Urban eco-geopolitics

Geopolitics should be understood as a broader subject than the usual association ‘nation-states + international relations + military power + geographical conditions’ suggests. Actually, ‘geopolitics’ is nothing but an explicitly political approach to social–spatial analysis, even if we pragmatically reserve the term for situations in which we face state interventions and strategies aiming at socio-spatial control and/or expanding political influence. Similar to the Copenhagen School’s ‘wider agenda’ for security studies, I think it is useful to develop a ‘wider agenda’ for the critique of geopolitics—for instance, one that clearly incorporates some urban problems as relevant subjects. ‘Eco-geopolitics’ refers to the governmentalisation of ‘nature’ and the ‘environment’, using the ‘environmental protection’ and often even the ‘environmental security’ discourse as a tool for socio-spatial control. Within the framework of this governmentalisation, there are increasing connections between local-level expressions of socio-spatial control in the name of ‘environmental protection’ and national and global agents and agendas. More concretely, ‘urban eco-geopolitics’ is above all related to strategies of socio-spatial control apparently designed to prevent people from ‘degrading the environment’, though in fact they have several social and spatial implications. Rio de Janeiro is here nothing but an illustration of a very general phenomenon. Nonetheless, Rio is a ‘privileged laboratory’ due to an almost unique conjunction of factors: (a) a proverbial ‘abundance of nature’ (i.e. a huge national park inside the heart of the metropolis); (b) a similarly proverbial socio-spatial inequality (hundreds of favelas coexist with elite neighbourhoods in the context of a complex segregation pattern that also includes a huge periphery and an extreme socio-spatial stigmatisation); (c) a ‘modernising drive’ that has significantly changed Rio’s urban space several times since the beginning of the 20th century, being recently represented by the direct or indirect effects of the ‘sporting mega-events fever’ that has dominated Rio’s city marketing since the last decade.