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.