SPECTACLE AND REALITY IN RIO
The hosting of sporting mega-events like an Olympic Games or a World Cup is accompanied by a fascinating process of image construction. Much like a Potemkin city built solely to deceive and flatter, this is a highly controlled makebelieve world of unproblematic success, wealth and prosperity. The false façade is propped up by the projection of a disciplined, relatively crisis-free and cohesive civic order; a positive media image counts – however skewed, biased and photoshopped – and sports federations and event sponsors push it at all costs.
But left out of these images – erased, silenced and made invisible – are the poor, the homeless and the marginalized. When documenting the construction of such a landscape of exclusion and trying to make sense of the urban impacts of mega-events, it is useful to draw on social geographer Neil Smith’s theory of the ‘revanchist city’.1
Smith described the revanchist city as a dual city of wealth and poverty, where the victors were increasingly defensive of their privilege, and increasingly vicious in defending it. Basing his critique on the disintegration of liberal
