Peripheral creativity: temporary cultural uses as alternatives to inefficient policies?

ABSTRACT

The article focuses on temporary and improvised cultural spaces in marginalized neighbourhoods of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. They are presented here as alternatives to current urban and cultural policies, often based on international ‘best practices’ models with exclusionary and segregating consequences. It begins with a brief overview into North American and Western European cultural planning policies. It then analyses the instability of cultural policies in Brazil, highlighting that, after a period of State recognition of bottom-up actions, administrators have turned to a contradictory planning scheme that mixes outdated and recent international trends, leading lower-income inhabitants to self-build their own cultural spaces. Unlike many products of today’s global strand of ‘tactic urbanism’, Rio’s temporary spaces are politically charged territories of resistance. An example is ‘Cine Taquara’ – an improvised cinema and debate forum that illustrates how, in an unequal city, such initiatives can do more towards social inclusion than ready-made models.     

Urbanization,ruination, and refusal: racialized geographies in 1920s Rio de Janeiro

This article focuses on a community located in downtown Rio de Janeiro that was destroyed to make way for the commemorations of Brazil’s Centenary of Independence in 1922. Morro do Castelo was once a space customarily inhabited by Afro-descendants, but Italian and Portuguese immigrants predominated there by the time of its destruction. I argue that whatever Castelo’s racial heterogeneity it was imagined and treated as a black space by planners and policy makers, hence its disposability. In Castelo's neglect during the colonial period and in the urbanization projects that sought to destroy it in the first two decades of the 20th century, one can discern the continuity of imperial processes of ruination of racialized spaces and bodies. The article examines ways in which residents of Morro do Castelo established territory and engaged in various forms of refusal when faced with the ruination of their neighborhood. The spatial practices of the hillside’s diverse population suggest that its various racialized and ethnic groups mapped difference onto a palimpsestic site that defied official classificatory systems and troubled official mappings of the concept city.     

Mapping the Contours of Race: Griffith Taylor's Zones and Strata Theory

This article explores the ways in which cartography served as a tool to reinforce racial divisions in the context of late nineteenth and early twentieth century race science. Racial and anthropometric mapping was an endeavour in which both European and new world anthropologists and geographers were involved. The focus here is on the work of Thomas Griffith Taylor – regarded as one of the founders of modern geography in Australia – who deployed a number of cartographic techniques to reinforce his racial theorisations. This article explores Taylor's ‘zones and strata’ portrayal of racial evolution, and other geological‐ style maps of racial difference. These representations are investigated from two standpoints. Firstly, Taylor's theories are situated within the wider context of the Victorian tradition of classifying race, a tradition where physical race type was often correlated with moral and intellectual traits, and which was supported by the acceptance of environmental determinism within geographical circles. Secondly, his maps are considered from the perspective that, as J.B. Harley has argued, maps are social texts that contain power and, as such, can be deconstructed. Taylor's cartographic representations resulted from the manipulation of the internal elements of the map text, such as shading and projection, and were supported by the widely held belief that human racial groups could be delineated through physical anthropometry.     

Woman,Body, Space: Rio Carnival and the politics of performance

The practices and aesthetics of carnival are hotly debated in Brazilian society, as it is taken to be the expression of 'the essence of Brazilianness'. In this paper, an attempt is made to understand the Rio de Janeiro carnival in ways which are not only sensitive to its maps of power and meaning, but also able to explore the subtle ways in which value hierarchies are displaced. To this end, we suggest that cultural categories 'constitute' what they appear to 'describe'. In this way, the mobilisation of categories of 'woman' make women's bodies seemingly both material and intelligible, while foreclosing on the instability of that category. This paper shows that Rio Carnival is a site not only where categories of high and low value are presented and sometimes inverted, but also where the sight of the female body is both made to bear the full weight of contradictory and unstable cultural values, and to disguise and deny those tensions and instabilities. Yet, the performance of 'woman' in Rio Carnival constantly unfolds through power, knowledge and social equivocation about what 'woman' is- or might be. From here, we argue that the performers are not merely dupes to this system of meaning and power, nor do they merely convey cultural norms through their bodies, but are actively performing and masquerading femininity, and this actually renders femininity indeterminate and unknowable, opening up the possibility that the performance can act as a site of resistance .     

Armed peace: Militarization of Rio de Janeiro's favelas for the World Cup (Respond to this article at http://www.therai.org.uk/at/debate)

Rio de Janeiro city's policy of Pacifying Police Units (UPP) for strategically located favelas is part of the state's reconfiguration of the city, involving military occupations, evictions and gentrification in the lead‐up to the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. Yet since the author arrived in Rio to carry out doctoral research on young people's experiences with the UPP, the flaws in the project have become increasingly exposed as the policy appears to be experiencing a crisis. This paper describes this current crisis in the global context of mega‐events and the elitization of urban space.     

Fishing Livelihoods,Seashore Tourism,and Industrial Development in Coastal Rio de Janeiro: Conflict,Multi‐Functionality,and Juxtaposition

Critical global political ecology and critical cultural political economy approaches are used in a study involving decades of research to evaluate the changing relationship between fisher livelihoods, seashore tourism, and urban industrial development in an economically dynamic region of coastal Brazil. As the metropolitan area of Rio de Janeiro expanded and encompassed fishing communities, socio‐environmental transformations created threats to fisher ways of life, opened new multi‐functional opportunities, and also introduced unrelated juxtaposed activities. As stocks fell due to overfishing and urban industrial pollution over the last two decades, small‐scale inshore fishing declined in the bay–lagoon systems located to the east and south‐west of Rio de Janeiro. Tourism increased but proved to be a poor substitute for declining fishing activities because it and other new multi‐functional activities rarely aggregated significant value to local livelihoods. Consequently, only a small minority of fishers benefited and remained on the islands and sand spits, while the great majority left for the mainland. New cultural and environmental functions were also absent, so that of the types of multi‐functionality identified by Wilson and Holmes, those present in the study area are weak and basically serve outside urban production and consumption interests.     

地图学史视角下的古地图错讹问题

文章从地图学史的视角,结合历史地理学的最新理论进展,讨论了对古地图上错讹地理信息的合理认知和处理方法。古地图中的地理信息来源芜杂,兼有实际和想象的内容;且其表现形式多样,兼具实用和装饰目的。因此,古地图上的错讹必须以丰富的地图学史知识为基础,将其置于当时、当地的情境中去理解。文章以19世纪初以前中外古地图中对西沙群岛(帕拉塞尔)的表现为例,分析了错讹出现、维持以及最后消失的原因。作者认为,"古Pracel"的提法不符合地图学史,系对古地图地理信息的误读。     

The shape of the nation: Visual production of nationalism through maps in Turkey

Nationalism, as a political discourse requiring a fundamental connection to a particular territory has constantly referred to maps as evidence of the eternal existence of the respective nation. In the case of modern Turkey, the national map has been a symptomatic signifier of a constant anxiety of territorial loss. Built around such anxiety, Turkish nationalism has been sensitive towards the borders defining national territory. This article analyzes the use of national maps as instruments for the cultural production of nationalism in Turkey throughout the last three decades. In the process, it is intended to differentiate between official maps produced under state authority and popular maps circulated in mass media.Throughout the 1980s, national maps included in school textbooks presented a country surrounded by hostile neighbors on all sides, in tune with the political climate of the Cold War. A crucial aspect of these official maps was the cartographic awareness they generated which, in the following decade, would become operational in the widespread use of the map as a nationalist sign. With the emergence of the Kurdish question in the 1990s, the national map became a key instrument in promoting nationalist sentiments with the invention of the flag-map logo as a favorite symbol. After the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, the Kurdish issue was projected on to Northern Iraq, and a new mode of cartographic representation was invented. “Appropriated maps” produced through the digital retouching of random maps found on the Internet visualized irredentist desires enlarging the country’s territory especially into Northern Iraq and invoking the Ottoman past. These maps, which consciously distorted geographical information, turned to historical references to sustain their cartographic validity.     

Insularity, Sovereignty and Statehood: The Representation of Islands on Portolan Charts and The Construction of The Territorial State

This article investigates the cartographic origins of the idea that the territorial state is a unified, bounded, homogeneous and naturally occurring entity, in a world of equivalent but unique entities. It is noted that this image of the territorial state closely resembles the representation of islands on sixteenth‐century portolan charts, and this suggests a historical link between the Renaissance‐era imagination of islands and the modern imagination of states. The article posits that the concept of territorial unity and boundedness, which appeared on portolan charts to signify islands as obstacles amidst maritime routes of movement, migrated in the late sixteenth‐century to form the basis for representing the emergent concept of the territorial state. It is suggested that the conceptual and aesthetic links between these representations of islands and states has led to an ongoing dilemma for those who seek to comprehend (or cartographically represent) islands that are divided between multiple states.     

LA COMMISSION INTERNATIONALE DE GÉOMORPHOLOGIE PÉRIGLACIAIRE ET LE CANADA

ABSTRACT. The I.G.U. Commission on Periglacial Morphology was set up in 1949 and Us first report was presented to the 11th Congress in Washington in 1952. Between 1952 and 1956, the Commission published a select bibliography on periglacial phenomena and a few national maps were produced. A short study on Canadian periglacial morphology appears in the general report to the 16th Congress in Rio de Janeiro in 1956. From that date Canada has been represented on the Commission, which has met in Spain and Poland. During 1959, a national map of Canadian periglacial phenomena will be prepared for presentation at the 19th Congress in Stockholm in 1960.     

Economic Geography at the 1960 International Geographical Congress

The author compares the scope of economic-geography papers at the Rio de Janeiro and Stockholm congresses, discusses William William-Olsson's book on Stockholm, and analyzes a number of congress papers with an economic-geographic content.     

Street music,governance, and cultural policy in San Cristóbal de Las Casas

ABSTRACT

This article takes an ethnographic perspective to explore the changing ways in which the municipal government of San Cristóbal de Las Casas, a city in southern Mexico whose economy is highly dependent on tourism, has regulated street musicians over the last five years. It focuses on permits given to street musicians which served to exert spatial and temporal control over street performance, while giving musicians no substantial rights in practice. Engaging the so-called ‘anarchist turn’ in anthropology, it shows that this policy instrument effectively sidelined non-monetary forms of exchange between musicians and their various publics, and privileged the commercial interests of restaurants and bars. Further, in practice, it pushed some street musicians onto the margins of the city’s economic life, where their performances were often more, rather than less, disruptive. Nonetheless, this situation altered significantly in the wake of social unrest in Summer 2016, which caused a precipitous drop in tourism to the city. The municipal government’s response to the ensuing economic crisis signified a belated recognition of the economic value of street musicianship.     

The embodied state: governmentality in a Brazilian favela

Given that the influence of the state apparatus tends to vary across space, it has been frequently presumed that the state develops a stronger presence in wealthier neighborhoods (where levels of capital accumulation are higher) than it does in poorer ones. In Brazilian favelas (urban slums), as a prominent example, ethnographic accounts have previously suggested that the presence of the ‘official’ state is limited and on the decline. Based on the results of intensive fieldwork in Fortaleza, Brazil, this paper complicates that argument, positing that the state, through the effects of governmentality, may actually have a much stronger presence in favelas than has often been presumed. Drawing upon case research with favela residents, and interpreting through a Foucaultian perspective, this paper explains the increasing presence of the state through the governmentality produced in urban space. By recognizing how the state manifests both in and through bodies and space, researchers are provided better traction for understanding proliferating urban slums and explaining the political landscapes they engender.     

Contribution of Local Agenda 21 to Practical Implementation of Sustainable Development: The Case of the Czech Republic

Local Agenda 21 (LA21), a voluntary tool for implementing sustainable development (SD) in local level, is one way of implementing sustainability principles in practice. Twenty years after the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development Conference in Rio de Janeiro, which made the first reference of LA21 (intended as a framework for the twenty-first century respecting SD principles), this article deals with evaluating the real contribution of this initiative to the implementation of SD in practice on the example of selected municipalities in the Czech Republic. This contribution is examined by a comparative analysis of the indices of change in selected indicators (three to four indicators for each pillar of SD) for municipalities involved in the LA21 initiative in comparison with reference municipalities, which have not been involved in LA21 so far. The analysis results indicate that different trends in some of the indicators can be observed in municipalities implementing LA21 and in the others. This applies, in particular, to the environmental indicators (such as the degree of waste separation, indicating in part the degree of environmental awareness), but also to some of the economic ones (municipal capital expenditures indicating investment activity).     

Illustrating spatial policies in Europe

The visualisation of spatial policy options through maps and other cartographic illustrations can be very powerful both in the planning process and in communicating the key messages of planning strategies. However, experience from the ‘European Spatial Development Perspective’ (ESDP) shows that visualisation can also be the most difficult aspect in transnational spatial planning processes. This paper explores the potential role of policy maps in communicating spatial policy, and the progress made so far in visualising spatial policies in European spatial planning. It suggests possible reasons for the difficulties on reaching agreement on the form and content of planning policy maps at EU and transnational levels. The paper goes on to discuss theories that might assist in improving performance in the use of cartographic visualisations in European spatial planning. The article concludes by highlighting the need for further research on the communicative potential of cartographic visualisations in European spatial planning.     

The Egyptian “book of the two ways”

Abstract

Science and cartography have had an intimate history which has not been simply the creation of ever more accurate scientific maps but one in which science, cartography and the state have co‐produced the knowledge space that provides the conditions for the possibility of modern science and cartography. The central cartographic process is the assemblage of local knowledges and, as such, is a particular form of the assembly processes fundamental to science. The first attempts by the state to create a space within which to assemble cartographic knowledge were at the Casa da Mina and the Casa de la Contratación, and hence they can be described as the first scientific institutions in Europe. Their failure to create a knowledge space can be attributed to the nature of the portolan charts. The triangulation of France and the linking of the Greenwich and Paris Observatories established the kind of knowledge space that now constitutes the dominant form within which modem science and cartography are produced. However, resistance to the hegemony of modern scientific knowledge space remains possible through finding alternative ways of assembling local knowledge.     

Mapping the Nation for War: Landscape in Danish Military Cartography 1800–2000

The focus in this article is on the way the post eighteenth-century cartographic turn in military practices developed into a particular military perception of landscape that continues to set the standard of Danish topographical mapping. My argument is that the development of modern topographical maps is the result of a long process of military comprehension and measurement of the terrain in order to conduct field operations. The demand for spatial data for actual or potential military operations had a direct impact on the specifications of maps produced by the military, as landscape representation was adapted to meet operational demands and as lessons learned from war experience were incorporated. In this and other respects, the development of Danish topographical maps in and after the nineteenth century followed the general trend of European military mapping as regards methods and standards.     

Applying the Strategic‐Relational Approach to Urban Political Ecology: The Water Management Problems of the Baixada Fluminense,Rio de Janeiro,Brazil

Abstract: The complexity of water management requires an explanatory framework that is able to capture the multidimensionality of the relations between nature and society increasingly mediated by the state. The evolution of water problems in the Baixada Fluminense, a wetland area situated to the north of Rio de Janeiro, provides a paradigmatic example of how water management becomes incorporated into the fluid politics between state, nature and society. The local experience is examined by making use of the strategic‐relational approach (after Bob Jessop) expanded to urban political ecology. The concept of “trialectics” is proposed as an ontological representation of the interconnections between the state apparatus, class‐based relations and the socionatural elements of the water cycle. The empirical results show that, in a situation of precarious water supply, regular flooding and severe river degradation, state interventions have tended to favour certain groups and areas, which only intensifies the politicisation of water management.     

Debating Womanhood,Defining Freedom: The Abolition of Slavery in 1880s Rio de Janeiro

This article demonstrates how both the agency of women of colour and a particular set of ideas about femininity and maternity played an important part in shaping the ending of slavery in the city of Rio de Janeiro. It does so through the prism of untapped municipal documentation, exploring initiatives taken by the city council both to abolish slavery by emancipating mainly women and to shape the city's first generation of fully free working families by founding schools and charitable institutions. In enacting these measures, councillors found themselves debating not only the meanings of freedom, but the meanings of ex‐slave womanhood. Their discussions reflected both the long‐term development of ‘free womb logic’ in Brazilian slavery and emancipation, and tendencies by the 1880s abolitionist movement to make emotive, ‘feminised’ appeals for elite women to sympathise with enslaved mothers. The article explores how women of colour used elite discourses about freedom, maternity and womanhood in order to achieve freedom, but also contested and reshaped them as they sought to bring their own lived meanings to freedom.