Rio de Janeiro: The Postcard and the City Behind It

Copacabana and Ipanema are beaches with international reputations that their reality does not disappoint, which is rarer than it should be. The sand is fine and pale, the waves consistent, the food and drink available at the beach kiosks unremarkable and entirely sufficient. The social life of the beaches operates at a level of visible ease that takes a day to adjust to if you have been in cities that treat public space differently, people of every social and economic background sharing the sand without obvious hierarchy, the beach functioning as the public commons that Rio’s geography made possible and its culture made inevitable.

The favelas deserve more than a paragraph and more than the view from the cable car. They are not blight or failure but communities, developing their own governance and their own economy in the absence of official infrastructure, producing the music and the culture that the rest of the world associates with Brazil while receiving rather less of the benefit of that association than is reasonable. The pacification programme that the city government conducted in the years before the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics reduced violence in some communities and displaced it to others, and the police units that entered the favelas did so with methods that the human rights organisations that monitored them did not always endorse. What the favelas got from the pacification were not always schools and clinics and clean water, though some communities received some of those things, but rather the kind of order that made them suitable for tourism, which is a different thing from the kind of order that makes them suitable for living in. I am aware this is easy to say as someone who spent two days there and left.

I needed more time. Rio is the kind of city that operates at a scale and pace that requires more than a transit stop to understand, and two days gave me the postcard and a glimpse of the city behind it, which is both more complicated and more interesting than the postcard suggests. I will go back.