Introduction

How is the global diffusion of ideas concerning the culture-led ‘redevelopment’ of cities shaping the contemporary transformation of Rio de Janeiro, where there is a long history of elite-driven ‘modernisation’ efforts? What are the political, economic, social, and cultural consequences of such projects? Finally, what do they reveal about the mutual imbrication between racialised inequalities, longstanding colonial logics of erasure and dispossession, and neoliberal ideals, particularly in aspiring postcolonial (and settler-colonial) ‘global cities’?

Rio’s particular trajectory renders it an especially compelling site from which to observe these dynamics. After the uprooting (and, often, destruction) of local Indigenous societies (Bessa Freire and Malheiros 2009), and amid recurring waves of especially European immigration, Rio served as the capital of colonial Brazil (1763-1808), the Portuguese Crown (1808-1822), the independent Brazilian imperial state (1822-1889), and the Brazilian republic (1889-1960). Consequently, recurring projects to remake the city have unfolded within a socio-spatial milieu profoundly conditioned by colonial (/postcolonial) and imperial (/postimperial) realities.

Under the framework of ‘dependent urbanisation’, regional thinkers such as the late, seminal Black Brazilian geographer Milton Santos (2004) have long drawn from dependency theory to demonstrate how Latin American cities were shaped by the region’s position ‘in the international division of labor and in the structure of the world power system’ (Tonin 2022: 237). Notably, early-nineteenth century Rio featured the hemisphere’s largest urban slave population (Karasch 2019). In turn, the physical presence of slaves and their descendants, along with their cultural practices, and mixing with other populations, have consistently provoked elite apprehension (Carvalho 2013)—as well as projects seeking their suppression, removal, and separation (Leite 2020).

Drawing from and extending the sociologist Leslie Sklair’s (2017) innovative analysis of how capitalist globalisation is generating the proliferation of elite-friendly, exclusionary, and architecturally striking ‘iconic’ sites, this article examines the contemporary megaproject (known as Porto Maravilha which is usually translated as ‘Marvelous Port’Footnote 1) that seeks to refashion the long-marginalised, majority Afro-descendant neighbourhoods of Rio’s old port zone—which comprise part of an area known as ‘Little Africa’—as upscale, tourist-friendly extensions of the central business district.

I focus on the grandiosely titled and environmentally focused Museu do Amanhã (Museum of Tomorrow), pictured below, which serves as Porto Maravilha’s flashiest showpiece and is claimed to be Brazil’s most-visited museum (personal interview by author with cultural project developer and manager, Rio de Janeiro, 3 July 2019). Straddling nearly the entirety of a formerly abandoned pier that linked Guanabara Bay to the city’s once-bustling downtown-adjacent port, this massive, hovering, horizontal, and gleaming white cantilevered structure—which, in the imitable phrasing of The Guardian, ‘looks like a cross between a solar-powered dinosaur and a giant air conditioning unit’ and ‘rank[s] as one of the world’s most extraordinary buildings’—is the most spectacular addition to central Rio’s previously-derelict waterfront (Watts 2015) (Figure 1).

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Image from the Museum’s website: https://museudoamanha.org.br/pt-br/content/horário-de-funcionamento (accessed 1 December 2021). All images are reproduced as fair use

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Designed by Spanish ‘starchitect’ Santiago Calatrava, the Museum—along with the adjacent esplanade and nearby Praça Mauá (Mauá Square), onto which the front of the ‘dinosaur’s’ mouth opens—had already become, before its 2015 opening, a mandatory selfie backdrop for throngs of the same international tourists and middle-class Brazilians who long regarded this as an attraction-less, dangerous no-go area. Like its ‘extraordinary’ physical form, the Museum’s environmental focus has also resonated with audiences, including The Guardian’s above-cited global environment editor, who described the Museum as ‘a captivating invitation to imagine a sustainable world’ (Watts 2015).

Yet little has been said in non-Brazilian scholarship about this future-oriented science and technology museum’s contents (Malta 2017; Pio 2014). Though a recent article argues that the Museum contributes to the longstanding ‘epistemic erasure’ of marginalised groups and accordingly ‘reproduces colonial violence’ (Reyes-Carranza 2023: 262), existing works do not sufficiently explore the site’s reflection and generation of certain values, ideologies, and subjectivities, or the extent to which Calatrava has succeeded—per his claim—in creating a ‘new meaning’ for the port area (and of what kind, and for whom).Footnote 2 These are salient topics, given the central role that museums play in constructing the same racial, place-based, and other imaginaries and hierarchies that permeate global politics and economics (Tidy and Turner 2020), along with—in this case—shaping popular understandings of the climate crisis. Notably, a thematic area called ‘Anthropocene’ comprises the Museum’s ‘centrepiece.’Footnote 3

In other words, invoking Edward Soja’s (2011) classic formulation, there is a need within IPE for ‘socio-spatial’ analysis of the political-economic processes through which, dialectically, human agents shape and are shaped by iconic sites—particularly in oft-overlooked Global SouthFootnote 4 cases, where global city-making projects are conditioned by distinct (but related) colonial legacies, economic challenges, and elite visions and racial anxieties (Parnell and Robinson 2012; Taylor and Lublin 2021).

I argue, on the one hand, that the Museum’s conceptualisation, curation, and creation as an iconic site comprise an exercise in what is commonly labelled ‘neoliberal urbanism’ (Brenner and Schmid 2015; Peck et al. 2013), or, more specifically, ‘neoliberal place-making.’ I define the latter as a socio-spatial process through which sites are transformed (often through privatisation) to facilitate capital accumulation and engender values such as individualistic self-salvation, consumerism, commodification, depoliticisation, competition, entrepreneurialism, and the favouring of market-based approaches. This definition incorporates neoliberalism’s two principal features, as elaborated by distinct theoretical traditions: per a Marxist critique, the adoption of policies and regulatory frameworks to promote elite interests (Harvey 2007), and, from a Foucauldian perspective, the reconstitution of the individual as ‘an intensely constructed and governed bit of human capital’ (Brown 2015: 10). As delineated below, both facets are evident in the Museum and Porto Maravilha project, as well as in redevelopment schemes elsewhere (Bogaert 2018). Accordingly, the present analysis draws from understandings of neoliberalism that are often seen as conflictual but may also be complementary insofar as they illuminate separate but related dynamics (Choat 2019).

On the other hand, borrowing from the political theorist Nancy Fraser’s (2019) theorisation of ‘progressive neoliberalism’, I add nuance to conventional accounts of neoliberal urbanism by showing how the Museum—with its focus on sustainability, futurism, and empowerment of long-marginalised local residents, many of whom descend from slaves—marries a neoliberal logic with ostensibly left-leaning social justice discourses. To capture the complex reality of how efforts to neoliberalise space—in Rio and beyond—are increasingly given a progressive (but still capital-friendly) twist (Peck 2012: 475), this article develops the novel concept of ‘progressive neoliberal place-making.’

In so doing, I bring needed focus to the role of pro-environmental messaging in neoliberal urbanism. In turn, this analysis elucidates a broader trend—sometimes labelled the ‘post-Washington Consensus’—in which elite projects are couched in terms of diminished neoliberal commitments and increasing concern for progressive causes (such as equity and sustainability), but without fundamental policy shifts away from the neoliberal or colonially inflected status quo. Further, this article contributes to IPE’s empirical and theoretical engagement with the pathways through which more peripheral cities seek greater global economic relevance, and highlights how oft-overlooked Global South elites exercise agency, including by elaborating neoliberal projects (Funk 2022).

My analysis draws from repeated visits I made to the Museum and surrounding areas over a seven-month period during 2018, 2019, and 2023. As a participant-observer, I frequented the Museum’s exhibits and analysed its contents while scrutinising the demographics and behaviours of fellow visitors. I did the same in Mauá Square (home to an art museum—Museu de Arte do Rio—that opened in 2013 through a public-private partnership), and Olympic Boulevard, an adjacent pedestrian thoroughfare, bisected by light-rail tracks and lined with evocative murals, that is iconic in its own right and a product of the same period. It connects the Museum to additional Porto Maravilha landmarks, including AquaRio, South America’s biggest aquarium, and Rio Star, inaugurated in 2019 as the region’s largest Ferris wheel.

Further, I conducted over 30 in-depth, Portuguese-language ‘relational’ interviews, which refers to an interpretiveFootnote 5 and dialogic approach in which conversations explore the meaning-making practices, constructed realities, and life-worlds of particularly situated interviewees (Fujii 2017). My interlocutors included urbanists, tour guides, the Museum’s intellectual architect, current and former directors, and chief administrator, and past and present leaders of Porto Maravilha’s public-private institutional overseer (CDURP, which was established in 2009 to manage the targeted areaFootnote 6). This article is also informed by a discursive analysis of promotional and curated materials, as well as visitor survey reports, to which I was granted access.

I argue that two particular facets of the Museum clearly evoke a neoliberal ethos: first, its creation by an image-conscious political-economic elite—comprised of city officials, business leaders, and cultural administrators—that commissioned a global starchitect to construct an iconic space as part of a privatising, culture-led development scheme to buttress Rio’s status as a global city and spur investment, and accumulation, by real-estate and other business interests; and second, its messaging and exhibits, which suggest that climate change can be addressed through individual behavioural choices and market-based technical fixes.

The Museum, however, contains important ambiguities. Insofar as it has promoted any kind of green consciousness, the Museum has played a relatively progressive social role, particularly during Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right presidency (2019-2022), when the Brazilian state launched accelerated assaults on environmental regulations, climate science, and the Amazon.

The argument, then, is not that the Museum—or its designers and administrators—are instruments of capital. Rather, this article demonstrates how Rio’s ‘urban growth coalition’, in its quest to attract prestige, investment, and visitors, created a space that looks a certain way, was designed by a specific class of architect, features particular kinds of progressive content for particular audiences, and promotes market-based, individualistic, and technologically oriented would-be solutions to the climate crisis, while mostly occluding radical alternatives emanating from left-wing parties, social movements, and Indigenous and Black communities (Pires de Araújo et al 2023). That is to say, the Museum’s protagonists, whatever their beliefs, have been enmeshed in a web of political-economic entanglements that incentivise the production of built spaces and curated materials that are simultaneously progressive and neoliberal.

Further, they are operating in a particularly situated space that has been rendered a blank slate for elite-led projects through recurring rounds of dispossession, and that has been constituted by the slave trade and its legacies, European settlement, and long periods of colonial and imperial rule (Poets 2021). This ‘past’ not only conditions the context in which contemporary urban projects unfold; additionally, I argue that traces of colonial and imperial ideologies and practices reappear in Porto Maravilha and the Museum.

To advance these claims, the next section briefly historicises contemporary ‘revitalisation’ efforts, particularly vis-à-vis the trajectory of uneven capitalist development in Rio. The following section delineates the factors that gave rise to Porto Maravilha and the Museum within the context of an increasingly globally oriented city. Subsequently, I interrogate the nuanced meanings embedded in the Museum, which, I argue, evokes a logic of progressive neoliberal place-making. I also analyse the Museum’s occlusions. To conclude, I explore the contemporary status of the Museum in relation to a shifting political context and the recent dramatic rise within Porto Maravilha’s boundaries of private real-estate investment.

From ‘Little Africa’ to ‘Global Rio’

Porto Maravilha was established as a public-private partnership in 2009 and subsequently rebranded as a legacy project of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics. Its stated aim is to rehabilitate the area immediately northwest of—but socially, worlds away from—the city’s central business district. Per the below map, this includes a long waterfront, formerly home to Rio’s principal port, and the hillside neighbourhoods of Saúde, Santo Cristo, and Gamboa. Located between the latter is Morro da Providência, Brazil’s first favela, which was built by returning landless war veterans in 1897. A cable car that ascended Providência opened to great fanfare under Porto Maravilha’s aegis in 2014, promising a revolutionary form of connectivity for its marginalised residents. It closed just over two years later when the city’s contract with the private operator expired (Figure 2).

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Official CDURP map: https://portomaravilha.com.br/portomaravilha (accessed 1 December 2021). The yellow lines represent the boundaries of the Porto Maravilha redevelopment zone; visible at the top right, extending into Guanabara Bay, is the Museum. Immediately to the south—beyond the highlighted area—is Rio’s central business district

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Rio’s old port area is a highly significant site, and one whose trajectory evokes the fundamental role played by mainstream IPE ‘blind spots’ such as colonialism, slavery, and racial inequalities in global capitalism’s rise, expansion, and functioning (LeBaron et al. 2021). Its port was extremely important under Portuguese colonial rule and after independence, and for many years was Brazil’s largest, until its displacement by Santos, to São Paulo’s south, during the twentieth century. Accordingly, it has long been a hub for exchange between Brazil and the world economy, and a space through which capital, goods, ideas, and people have flowed (or been trafficked).

Also salient for understanding Rio as what Sérgio Costa and Guilherme Leite Gonçalves (2020) call ‘a port in global capitalism’ is the presence of the remains of Cais do Valongo, the largest slave disembarkation wharf in the Americas (and, as of 2017, a UNESCO World Heritage Site). Use of the term ‘Little Africa’ to describe a somewhat amorphous area of central Rio, much of which lies within Porto Maravilha’s boundaries, invokes both this space’s key role within the transatlantic slave trade and the majority Afro-descendant composition of its current population (Carvalho 2013; Friendly and Pimentel Walker 2022). Here, racialised poverty, exclusion and abandonment—persistent features of Rio’s, and Brazil’s, social structure, from the colonial era to the present—have long predominated (Roth-Gordon 2017).

The descendants of a particularly famous quilomboFootnote 7—a fugitive slave community known as Pedra do Sal—still reside in Saúde, only a few blocks from the Museum. In turn, the presence of mostly empty, hyper-modern new high-rises almost immediately next to rundown colonial-era buildings, as seen below, with precarious dwellings clinging to nearby hillsides, adds an incongruous element to the streetscape. This disjointed reality highlights how capitalism’s uneven development patterns have shaped Rio through boom-and-bust cycles and by generating massive amounts of wealth (and its accoutrements) while simultaneously producing (and reproducing) racialised immiseration (Fahlberg 2018) (Figure 3).

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Porto Maravilha streetscape (Schmidt 2017)

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As is true throughout Brazil, self-exculpatory discourses concerning a colour-blind ‘racial democracy’ coexist in Rio with a harsh, colonially inflected social structure in which class and skin colour are heavily correlated, whiteness is equated with order and progress (the national motto, displayed across the flag), and Blackness (along with Indigeneity) are downplayed, repressed, and erased (Poets 2021; Schwarcz and Starling 2015). Invoking the mutual imbrication of socio-spatial, class, and racial dynamics, a common and pithy alliterative statement captures the stigmatised traits that define many of the country and city’s most marginalised: preto, pobre, da periferia (Black, poor, from the periphery).

Local and national elites have repeatedly sought to ‘civilise’ Rio’s population and ‘modernise’ its built spaces. Under Francophile mayor Francisco Pereira Passos’ hugely influential reign (1902-1906), ‘barbaric’ cultural practices associated with Black and lower-class life were banned, including ‘hawking food on the streets, spitting on the streetcar floors, selling milk from cows trotted door to door, raising pigs within city limits, exposing meat on butcher shop entrances, allowing stray dogs to run loose, leaving building façades unpainted, [and] continuing with the entrudo (wild pranks) and unregulated cordões (boisterous popular processions) of Carnaval’ (Needell 2010: 35-36).

With Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s (in)famous ‘destruction’ of Paris’ proletarian enclaves as inspiration (Needell 2010: 36), Pereira Passos and subsequent reform-minded elites sought to ‘modernise’ and ‘beautify’ Rio by demolishing informal settlements and crowded colonial-era streetscapes—which they associated with ‘backwardness’, and saw as incubators of disease—and replacing them with built spaces befitting an aspirational ‘tropical Paris’ (Leu 2020; Meade 1996). Indeed, elite cariocaFootnote 8 reformers have long understood these, in socio-spatial terms, as complementary goals: that is, by ‘improving’ (meaning Europeanising) Rio’s built environment, the population would be made healthier and to reach a higher level of European-inspired cultural development and civilisational prowess (Needell 2010).

While Rio’s old port area was thus condemned to suffer from recurring, heavy-handed reforms due to its association with Blackness (and Portuguese colonialism)—which light-skinned elites viewed as problems to be solved—the region was dealt additional material and symbolic blows in the past century. These include: the loss of political centrality, with newly-built Brasília replacing Rio as the national capital in 1960 and as Brazil’s primary urban laboratory (Holston 1989); the post-World War II standardised containerisation of international shipping, which required larger ships that could be more easily accommodated in ports deeper than Rio’s; and the mid-century supplanting of Rio by São Paulo as Brazil’s largest city and locus of industrialisation, modernisation, and development (Weinstein 2015).

The contemporary drive to ‘revitalise’ Rio’s old port area thus must not only be understood vis-à-vis a long history of racialised, colonially inflected reform efforts in an urban milieu shaped by centuries of uneven capitalist development (Mosciaro and Pereira 2019). It also represents an elite attempt to overcome decline through a globalising strategy that seeks to build a new imaginary for the city, and attract capital and tourist flows, through culture-led development, iconic building projects, and the upscaling of urban space (Jaguaribe 2014).

The following section demonstrates how these circumstances, combined with Rio’s embeddedness in a larger global capitalist economy, led to the birth of Porto Maravilha and the Museum. Drawing from Sklair’s arguments concerning the role of architecture in capitalist globalisation, as well as analyses of the worldwide turn toward profit-oriented culture-led development schemes, I delineate the Museum’s creation as a progressive neoliberal icon for an increasingly global Rio.

A progressive museum for global Rio: the carioca urban growth coalition’s drive for iconicity

Within an increasingly competitive global capitalist marketplace, defined by ceaseless struggle for growth and profitability, urban elites feel compelled to jockey for position with their peers the world over and ascend the global-city rankings (Lederman 2020). For Global South cities (and their declining or peripheral Northern counterparts), this scramble for capital, visitors, and recognition is especially acute, given their liminal positions in the global economy (Angotti 2017).

Cities are of particular significance in global capitalism, as business leaders—pursuing what David Harvey (2018) calls a ‘spatial fix’—seek profit through endless ‘geographical expansion’, much of which takes the form of investment in the built environment (and thus literally becomes ‘fixed’ in space).Footnote 9 Hence the assessment of a Brazilian urbanist that Porto Maravilha functions less like an urban renewal project than a ‘financial operation’ that facilitates wealth accumulation through privatising services and stimulating real-estate investment (personal interview by author with architect and academic specialist in urban development, Rio de Janeiro, 5 July 2018).

Notably, ‘succeeding’ within today’s global capitalist order entails sustained efforts to neoliberalise space. This involves, inter alia, enacting a business-friendly regulatory agenda, diffusing alluring imaginaries (including by constructing iconic sites), and building particular kinds of infrastructure, such as modern business districts (Rossi 2017; see also Funk 2018). The hope is for the city to increase its centrality as a node within the ‘space of flows’—of capital, goods, services, tourists, and so on—that defines capitalist globalisation (Castells 2010: 442). The recent proliferation within Porto Maravilha of iconic cultural spaces, along with transportation infrastructure, corporate skyscrapers, and construction sites for modern apartment buildings, must be understood in this light.

Decades ago, the sociologist Harvey Molotch (1976) developed the highly influential argument that political-economic elites invariably sought to forge U.S. cities into ‘machines’ of endless growth that engage in unceasing competition for investments and resources. Expanding and updating this formulation, the aim of contemporary urban growth coalitions is to outcompete peer cities everywhere by cultivating spaces that are safe for capital accumulation (Sklair 2017). It is in this fashion that a city’s ‘globality’, as measured by sources such as the consulting firm Kearney’s oft-cited Global Cities Index—which ‘seeks to quantify the extent to which a city can attract, retain, and generate global flows of capital, people, and ideas’Footnote 10—is established (Acuto and Pejic 2021).

An expected consequence of these ambitions is the reinforcement of racialised class hierarchies and the colonial logics that sustain them (Peck et al. 2013). This was apparent while observing guards patrol—on foot and by scooter—Mauá Square, providing a sense of security to camera-wielding visitors while targeting darker-skinned local peddlers for occasional harassment and expulsion. Previous to those years of economic crisis, I was told, they were banned entirely (personal interview by author with urbanist and researcher, Rio de Janeiro, 29 June 2018).

In Rio and elsewhere, a well-worn strategy that is practically constitutive of global-city status involves elaborating culture-led development schemes and constructing iconic architectural sites (Sklair 2017). Such efforts are most common in geographically central but economically and socially marginalised spaces, which have proven especially attractive to developers and politicians who seek to ‘revalorise’ waterfront areas in particular and ‘resignify’ their meanings (Boland et al 2017).

This model is encapsulated by the ‘Bilbao effect’, referring to the transformative processes set in motion by the 1997 opening of a Guggenheim museum, designed by starchitect Frank Gehry, along the Nervión river in the post-industrial northern Spanish city’s downtown. A desire to emulate Bilbao’s would-be success subsequently went global (Arantes 2019). To profit, grow, and be global, the contemporary city thus builds certain kinds of iconic cultural spaces for particular audiences (Peck 2012).

As noted, efforts to ‘modernise’ Rio have been frequent, from past attempts to refashion it as a ‘tropical’ Belle Époque-era Paris to contemporary desires to climb the global-city rankings (Carvalho 2013; Meade 1996). In Porto Maravilha’s case, the latter ambition has been propelled by the below-mentioned mayors and other political figures, along with business interests, especially in real estate and construction, and cultural administrators affiliated with state institutions and NGOs.

In the words of a CDURP manager, the port region was an ‘urban vacuum’ before the current project began, ‘almost like a ghost area.’ Echoing colonial rhetoric, this proclaimed ‘emptiness’ discursively renders the space available for ‘revitalisation’, and, perhaps, (re)settlement (Poets 2021: 271). Indeed, given the area’s downtown-adjacent location, local actors recognised that it could function as ‘an extension of the economic centre of the city’ (personal interview by author with CDURP manager, Rio de Janeiro, 28 June 2018). It is in this sense that Porto Maravilha aims to ‘reconquer’ this space—a colonially inflected term deployed by an interlocutor without irony. To do so, the city demolished and relocated underground a section of the much-maligned elevated highway—the Perimetral—that separated downtown Rio from its waterfront, introducing locals and visitors to a previously-obscured strip of shoreline. Per the same source, ‘The only people who frequented that area [before the demolition] were the insane’ (personal interview by author with cultural project developer and manager).

It was due to the confluence of various motivating factors that this latest effort to transform the area gained traction. These included Brazil’s precipitous early-2000s economic rise, which provided the impetus (and funds) for a modernising agenda, and the electoral success of the centre-left Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT; Workers’ Party), which held the presidency—under Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2011) and Dilma Rousseff (2011-2016)—during Porto Maravilha’s creation and the Museum’s opening. Both pursued a largely market-friendly agenda, but softened Brazil’s neoliberal framework—less so, under Rousseff, after the mid-2010s onset of recession—through social spending and mild, yet significant, redistributive policies such as the internationally famous Bolsa Família (Family Allowance) conditional cash transfer program.

The same ethos was evident in the PT’s urban policy, and was shared by Rio’s less left-leaning but similarly inclined mayors of the time. For example, the Minha Casa, Minha Vida (My House, My Life) program provided incentives and marshalled public resources to promote the building (by private actors) of unprecedent amounts of desperately needed low-income housing in greater Rio and elsewhere (Stefani 2022). However, the resulting apartments tended to be ‘tiny’, ‘poorly built’, and distant from city centres, as few regulations were placed on contracted companies—which profited greatly (Boulos 2021). It was within this (progressive neoliberal) context—defined by state-led efforts to appease elites and the excluded—that Porto Maravilha and the Museum were conceptualised and born. Invoking this attempt to promulgate a simultaneously pro-market and pro-poor message, as a CDURP interlocutor put it: ‘If the capitalists are making money, why can’t the favelados [favela-dwellers] cash in?’ (personal interview by author with CDURP manager).

Also important was the staging of the 2014 World Cup throughout Brazil, including in Rio, and subsequent 2016 Rio Summer Olympics, which performed the usual megaevent role of focusing minds and spurring public and private investment. There was, then, money available for Rio to follow the aforementioned global trend toward waterfront revitalisation, culture-led development, and the construction of iconic sites.

Rio’s local political context further facilitated Porto Maravilha’s creation and implementation, as the centrist mayors who ruled in the most relevant periods—Cesar Maia (2001-2009) and Eduardo Paes (2009-2016)—invested heavily in the city’s transformation and massive public (or public-private) works. Crucially, there was overlap between their ambitions to leverage state power to revitalise and globalise Rio and the PT’s pro-development agenda. The euphoric sensation of a ‘rising Brazil’ buoyed by strong economic growth, an increasing presence on the global stage (Menezes and Vieira 2022), and the awarding of megaevents, thus created a ‘unique moment’ that prompted a cross-party, public-private growth coalition at the national and local levels to think big and collaborate to create a new ‘icon’—the Museum—for the city (personal interview by author with cultural project developer and manager).

It has long been recognised that built spaces express meaning and specific ideologies (Goodman 1985). A corollary, though less explored, insight—at least in Global North scholarship—is that they can represent class interests.Footnote 11 As Sklair (2017: 3) argues in the landmark text The Icon Project: Architecture, Cities, and Capitalist Globalisation, ‘Capitalist hegemony, the everyday expression of the power of the dominant class, is made visible by the creation of iconic buildings, spaces, urban megaprojects, sometimes whole cities.’ This is perhaps especially so in our supposed postmodern age, during which economic elites increasingly motivate consumption through spectacles, images, advertising, and cultural production (Harvey 1991).

Even before the Museum’s opening, Rio possessed a diverse line-up of heavily marketed iconic spaces that few cities could match (Jaguaribe 2014). These include the Christ the Redeemer statue, Sugarloaf Mountain and associated cable cars, certain beaches (especially Copacabana and Ipanema), and even its favelas. Through drawing from and extending Sklair’s framework, this section analyses the addition of the Museum to Rio’s collage of iconicity. Further, it explores how the Museum’s conceptualisation, design, and reception both reflect and reify the logic of (progressive) neoliberal place-making.

Sklair reveals how today’s iconic architecture seduces audiences through its supposed uniqueness and vernacular qualities. Ironically, however, what the creation of so many ostensibly one-of-a-kind built spaces increasingly amounts to, borrowing from a study of Calatrava’s output, is a seemingly forever-proliferating menagerie of ‘ubiquitous signature architecture’ (Tarazona Vento 2015), as the new and spectacular skyscrapers, bridges, and museums that were to construct particular identities for distinct places typically draw from, if not imitate, successful efforts pursued in Bilbao and elsewhere (Harvey 1991). What we are witnessing, then, is a creeping, market-driven architectural homogeneity—hence the Brazilian geographer Álvaro Ferreira’s (2011) conclusion that Rio fits into a larger trend toward the ‘banalisation of urban space.’

Sklair (2017: 3) identifies two features that define architectural iconicity: ‘fame’ and ‘symbolic/aesthetic significance.’ These are highly relative terms, which poses the resulting analytical risk that ‘Almost anything can be considered iconic by someone, somewhere, sometime’ (Sklair 2017: 17). Yet there is a political economy to what is typically afforded the iconic label, a process now mostly driven by the corporate sector and market forces (unlike previous periods, when political and religious authorities largely defined perceptions of iconicity). As Sklair (2017: 3) observes concerning the contemporary zeitgeist, ‘The more successfully a building can convey consumer-friendly meanings and consumer-friendly design, […] the more value it will have in the market.’ And the more likely it will be deemed iconic by taste-makers. That the notion that the Museum serves as an ‘icon’ for Rio is featured on the former’s website, as noted below, and was repeated by an above-cited interlocutor, speaks to the relevance of the concept of iconicity for the present analysis, even if it lacks precision.

For Sklair (2017), the principal aim of today’s iconic architecture is to promote the ‘culture-ideology of consumerism’ through incorporating consumerist enclaves into built spaces (including airports, libraries, and museums). Additionally, iconic structures serve as lightning rods for investment and touristic consumption. In this context, nearly all cities—particularly those afforded, or reasonably aspiring to, a global status—increasingly market and brand themselves as attractive destinations for flows of capital and cash-wielding visitors. On the one hand, iconic architecture is intended to represent particular cities, and indeed urban imaginaries often revolve around skylines and building silhouettes (Graham 2016). Yet the ultimate purpose of iconicity, for Sklair, is to foster capital accumulation.

One effect of this effort—as is hinted at, but less directly explored, by Sklair—is to change how people relate to space, which increasingly becomes another commodity to be consumed (and posted about via social media). Specifically, an underlying, socio-spatial aim of icon projects is to reconstitute participating publics as neoliberal subjects (Spencer 2016), for whom, as Wendy Brown (2015: 9-10) observes, ‘All conduct is economic conduct [and] all spheres of existence are framed and measured by economic terms and metrics.’ What is unfolding, then, is a place-making process in which built spaces assume a ‘market value beyond their immediate functions’ by constructing neoliberal citizens (Sklair 2017: 95). In this way, architecture serves as another domain through which economic elites seek cultural hegemony (Sklair 2017: 9).

At first glance, these descriptions do not resonate with the Museum. Beyond its forward-looking, idealistic, and pro-environmental framing (as analysed in the following section), the Museum provides free entrance (along with a VIP entry line and pre-launch event invitations) for the port area’s mostly low-income residents, stages events celebrating the zone’s African roots, and features only a modest gift shop. Materially and symbolically, it positions itself as a good neighbour and responsible steward of this colonially-inflected space’s rich cultural milieu and economic redevelopment. For example, the Museum offers ‘Cozinheiros do Amanhã’ (Cooks of Tomorrow), a three-month residency program that educates participants in healthy, eco-friendly gastronomy and promotes entrepreneurship, job creation, and the preservation of natural and cultural heritage.Footnote 12

What is particularly salient about the political economy of the Museum, then, is not its promotion of material consumption, but rather: first, the public-private partnership that brought it to fruition, and what this reveals about the reconstitution of state authority as a vehicle for promoting capital accumulation; and second—hence the need to put Sklair’s focus on iconicity into dialogue with dynamics related to the ‘socio-spatial dialectic’ (Soja 2011) and neoliberal subject formation—its reinforcement of a commodification process in which (iconic) space becomes a good to be consumed, photographed, and shared via social media, and visitors are ‘modified’ through exposure to capital-friendly environmental discourses.

Regarding the former, the Museum—which is owned by the city but administered by an NGO—was born at the initiative of private capital and relies on its patronage. It was conceived by the Fundação Roberto Marinho (Roberto Marinho Foundation), named after the media mogul who owned the massive, right-leaning Globo conglomerate between 1925 and his 2003 death. Though he—and Globo—supported Brazil’s brutal 1964-1985 military dictatorship, Marinho subsequently became a Ford-like philanthropist whose name is attached to numerous educational, cultural, and environmental initiatives. With the city’s governing elites committed to hiring a non-Brazilian architect to design a museum that would serve as an ‘emblem’ of Rio’s budding globality, it became the Foundation’s role to ‘nationalise’ the project and make it resonate with the Brazilian context (personal interview by author with cultural project developer and manager).

Its main sponsor is Santander Bank, a major global financial institution. Other patrons include Globo and Shell, one of the world’s largest oil companies. An evocative nearby sign—previously affixed to a bright yellow cube on the sidewalk—informed passers-by that ‘Shell’s energy will take you to the Museum of Tomorrow.’

Notably, this private project was championed by public officials who understood that their roles as leaders of a globalising city required stimulating tourist and investment flows through iconic architecture, culture, art, and seemingly progressive discourses (Lederman 2020; Peck 2012).

The Museum’s public-private structure is also significant. CDURP declares that it does not receive public funding (indeed, its staff are private-sector employees). Yet while its various projects (like the Museum) are privately financed, they sit on state-owned land. In practice if not by name, it is being privatised. Porto Maravilha’s framework dictates that funding would be derived from the sale of ‘air rights’ and construction permits to private developers, as opposed to public coffers. However, far too few were initially sold for the project to be self-sustaining. At least at the time, this represented the (neoliberal) model’s failure to promote private accumulation.

Accordingly, in May 2018, the consortium Concessionária Porto Novo, which was contracted to provide basic services in the area—including trash collection (from Porto Maravilha-branded bins), street cleaning, and the maintenance of tunnels, roads, plazas, and other ostensibly public spaces—declared that it was breaking the agreement due to non-payment, as it had done previously for the same reason. Notably, after the private sector failed to profit as expected, the resource-strapped city found itself obligated to conduct repairs and provide sanitation services.Footnote 13

While such corporate entanglements easily lend themselves to criticism, in a neoliberal era of declining state funding, where would museum sponsorship come from, if not private actors? Neglect of cultural spaces by governments of different persuasions was made explicit by repeated pleas from the leadership of Brazil’s prized National Museum, also in Rio, for public funding to cover operational and maintenance costs, and better protect its artifacts, specimens, and volumes. Tragically but not unpredictably, when the former palace that houses the National Museum caught fire in 2018—exactly two hundred years after its founding—most of the 20 million items in its collection were destroyed.

Regarding the second point, the Museum and surrounding area—now firmly ensconced in tour itineraries—have been repurposed as consumable spaces. Especially on sunnier days, traversing Mauá Square involves circumventing long lines and dodging selfie stick-clutching visitors, their raised phones pointed toward the Museum’s iconic entrance.

Porto Maravilha is often regarded as a failure, given its numerous stalled or cancelled building projects, recurring maintenance and financial issues, and the fact that—per pre-pandemic reports—nearly half of the area’s buildings sat unused (Arraes 2019), with vacancy rates then estimated at 70-90 percent for the recently-opened glass skyscrapers that were to form a new business district (personal interviews by author with: urbanist and researcher; architect and academic specialist in urban development). Yet, as delineated in the concluding section, these underperforming office-building projects have largely given way to a recent boom in residential construction, which in turn has breathed new life into different commercial and mixed-use ventures. Further, in socio-spatial terms, Porto Maravilha, and especially the Museum, have succeeded to a significant degree by changing the meanings attached to this long-stigmatised area (Broudehoux and Carvalhaes dos Santos Monteiro 2017).

For many poorer cariocas and the leisure classes, domestic and foreign, Porto Maravilha and the Museum became destinations. Guided tours that once avoided downtown Rio started including the Museum and nearby sites. Middle-class Brazilians who previously remained in Rio’s tonier southern neighbourhoods now arrive by private vehicles and public transit for weekend strolls, concerts, and ‘to get a beer’ (personal interview by author with CDURP manager).

Like its exterior, the Museum’s contents also lend themselves to consumption-by-photograph. Though most of the Museum’s text is posted in three languages—Portuguese, Spanish, and English—during repeated visits I observed much more picture-taking than reading, even more than at a typical museum. One critic suggests that the rather sparse Museum is so devoid of ‘stuff’ that it is not a ‘museum’ at all (personal interview by author with tour operator and historian, Rio de Janeiro, 16 July 2018).

This raises an important question: if museums are conventionally understood as repositories of artifacts, then what is the purpose of a future-oriented museum?

Here, I understand the Museum of Tomorrow as a meaning-making exercise that deploys words, alluring audio-visual materials, and iconic architectural forms to construct certain understandings about future worlds (Yanow 2015), while, inevitably, occluding others. The following section analyses the nuanced meanings associated with the Museum, and their embeddedness in a broader progressive neoliberal and postcolonial urban context.

Curating (green) neoliberal techno-futurism in ‘Little Africa’

As argued, one of the most significant ways a built space may create meaning is by achieving iconicity. Contemporarily, this typically results from promotional efforts by corporate and political elites. Regarding the Museum, the process through which this has occurred reflects a logic of progressive neoliberal place-making, in which globally oriented urban growth coalitions compete to construct (and motivate audiences through) forward-looking imaginaries, related to the environment or otherwise.

Here, I put two frameworks into dialogue. The first is Fraser’s (2019: 11) formulation of ‘progressive neoliberalism’, which, in economic terms, refers to privatising, elite-enriching projects that seek legitimacy by declaring affinity with ‘feminism, antiracism, multiculturalism, [and] environmentalism.’ The second is the voluminous literature on ‘neoliberal urbanism’ (Brenner and Theodore 2003; Spencer 2016), which analyses the reconstitution of urban spaces in accordance with the aforementioned values.

Specifically, I argue that the notion of progressive neoliberal place-making captures how Porto Maravilha’s protagonists deploy social-justice discourses—relating to sustainability, the economic development of peripheral areas, and the uplifting of marginalised, Afro-descendant communities—while promoting a capital-friendly agenda that is privatising public assets and services and upscaling urban space. Importantly, this trend extends beyond Brazil, as powerful economic actors have discovered that branding emphasising values like cosmopolitanism, egalitarianism, and togetherness has become especially palatable for many consumers due to factors including the climate crisis and rise of far-right nativism (Fraser 2019).

Jamie Peck (2012: 465) highlights this dynamic in Amsterdam, where an elite consensus arose in the 1990s and 2000s concerning the economic importance of constructing ‘a globally branded place-image with hipster allure.’ Curating this imaginary for desired cosmopolitan audiences engendered a new understanding of the cultural sphere as a key driver of economic and urban growth. It also meant leaning into progressive discourses: specifically, an appreciation for ethnic and racial diversity, the arts, and the ‘creative’ economy more broadly. Inspired by Richard Florida’s (2012) profoundly impactful theorisation of the ‘creative class’’ role in reversing urban decline, this was a ‘creativity fix’ that promised growth and globality (Peck 2012). Rio represents another iteration of this model, but one that reflects the particular elite configuration, racial dynamics, and postcolonial (as well as settler-colonial) context of this Global South city.

A progressive neoliberal logic is evident vis-à-vis the Museum’s physical form, curated materials and intellectual conceptualisation. As its website notes self-assuredly:

A new icon [emphasis added] of the modernisation of Rio de Janeiro’s harbor, the Museum of Tomorrow was born in the Praça Mauá as a science museum meant to explore, imagine, and conceive all the possibilities for constructing the future. […]

Museum of Tomorrow is an Applied Sciences museum which explores the opportunities and challenges which humanity will be forced to tackle in the coming decades from the perspective of sustainability and conviviality.Footnote 14

Here, we see clear evidence of both phenomena under investigation: an elite desire to create iconic (as well as modern) spaces, and a curatorial ethos, explored below, motivated by (neoliberal) environmentalism. The latter is at least partially a product of the Museum’s aforementioned corporate and political entanglements, which are again a constitutive feature of today’s icon projects.

Reflecting a postmodern zeitgeist, the Museum’s form (including the building’s aforementioned aesthetic qualities and the technological sophistication of its awe-inspiring audio-visual displays) often takes precedence over its declared function (that is, educating the public about science, sustainability, and climate change) (Harvey 1991). This is apparent from repeated site visits, which revealed that audiences paid significantly more attention to the Museum’s style than its (relatively minimal) contents. Yet this is expected, given that—as understood by Rio’s growth coalition—the Museum is a spectacle to be consumed (and quite enjoyably so, per the below survey results).

Visitors are greeted, upon entering the cavernous and sparsely appointed lobby, with a giant hanging digital globe that displays data—without accompanying explanation—on forest fires, global air traffic, and related phenomena.

After ascending to the second level, the suggested pathway to the permanent exhibits involves stopping to watch—while sitting, or, more commonly, lying on the floor—a 12-minute planetarium film. Its script, reproduced here, is representative of the Museum’s discursive style, which is high on drama but short on specifics:

We are the void. We are time and space. We are light. We are energy. We are matter. We are atoms. We are the Universe.

The Universe is constantly unfolding. Unfolding as matter. And matter unfolding into life. Life which is mutation and evolution. Life that unfolds as instinct. Life that unfolds as thought. Thought that imagines the Universe.

We are Life. We are rhythm and movement. Diversity. Words and silence. We are memories. Knowledge. And invention. We are Earth.

We are the unfolding Universe. Unfolding as matter, matter into life, life into thought. We are the thought that envisions Tomorrow, a Tomorrow that is here and now.Footnote 15

As the narrator’s voice booms from surrounding speakers, striking images of natural scenes, fauna, and global humanity race across the 360-degree, wraparound screen.

Though this immersive (and perhaps overwhelming) audio-visual experience does not invite concomitant introspection, important questions arise regarding its contents. What is the capitalised ‘Tomorrow’ vis-à-vis which the Museum was conceptualised? If the film’s purpose—per one of its creators—'is to take the visitor to a different state of mind, away from Praça Mauá, and help them…alter their brainwaves’,Footnote 16 then where exactly are they being taken, and why? Finally, if the message is that the future ‘has not been decided’ (personal interview by author with cultural project developer and manager), then what potential outcomes exist, which are preferrable, and how might we pursue them?

While it is impossible, based on existing data, to definitively determine to what extent the Museum reinforces capital-friendly understandings of climate change among visitors and generates (progressive) neoliberal subjectivities (matters that must be left for future research), survey responses do suggest some success in these regards. More importantly for present purposes, I argue that there is significant evidence that this is the intent. Indeed, the aim of cultivating particular kinds of subjects is evident vis-à-vis an interactive game I encountered toward the end of the Museum, which began with the question, ‘Que tipo de humano você é?’ (What type of human are you?).

As noted, the Museum’s displays are commonly perceived as aesthetically (and rhetorically) pleasing. This is apparent based on visitor counts and the frequency with which audiences were observed to consume their contents through photographs and selfies. The Museum’s audience surveys confirm this assessment, noting that visitors in November 2018—the last month for which figures were available—rated their satisfaction at an average of 9.56 out of 10. Equally remarkably, 96 percent of respondents said they would ‘certainly’ recommend the Museum to a friend, while only 0.4 percent said they ‘probably’ or ‘certainly’ would not do so.

Accordingly, effusive praise regarding the Museum is the norm, and positive experiences are reported by nearly all who traverse its halls—even if some locals at least initially criticised it as an ‘aggressive’ (and expensive) imposition on their marginalised neighbourhood. Notably, many port area residents are among the visitors, and the Museum has deliberately sought to build community connections, including before its opening (personal interview by author with cultural project developer and manager). Indeed, a large, Museum-branded, Portuguese-language sign near the entrance, observed in June 2023, notes in all-capital letters that ‘We are in Little Africa.’ It refers to an adjacent baobab tree as ‘represent[ing] the strength and the resistance of the peoples who arrived here against their will’, and mentions an amefricana (that is, an amalgamation of ‘American’ and ‘African’) history that must never be forgotten.Footnote 17

Yet the climate-related meanings being communicated to and consumed by diverse visitors are less discernible. As is the case vis-à-vis the aforementioned looming digital globe that dominates visitors’ fields of vision upon entry, so do the exhibits evoke multiple interpretations. For example, as shown below, the Museum’s elongated main, permanent exhibition hall features a series of evocative birds-eye images of natural scenes, accompanied by equally dramatic but underspecified slogans such as ‘The Earth is dynamic’ (or, in another case, ‘The Earth is blue’) (Figure 4).

Fig. 4
figure 4

Image from the Museum’s website: https://museudoamanha.org.br/pt-br/exposicao-principal (accessed 8 December 2023)

Full size image

Importantly, to an extent, this open-endedness is deliberate. Indeed, beyond general invocations of our shared humanity, oneness with the planet, and need to ‘do something’ to avert environmental catastrophes (or, perhaps, planetary destruction), it is unclear what the Museum’s wants us to do. It is a self-designated ‘museum of questions’Footnote 18 and/or ‘possibilities’ (quoted in De La Barre 2013: 52). Yet—purposefully—it provides no answers. Nor does it explicitly offer resources for generating them. The aim, instead, is to be ‘provocative’ (personal interview by author with cultural project developer and manager).

This political and social aloofness is evoked by the structure’s (iconic) exterior, which was designed to capture public attention while remaining detached from it. As Calatrava observed, ‘The idea is for the building to be as ethereal as possible, almost floating above the sea like a boat, bird, or plant’ (Egan 2015). Accordingly, the Museum’s seductive built space is meant to convey otherworldliness, and push audiences to think beyond—in unspecified ways—not only ‘today’s’ environmental problems, but also the old port area’s historically inflected, racialised marginalisation (Bresolin Montoza 2018). What is being evoked, then, is an imagined postcolonial future in which Porto Maravilha’s built spaces and the market access it engenders allow for the overcoming of Brazil’s longstanding maladies—thus occluding their ongoing resonance (Reyes-Carranza 2023). However, after feelings of enchantment with the building’s sublime physical form subside, what sensations remain with audiences?

Regarding curated materials, this futuristic ethos, and lack of a clear message or metanarrative, are also purposeful (Candy and Oliveira 2017). As commented by Luiz Alberto Oliveira, a physicist who served as the Museum’s curator:

We wanted to bring to the Museum of Tomorrow a different concept of time: the idea that in the present, you prepare, you make a different path to different possible futures. It’s not a river in the sense that you have one source and one end. You have, in fact, a delta of possibilities.

This is the main concept of the Museum, that tomorrow is not a date on the calendar, tomorrow is not a place where you will arrive. Tomorrow is a construction. Tomorrow is open to be built.Footnote 19

But what, within this delta of multiplicity and open-endedness, allows audiences to adjudicate between competing truth claims about how to avoid ecological calamity? What would a future that is ‘open to all’ (personal interview by author with cultural project developer and manager) look like, and how could it be cultivated? The Museum suggests that the status quo is problematic and that we must—somehow—chart a different path. However, it intentionally neglects to provide specific guidance about overcoming political paralysis, or which would-be solutions are viable.

Nor does the Museum push audiences to think structurally about the larger processes—including endless consumerism, environmental degradation, and the deep and racialised inequalities that are visible from the building’s large windows—it raises for consideration, but in which it finds itself at least indirectly implicated. Its funders, again, are wedded to the same industries and growth model that bear significant responsibility for the ecological and other crises about which the Museum seeks to generate consciousness.

In this way, the Museum may produce the opposite of its aim: that is, by ‘greenwashing’ the images of leading corporations, it can impede visitors’ abilities to identify the political-economic causes of how we arrived at ‘today’ and soften public resolve for targeting the entities that are chiefly responsible for the climate crisis. By neglecting radical critique, the Museum also risks reinforcing a status-quo bias, according to which this crisis can be addressed through market-based mechanisms. This lays the foundation for a self-avowedly ‘green’ or ‘solar-powered capitalism with a whole new set of opportunities for profit and pillage’, as if the invisible hand will steer humanity clear of dystopian future scenarios (Aronoff et al 2019: 157).

This tension reflects the reality of a space—forged through Indigenous dispossession, the slave trade, colonial and imperial rule, and settler colonialism—that implores visitors to contemplate a better ‘Tomorrow’, but is funded by big finance, oil, and foundation money. Indeed, throughout the Museum, ‘Tomorrow’ remains an empty signifier: constantly invoked (as if to reinforce its progressive, futuristic appeal), but never defined.

To the extent the Museum neither directly addresses the question of how to achieve a sustainable tomorrow, nor identifies what actors or power structures impede meaningful change (let alone what to do about them), a probable effect is to channel political energy toward individual-level, micro-solutions instead of collective action. The visitor is thus encouraged through bedazzling displays to lower her/his carbon footprint, use public transit,Footnote 20 consume less, and be a visionary, an agent of change, even a utopian. The aforementioned report reveals that over 80 percent of visitors indicate a willingness to ‘change a habit’ after experiencing the Museum. Here, the most frequently cited behaviours involve garbage and recycling, conservation, and consumption. Yet what does not appear on the menu of options is the need to rethink the operating principles of an unsustainable, elite-dominated neoliberal order. Following Brown, the Museum thus aims to ‘modify’ visitors (personal interview by author with cultural project developer and manager), but not the larger structures in which they are embedded.

Per the survey, 52 percent of respondents suggested that the Museum made them more ‘optimistic’ about the future, while 22 percent said they felt more ‘pessimistic.’ The remaining 25 percent chose ‘neither.’ Though the former is hardly a low figure, it diverges markedly from the above-reported overwhelmingly positive evaluations, indicating that many who enjoy and recommend visiting the Museum do not feel that it enables them to envision what the report refers to as ‘our tomorrows.’ While nearly all visitors rate their experience positively, almost half indicate that it left them feeling more ambivalent, or worse.

The Museum’s ‘delta of possibilities’ appears progressive vis-à-vis a status quo, in Brazil and beyond, defined by extractivism, grim environmental predictions, and right-wing denialism. The Museum was designed for this purpose—to provide a ‘last breath of hope’ in challenging times (personal interview by author with cultural project developer and manager). Indeed, the contrast is immediately apparent between the Museum’s call for rational dialogue and the labelling of climate science by Bolsonaro’s first foreign minister, Ernesto Araújo, as a hoax perpetrated by ‘cultural Marxists’ (Watts 2018). As Oliveira put it, ‘We wanted to inspire people’ environmentally; and, somewhat unwittingly, during the crisis-ridden prelude to Bolsonaro’s ascent, ‘we became a symbol of a better future for the country’ politically as well.Footnote 21

We may thus regard the Museum as a potentially useful political space, and one via which dissident, critical narratives could reach mass audiences (Haapoja et al 2016). Notably in this regard, the celebrated Indigenous thinker Ailton Krenak was appointed in 2021 to the Museum’s newly formed committee for scientific and other ‘knowledges’, which convenes ‘a diversity of voices and visions of the world’ to foster the ‘production of a social transformation aligned with justice and development with equality.’Footnote 22

However, there are profound tensions between the Museum’s political-economic entanglements and Krenak’s (2023) views that the current (capitalist and colonially inflected) order is ‘not worth fixing’, and that we must eschew would-be technological solutions and individual behavioural modifications in favour of system change. Yet he presents precisely the sort of structural analysis of the climate crisis—one that breaks from neoliberalism, progressive or otherwise—that would allow publics to imagine alternatives to the status quo (Reyes-Carranza 2023).

Conclusions

Porto Maravilha—and the starchitect-designed Museum of Tomorrow, its flashiest showpiece—embody numerous contradictions.

These include not only the juxtaposition of Cais do Valongo, Pedra do Sal, and the surrounding favelas’ visceral invocation of the racially charged past and present of a ‘port in global capitalism’ with the Museum’s techno-futurism. One also observes: the design, creation, and management by private (or public-private) actors of ostensibly public iconic spaces, which are frequented by large, diverse groups of local and international visitors; the promotion of sustainability by companies wedded to extractivism and endless growth; and an elite desire to modernise and globalise space through a culture-led megaproject that—unlike most previous efforts—promises inclusive development, but that solidifies a privatising model that reinforces racialised inequality and exclusion.

Capturing the marriage of utopian, egalitarian and environmental discourses with privatisation and faith in market-based responses to climate change, this article elaborates the concept of progressive neoliberal place-making to describe the Museum and its curatorial ethos. By drawing from and expanding upon Sklair’s analysis of architectural iconicity and Fraser’s theorisation of progressive neoliberalism, I provide a novel framework for understanding a particular pathway through which urban growth coalitions mobilise culture to make city spaces safe for capital accumulation. In turn, progressive neoliberal place-making speaks to a broader zeitgeist in which elites seek to legitimise, through social-justice discourses, a global-capitalist order that faces increasing scrutiny for environmental and other reasons.

As I argue, the Museum was conceived by an image-conscious public-private elite that sought to ride the wave of a then-rising Brazil to reverse decades of decline in a world-famous but middling ‘global city’ by following and adapting the trend of waterfront revitalisation through the construction of an iconic, starchitect-designed (progressive) cultural site. For Rio, then, the Museum represents an environmental fix.

By erecting an environmentally focused museum and promising enlightened stewardship of a racially charged site (and economic opportunities for long-marginalised residents), they sought to construct a new, forward-looking imaginary that would spur investment and visitor flows. In this way, Porto Maravilha and the Museum represent attempts to navigate a precarious world of capital mobility from within a postcolonial and settler-colonial urban environment—and historically significant, majority Black, and long-stigmatised old port area—that generations of anxious elites have sought to reshape.

While today’s efforts pay much greater discursive heed to the deeply rooted racialised inequalities that reproduce this area’s marginalisation, the colonially inflected desire to create a Rio that conforms to elite understandings of order and progress remains constant. Contemporarily, within a postcolonial milieu of ‘peripheral modernity’, defined by imitation and ‘kaleidoscopic’ mixture (Schelling 2000), the recurring quest to overcome the ‘old Brazil’s’ maladies by creating a ‘tropical Paris’—or Bilbao, Barcelona, or Brooklyn—takes the form, in Porto Maravilha, of an ambitious (and ostensibly progressive) socio-spatial effort to build iconic cultural sites that establish Rio as a central node within global capitalism’s ‘space of flows.’ As noted, such ambitions are common across the world (Brenner and Schmid 2015: 162), but take on a specific valence in Rio due to its particular political-economic trajectory.

While the sociologist René Rojas (2020) declared that Latin America was witnessing ‘the end of progressive neoliberalism’, what Fraser (2017) labels the ‘alliance of emancipation and financialisation’ has, if anything, grown stronger in Rio due to the defeats of Bolsonaro and (some) local followers.

In Rio, the Bolsonaro-allied Evangelical mayor Marcelo Crivella was trounced by nearly a two-to-one margin in his November 2020 re-election bid by Paes, the figure most associated with Porto Maravilha’s implementation, trials, and tribulations.Footnote 23 In contrast, Crivella was generally seen—at best—as aloof from ‘Little Africa’ and its residents, his interest largely confined to polarising initiatives such as attempting to legalise the construction of a Sheldon Adelson-financed casino. Many critics concluded that he simply refused to ‘celebrate Black culture’ (personal interview by author with tour operator and historian).

As Paes noted after his triumph: ‘Rio is free of the worst government in its history—of its most negligent, most unprepared, most prejudiced government.’ Positioning himself as a progressive alternative, he declared: ‘I want to tell all cariocas that today—whatever your faith, orientation or skin color—you are free’ (Phillips 2020).

Having been feted internationally as ‘the mayor who brought the Olympics’, Paes remains a staunch defender of—and campaigned on nostalgia for—his efforts to transform Rio. Indeed, since his January 2021 inauguration, Porto Maravilha has been reenergised by a flurry of initiatives. These include the curiously titled Porto Maravalley (a portmanteau of Porto Maravilha and Silicon Valley), which seeks to turn the former into a tech hub, and Reviver Centro (Revive Downtown), which promotes mixed-use and residential development.

As of mid-2023, nearly 6,000 new apartments have been announced for the old port area, with presales reportedly brisk. If built and inhabited (and not simply held as speculative assets), the city estimates that they would bring nearly 16,000 new residents, increasing the area’s population by over 50 percent.Footnote 24 Amenities within the various projects include a rooftop pool and bar, sauna, beach tennis court, and coworking space. With names such as ‘Rio Energy’ and ‘Rio Wonder Residences Cais do Valongo’, several channel global English’s ascribed prestige. The latter also invokes—and monetises—the area’s racially charged past.Footnote 25 That the most visible changes unfolding in Rio’s old port area are driven by government-enabled, speculative real-estate investment underscores the extent to which the iconic Museum, which is frequently highlighted in real-estate marketing materials, not only promotes particular environmental discourses, but also facilitates capital accumulation. One residential building advertisement asserts that it is located ‘next to’ the Museum,Footnote 26 while the same company’s summary page for downtown Rio prominently features a description of the Museum and a dramatic, twilight-hour picture of its façade.Footnote 27

Notably, such state-backed efforts to promote upscaling gain a progressive aura when juxtaposed with the area’s historical and Crivella-era marginalisation, as well as the other forms of racialised abandonment that characterise Brazilian cities.

Rio, then, has experienced an intensification rather than the end of progressive neoliberalism and neoliberal place-making, which are positioning themselves as preferrable to the bleak, exclusionary, and nihilistic futures offered by the far-right.

However, scrutinising the Museum’s techno-futurist discourses reveals the folly of ‘green capitalism’ and the need for alternatives (Buller 2022). Though potentially useful at sparking debate about ‘our tomorrows’, the Museum risks engendering a neoliberal ethos that undermines collective action, cultivates a body politic that views corporate actors as partners instead of obstacles, and obscures the necessity of structural change.

Finally, this analysis highlights the extent to which markets are ‘raced’—in terms of both the mutual imbrication of racial and class inequalities, and the role of slavery, colonialism, and racialised elite anxieties in global capitalism’s (and neoliberalism’s) birth, maintenance, and spread. Indeed, Rio’s postcolonial urban trajectory must be understood vis-à-vis racialising processes that are deeply embedded in Brazil’s socioeconomic structure, which itself is partly the product of colonial practices.

Accordingly, current efforts to transform Rio, despite their progressive intent, appear poised to exacerbate racial and class-based stratification (Carvalho 2013). More egalitarian spaces are possible, but only if future interventions promote equity (instead of merely growth) and respond to popular demands instead of elite interests.