contractors' bank accounts. The companies ranged from favored conglomerates, including two under investigation as a part of the now infamous “car wash” enquiry into corruption at the heart of the Brazilian state, down to smaller local building enterprises that took on new staff and equipment in order to carry out state engineers' and local politicians' demands. As an engineer at a large containment project in Nova Friburgo's central valley told me under lowered voice: “This type of disaster doesn't alter politics […] but creates a way of making the most of a situation. […] I don't know the details. […] The company can say that [the work] will cost ten million and the state tells them, ‘I want it to cost thirty million.’”

A local resident, threatened with eviction close to the river, followed: “I don't know if it's the municipality or the state, but it's about overestimating. [The bidding companies] are all friends and they share public contracts around. It's a type of mafia.”

Of course, the problem at the heart of hillside containment in Nova Friburgo was that it would be impossible to contain the whole city—especially as urbanization continued at its fringes, helped along by developers with friends and family in municipal government. So instead, these new expensive infrastructures were justified in specific locations directly related to high-level lobbying. In one case, hillside containment was paid for to stabilize the hilltop property of an important businessman and ex-politician. He had extended his estate with a swimming pool just a couple of years before the 2011 tragedy, and it was at exactly that spot that the landslide initiated, which descended and killed the residents of the houses on the slope below. This was, in fact, far from the exception: in numerous cases containment walls were built to guarantee the elite capital of deeply dubious real estate, while poorer groups were pushed out to the fringes, much as they had been through history.

And the history itself, as I have outlined, taught that engineering these urban environments to be risk free could at best be viewed as delaying disaster rather than controlling it. While the experts rewarded themselves via experimentation with nature in the margins, the state could be seen by the public as actually doing something. Urban floods and landslides had never stopped but had moreover become more severe. An elderly resident threatened with eviction from the riverside to make way for river canal widening was incredulous, and explained to me that, “it seems these people don't even have a brain!” He did not deny that his house was at risk of flood, but moreover remembered the interventions of the 1940s and 1970s that had systematically rerouted and canalized the river in order to accommodate industry on the flood plain. Instead of his house being too close to the river, the river had been moved too close to his house! But this historical knowledge fell on ears reluctant to deal with the past.

The infrastructures of urban nature, rather than reducing risk, were above all state experiments in embedding capitalist urbanization at any cost. Corruption, far from simply a phenomenon blighting the state, was, in fact, a part of capitalism's essence as “a massive racket in nature,” as Neil Smith rightly observed. The granting of eventfulness to externalized nature mobilized the politically marginalizing urban machine to press onward. The non-event of everyday life, engineered across marginal space, was left to seek rights and citizenship within narrowly defined parameters: a sociospatial and temporal vulnerability that would, of course, reproduce the next disaster event when heavy rain fell.

An optimistic yet critical book that came out the same year as the tragedy in Nova Friburgo claimed that climate change represents a “chance-reclaim self, society and nature” from the crisis of capitalism. The authors bravely envisaged a future in which the climate crisis could reveal and reintegrate human connectivity with the environment, such as that capitalism's externalization of nature could be reformed. It was just a “chance”, of course, and undoubtedly considered a much longer time frame than these seven years since its publication. It was an admirable call, yet on the evidence of urbanization in Brazil the perception of external “climate risk” has become a monumental motivation for entrenching the growth of urban space-as-capital, with little social learning on the historical formation of vulnerability and hazard. The eventful time of a nature deemed “outside” marches onward.

Climate finance is mooted as the solution to the globally uneven present and future impacts of extreme weather, but it says nothing about the discourses of nature, modernity, and development that have long directed where, and on who, money is spent. Should climate finance be targeted at the protection of urban elites and the removal of the marginalized? Should it be pushed toward closed-door deals between political opportunists and construction multinationals? The imagery of an urban world that must be extended and managed—through activating “sustainability” or “resilience”—remains present at all costs.

In austerity Brazil, where markets have contracted alongside social and civil defense protections, life in the margins goes on and awaits the next event. For the seamstress informant at the top of a hillside settlement in Nova Friburgo: “There will be more tragedies, for sure, due to the deforestation. […] I think [tree] planting would be good, and also education and health. Education is the principal thing. I don't think we need containment walls.”

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Robert Coates

Robert Coates is Lecturer in the Sociology of Development and Change (SDC) group at Wageningen University, Netherlands. E-mail: [email protected].