Abstract
AbstractThis article explores the political quality of relations between residents and urban materiality. Against a background of mass protests against transit fare increases in major Brazilian cities, and the violent infrastructural transformations of post‐Olympic Rio de Janeiro, I show how the four‐year suspension of a central city tramline has led to the emergence of new forms of urban collectivity. My case study concentrates on the tramway’s function as “free riding” device, which allows residents to jump on and off the footboard without having to pay for the journey. I draw on filmed accounts of footboard‐riding to examine how embodied relations to urban matter have induced claims for alternative ways of organizing public transport and access to the city. By combining approaches to assemblage, micropolitics and affect, I argue that residents’ attachments to the tramway and its latest technological changes generate ambiguous political mobilizations, ranging from revolutionary to reactionary.
Highlights
The “Olympic Games of Santa Teresa” were celebrated in May 2015 in a central hilltop neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro
The oldest electric tramway of South America, in Rio de Janeiro, has both enabled and limited the formation of a political collectivity that relies on elastic affective bonds, ambiguous political demands, and strong attachments between residents and specific instances of infrastructural matter
The division of the city into southern and central areas and northern and western peripheries and the related exclusion of favela-residents from the rich parts of the city are entwined with the politics of new and old railway projects
Summary
The “Olympic Games of Santa Teresa” were celebrated in May 2015 in a central hilltop neighborhood of Rio de Janeiro. This article relates to ongoing debates in urban anthropology and mobility studies in order to argue that an explanatory framework for the tramway-protests in Rio de Janeiro that draws from the structural context of unequal access to public transport needs to be complemented by a consideration of infrastructural elements as “political matter.” The particular relations between residents and urban materiality in Santa Teresa neighborhood, I will show, have induced new forms of political collectivity and claims for alternative ways of organizing access to the city.
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