City Research Online

Abstract

Sport Mega-Events (SMEs) have been widely used as opportunities to promote and (re)brand host cities to domestic and international audiences. Perhaps unsurprisingly, therefore, marginalized or stigmatized urban places do not feature heavily in urban representations during SME opening ceremonies despite the complex relationship between SMEs, redevelopment and urban marginality. However, the 2016 Olympic Games in Rio de Janeiro marked a departure from this trend. While the Brazilian Olympic Committee (BOC) aimed to present the city as vibrant, colorful and safe, they also incorporated marginalized urban spaces–the city’s favelas–into event-related promotions. We introduce the concept of deactivation to analyze the representations of favelas during the Rio 2016 Opening Ceremony. We suggest that the complexity of urban marginality and territorial stigmatization is erased through cultural representations that foreground empowerment and challenges to socio-spatial stigmas. In doing so, the favela is (re)imagined as a romanticized spectacle for external consumption that works to make them legible for capital accumulation, pacification, and the displacement of their inhabitants.

Publication Type:	Article
Additional Information:	© 2025 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. The terms on which this article has been published allow the posting of the Accepted Manuscript in a repository by the author(s) or with their consent.
Publisher Keywords:	Mega-events, favela, slum, Rio de Janeiro, territorial stigma, urban politics
Subjects:	H Social Sciences > H Social Sciences (General) J Political Science > JA Political science (General)
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs School of Policy & Global Affairs > Department of Sociology & Criminology
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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