Model favela: Youth and second nature in Rio de Janeiro
Item
-
Title
-
Model favela: Youth and second nature in Rio de Janeiro
-
Identifier
-
d_2009_2013:afff7b2a1342:12038
-
identifier
-
12728
-
Creator
-
Angelini, Alessandro Massimo,
-
Contributor
-
David Harvey
-
Date
-
2013
-
Language
-
English
-
Publisher
-
City University of New York.
-
Subject
-
Cultural anthropology | Latin American studies | Brazil | favelas | imagination | play | urban | youth
-
Abstract
-
This ethnographic study of the conflicting social lives of representations of the city centers around the creators of a 4,000-square-foot three-dimensional mockup of Rio constructed with painted bricks, mortar, and detritus. For over fifteen years, teenage boys have enacted a role-playing game within this miniature urban world known as Morrinho, or "Little Hill," on the forested edge of their hillside squatter settlement, or favela. By manipulating and ventriloquizing thousands of inch-tall figurines representing residents, drug lords, police, DJs, politicians, prostitutes---a panoply of social figures---they produce a subversive and ludic perspective on urban reality. The game occupies the same physical ground as competing models: since Morrinho's inception, Rio's elite military police battalion have used the community that gave rise to Morrinho as a "live" training ground, and the municipal urban development agencies have implemented a patchwork of engineering projects and social programs aimed at incorporating this favela into formal property markets. These state initiatives hinge on rendering space and people legible to modes of rule through the use of maps, statistics, and tactical knowledge. Amid these changes in infrastructure and security, Morrinho has become valorized as an alternative form of knowing the city. Its creators have traveled internationally as artists, building replicas of their model in collaboration with youth in new urban contexts. Participants define Morrinho as a space of autonomous reflection on the city, and the mimetic relationship of their form of play to systems of power and the production of space does not reproduce these processes as a copy, but rather stages it on its own terms. This dissertation thus argues that maps, models, and narratives do not simply describe an external reality but actively participate in remaking the spaces of the city.
-
Type
-
dissertation
-
Source
-
2009_2013.csv
-
degree
-
Ph.D.
-
Program
-
Anthropology
