Image: General rehearsal of Opening Ceremony of the 2016 Olympic Games, Maracanã, Rio de Janeiro

Valued Difference. Cultural diversification and social hierarchies in Rio de Janeiro

Based upon the experiences and views of urban dwellers in Rio de Janeiro, who arrived in the last 10 years from West Africa and Southern Europe, this project investigates how they relate to their new surroundings and become part of an urban population that is culturally diverse and socially stratified in complex and historically laden ways. I ask how they find a place in the city and how they see their own position relative to other urban dwellers. An important aspect is their ability to compare to the experiences made in the places they grew up in and passed through. Also, they contextualise their current experience with their imaginations and hopes for the future. I investigate this evaluation process with ethnographic methods, mainly participant observation, open-ended interviews and a mobile phone app with which my interlocutors document and share their experiences and reflections. I shift perspectives on urban socialities in a rapidly changing city in the global south by way of inquiring into the most recent migration movements.

The setting of Valued Difference


Why Rio de Janeiro? For its emblematic inequalities, more or less visible, but nevertheless cruel in its effects. Rio de Janeiro is the urban laboratory in which Valued Difference is set in order to learn about the future of urban spaces worldwide. This future is one that will have to deal with multiple differences that people always also evaluate. Differences are never neutral; they are always ordered into hierarchies.

​There are few places around the world that cause a clearer visual and sensory imagination than Rio de Janeiro, even before it was displayed to the world during the 2016 Olympic Games. On the one hand, the statue of the Christ, the sugar loaf and the favelas climbing up the emblematic hills of the city, as well as carnival and samba come readily to mind. On the other hand, the spectator is also affected by the imagery of violence, crime and inequality that are linked on a daily basis to the city and its inhabitants, even more so within Brazil. An emotional roller coaster ride seems guaranteed in the face of the cidade maravilhosa, the marvellous city, now often said cynically, but still with a good share of affection, given the current grim economic, political and social conditions of crisis. Clearly, the city and its inhabitants stimulate engagement in all kinds of ways, ranging from euphoria and longing, to fear and depression. 

​It is a common place in Rio de Janeiro that its location and urban geography make it unique, combining topographical and embodied beauty with the harsh visibility of unequal urban conditions due to the uttermost proximity of often racialised great wealth and immense poverty. With an interest in a better understanding of how recently-arrived urban dwellers find their way through multiple, intersecting and overlapping urban hierarchies, this unavoidable visibility would provide a favourable starting point, I expected. The nitty-gritty detail of the processes of distinction and differentiation turn out to be multi-layered due to the intersection of different stereotypes, prejudices and actual practice.


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Funded by the Research Foundations - Flanders (FWO) and the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant 665501 (2017-2020).