Neoliberal urbanism, corporate management and the right to the city: recent impacts and tensions in Brazilian cities

Abstract

In the context of the recent mega events in Brazil – the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games –, the urban projects that were implemented indicate the strengthening of the corporate pattern of city production, within a growing hegemony of the logic of profitability, financialization and private management of collective goods and services, enabled by huge public investments. They imprint, on space, a selectivity and exclusivity of market use and consumption, associated with the current financial globalization cycle and the neoliberal urbanism that is configured. This process brings remarkable changes in the public-private accessibility of urban space, which has generated strong tensions in the social achievement of the right to the city as a collective good in facing today’s growing socio-spatial segregation and urban exclusion.