The image of Rio de Janeiro in Império and República Velha and the new image post-major sporting events: Porto Maravilha, literature and tourism.

Abstract

This paper addresses the city of Rio de Janeiro and, more specifically, its port area in two distinct moments – the first one between the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century and the second one, more recently, related to the Porto Maravilha project, developed in the context of the two major sporting events which took place in Brazil, the 2014 FIFA World Cup and the 2016 Olympic Games. The aim of this study is to analyse the process of refunctionalization attributed to the port area of the city, through a theoretical-methodological contribution based on the literature of João do Rio, a portraitist author of social life in the early 20th century, and Lima Barreto, a strong social critic. Both authors have allowed us, in the dialogue with contemporary authors such as Henri Lefebvre and Milton Santos, to reflect on the reproduction of the social relations of production in the urban space of the city and to understand how tourism engages with these processes, the attribution of new symbolic charges to places, especially if new landscapes are given new values and uses, with the consequent transformation of these into tourism products. During this trajectory, the literature provides the necessary subsidies to this understanding.