Abstract
This article employs the notion of chronopolitics (Klinke 2013 [1]) to explore the place of disaster events within urban politics. A chronopolitics of disaster focuses on both governmental manipulation of the post-disaster space and the use of memory in resisting longstanding patterns of urban spatial segregation and forced removal: the creation and embodiment of alternative narratives of time and space to those mobilized by hegemonic actors. We draw here on the aftermath of calamitous landslides in favelas in Rio de Janeiro in 2010, during which 67 people died. In the wake of this traumatic event, the state moved quickly to close down political openings produced by the tragedy (Edkins 2006 [2]), focussing public attention on ‘future risk’ in order to put in place a rapid “recall” to favela displacement; a constant in Rio's politics since the early twentieth century. While changes in urban land formalisation and rights since the 1980s positioned forced displacement as an exception, we argue here that the much newer reductive vision of favelas as ‘at-risk’ places enables a return to the sovereign right to displace them. By working within a “time out of joint” (Zebrowski 2013: 213 [3]), the municipality established a dominant narration of city history that reinforces favelas as the principle problem facing urban politics, making displacement inevitable. The disaster event, then, elevates the politics of emergency response to a category of exceptionality in the post-dictatorship period, and lays the foundation for a renewed favela politics: a chronopolitics of disaster. The paper inductively expands the concept of chronopolitics, a politics of time, to analyse how calamitous events are used to normalise the exceptional, and how trauma and memory challenge narratives inspired by modern aspirations of a Rio without favelas.
Highlights
On April 8, 2010, successive mudslides and floods in the city of Rio de Janeiro killed 67 people, marking a portentous turn in municipal and state government policy that is still evident a decade later [4]
In this article we argue that this shift in the rationale of favela removal is indicative of a more widespread mode of contemporary urban governance based around anticipatory or preventative action and the promotion of ‘resilience’ in the face of disaster risk [11,12,13,14]
That favela residents themselves held on to the ‘opening’ resulting from the trauma of removal and mobilized their vulnerability to contest the dominant chronopolitics of disaster
Summary
On April 8, 2010, successive mudslides and floods in the city of Rio de Janeiro killed 67 people, marking a portentous turn in municipal and state government policy that is still evident a decade later [4]. From the late 1800s until the end of Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1985, narratives of higienizaçao (“hygienisation”) informed a wide spread policy of removal from central areas based around the ideal of a rationally ordered and “hygienic” city in the European model [5,6,7] At another level, restoring the conventional political response to the ‘favela problem’ [8] is often legitimised by the apparently benevolent purpose of—according to the municipality—“preserving favela dwellers’ lives” [9]. The final section before the conclusion focuses on the ‘flip-side’ of the chronopolitics of disaster: the importance of ‘trauma time’ for subaltern resistance that seeks to assert alternative temporalities to work towards less divisive futures
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Free) 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call
