by Jess Polebaum
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| Morro da Providência - Flickr/CatComm |
As Rio de Janeiro prepares for the international sporting events it will host in 2014 and 2016, the city’s most vulnerable citizens face an abiding uncertainty: will their homes survive the city’s development plans?
Evictions across the city
Two
major projects have the potential to leave a large wake of evictions in their
path. A multi-focal, multi-million dollar
development program initiated in 2009 and intended
to renew the city’s derelict commercial port threatens
to raze a portion of Morro da Providência, one of Brazil’s most historic
favelas. A second effort involves the construction
of a network of highways that will connect various points in the West Zone
of the city, where the Olympic Village will be located and many of the Olympic
events will take place. Rio On Watch, a
journalistic project of Catalytic
Communities, reports that more than 8,000 individuals have been evicted
from their homes since preparations for the Olympics began in 2009, with up to
10,000 more evictions expected.
The
city’s government denies wrongdoing and highlights the compensation and/or
alternative housing it provides to evicted residents, as well as the city’s
official reasoning for the evictions—namely that the homes slotted for removal
are structurally unsafe. Both local
and international
groups, however, have protested
and observed recurring patterns of
abuse in the eviction process, including lack of adequate notice of eviction,
unreasonable compensation, violent intimidation, and autocratic justification
for the orders of removal.
