Wonder…? Or Sick…!

Rio de Janeiro is synonym of dynamism, music, bright colours, dancing,samba, gorgeous beaches crowded with happy holidaymakers. However,the Citade Maravilhosa is also well-known for its excess, the sensorial contrast governing the lives of its inhabitants: wealth and poverty, good and evil, disgust and magnificence. A city where luxury hotels and favelas live together. The essence of Rio can be summed up by the dramatic pictures of the bay from the top of the Corcovado, by the view, from a luxury room of a luxury hotel, of the “cities within the cities” inhabited by the forgotten social outcasts living around the city but at the same time at the very centre of it. The favelas witness the important social unrest that the city and its inhabitants live every day:on the one hand they are open to the world of tourism and offer the holidaymakers folkloristic glimpses, exciting Caribbean dances in colourful squares, on the other hand they are miles off the evolution process of the city itself and still live in slums, in unhealthy conditions,facing an increasing rate of crime. Will they participate in the creation of a new model of the city of the future? Will they undergo the change in a passive way? Will their presence undermine the balance of powers that has been so accurately planned? A reflection about the future is inevitable if we think of the decisions made by Rio de Janeiro:to host a series of events as the World Youth Day in 2013,the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016. The multinational corporations,the lobbies have already plunged as “bees into honey” in reshaping the future city,trying to sponsor magnificent World Cup and Olympic cards all over the world,but we wonder:are they really interested in being active party in the development of services in favour of the inhabitants of Rio or will they create a “use and throwaway” model?In our vision of the future, this is a rhetorical question with a sad answer. And other questions follow:Is it socially sustainable that the Brazilian Government have chosen to regenerate the city sending the Army into the favelas razing them to the ground to build new stadiums and facilities for the planetary events? What will happen to the poor,the nameless? Where will they go? Will they give up living in their city,excluded from this renovation process? Through this operation the rich will get richer and the poor will get even poorer. And at last the most worrying question:what kind of city will the Olympic torch extinguish over? Shouldn’t we think that all the contradictions existing today in the city will dramatically blow up when the city will be left alone after being squeezed up? Maybe when the planes will have taken the only really valuable things like the beaches or the Christ Saviour, we will have a new Nolan’s Gotham city or a city inhabited by people resembling the characters of the medieval Berserk by Miura,only struggling for survival,where not even Batman would ever dare.