Estados, modelos urbanos e a dualidade social brasileira : rumos do desenvolvimento urbano da cidade do Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to discuss how the adoption of urban models, utilized as a State strategy to deal with the crisis of capital accumulation, shapes urban space and exacerbates the process of precariousness in capitalist cities. The efforts of this work focus on understanding the current moment of capitalist society after reching its internal logical limit of accumulation and on analysing the city of Rio de Janeiro, its urban evolution to the present day, demonstrating Brazilian social formation and the modernization project in pursuit of the country’s full development. Considering that the city’s urbanization process is tied to the formation of a typically Brazilian peripheral sociability, the civilizing project imposed by capitalist modernity inherently produces socio-spacial inequality. We examine, in particular, the dissemination of the urban model of Urban Strategic Planning and the impact that multilateral agencies, ideologically aligned with global capitalist hegemony, have on the production of urban space in peripheral countries. As a result of the readjustment of the role of the modern State by the advance of neoliberalism, the adoption of this liberal model as a substitute for the modernist model has become a requirement to ensure the urban (mainly economic) development of a country – while prioritizing the local scale, that is, the city management, now inserted in the competitive global market of cities. The intensification of the process of generalization of the periphery in the world, associated with the process of dissolution of social ties can be seen in the case of the Porto Maravilha Project, located in the port area of the city of Rio de Janeiro. A product of the city’s Strategic Plan, this specific intervention project acts in accordance with the process of urban fragmentation and the polarization of precariousness and prosperity, which we understand as Brazilian social duality. Thus, urban development proposals in cities such as Rio de Janeiro only reaffirm the logical of capital, whose inherent contradiction produces increasingly socially unequal and spatially segregated spaces.