Ruínas olímpicas e a destruição infraestrutural como modo de produção da cidade: uma etnografia da vida social do teleférico da Providência

Abstract

Opened during the 2014 World Cup and abandoned after the 2016 Olympics, a massive cable car built in the Providência favela, in the center of the city of Rio de Janeiro, languishes with the deterioration of its steel cables, metal towers, and three enormous stations, which would connect what is known as "the first favela" to a tourist circuit, linking to the metropolitan transportation Center, on one side, and to the Port Zone, targeted with the Porto Maravilha revitalization project, on the other. The Providência Cable Car is part of a constellation of ruins of unfinished or abandoned favela urbanization projects, where monumental mobility symbolized the integration of the favelas and also inserted them into new regimes of visibility, exploring their tourist potential and the value they could add to the urban marketing of the "Olympic City". Since 2016, however, Rio de Janeiro has been living with the various "carcasses" of Olympic urbanism mega-projects, many of which, like in Providência, were already considered abandoned before they were completed. This thesis seeks to carry out an ethnography of the trajectory of the social life of the Morro da Providência Cable Car using the approach of the anthropology of infrastructures as a conceptual and methodological instrument to understand its sociopolitical effects. Following the material and symbolic rubble generated by the urbanization plan the political rationalities that constituted the practice of Olympic urbanism are analyzed, and above all the processes of ruination that follows it, in order to understand the social, political, and economic productivity of ruins. Thus, this thesis considers ruins not as a fragility of power, but as a device that constructs and manages urban space, arguing that infrastructural destruction constitutes a mode of city production.