La Producción Elitista del Espacio Urbano Carioca: de los Cortiços y Favelas al Porto Maravilha

Abstract

The city of Rio de Janeiro, as other Latin-American cities, have been experiencing the impacts of neoliberal policies exaggerated in periods of FIFA World Cup and Olympic Games: Among them, the persistent violations of the right to housing and the right to the city, especially of marginal and marginalized sectors of population. Nevertheless, the exclusionary and elitist city project was planned before, in the beginnings of the modern urban planning in Brazil. In this way, the present article pretends to analyze –from the review of previous studies– the process of social production of urban space in Rio, in order to confirm the hypothesis that the social-spatial segregation is the result of an historic process of an elitist development, that materializes on the urban reforms from beginnings of the twenty first century. The modern and contemporary urban reforms define and reinforce the characteristic informal scenario of Latin- American cities: favelas, villas miseria, barriadas and many others forms of popular habitat.