ABSTRACT
We examine the impact of fantasies used in the redevelopment of sport mega-event cities on host communities; particularly as related to the male-dominated FIFA World Cup and forced prostitution. We start with a discussion of event fantasies, particularly those that circulate in relation to humanitarian aid and the alleged involvement of women and children in forced labour and sexual exploitation. We trace these fantasies across several FIFA host cities since the 2006 FIFA World Cup, hosted in Germany, to leverage continual and perpetuate attention (and profit) through the non-profit industrial complex. These fantasies have facilitated and coordinated collaborative consensus amongst state authorities and allies to act in a meaningful manner even as the evidence of forced prostitution is still scant-while the realities of people that continue to be subjected to violent and exploitative labour in the construction of stadia, athlete recruitment, or equipment and apparel industries are seldom addressed. We do this to question the lived impact of policies and personalities of rescue on people engaged, consensually, in erotic labour within host cities, that are often made target of rescue intervention. The figure of the proverbial sex slave, as a highly racialized and hypersexualized trope, is mobilized through the sport mega-event to further police the bodies of all women in labour and migration. We end with a cautious message to future host cities, particularly cities implicated in the 2026 FIFA World Cup within Mexico, Canada, and the United States, of the highly-profitable and politically-advantageous rhetoric of damsel in distress.
ABSTRACT
This paper examines the relationship between sport mega-event construction and the financialization of housing in Rio de Janeiro. It focuses on the area of Porto Maravilha, constructed prior to the 2016 Olympic Games, and the particular use of the 2001 federal Statute of City and 1995 Strategic Plan for Rio de Janeiro to create new possibilities for neoliberal-capitalist expansion, initially disguised as democratized access to land yet, in effect, further commoditized land into a form of fictitious capital. To do so, we follow the work of Brazilian architect and author, Raquel Rolnik, and her argument that the legal-institutional emphasis on wealth distribution in urban legislation, propagated at the time of the internationally recognized sport mega-event in Brazil, was not adequately harnessed and instead used to endorse real estate speculation and uneven development in the metropolitan area. The coordination and collaboration between state and nonstate entities in mega-event construction is typically associated with deepened socio-spatial inequities, the privatization of public resource material, and the in/direct displacement of low-income communities. We review pertinent literature to better understand the role of sport mega-event fantasies in the construction of Porto Maravilha-which we come to understand as a speculative logic lubricant for finance. We do this to call attention to future studies to be particularly attuned to financialization in mega-event cities.
