Urban Project Issues: Dealing with Porto Maravilha Project in Rio de Janeiro

PROURB, Graduate Programme in Urbanism, School of Architecture and Urbanism, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), Brazil

Abstract: This paper focus on the urban project in the central and port area of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, Porto Maravilha. It is a project with many complexities, including both small and large scales, dealing with a diversity of actors and interests in a territory in transition. The project covers an area of 489 ha, consisting of obsolete port structures, urban voids, historic fabric and low-income housing areas. The Rio de Janeiro Olympic Games in 2016 and the 2014 World Cup in Rio de Janeiro created the opportunity to implement this project. A legal, financial and urban development operation was established to enable a project based on a public-private partnership that envisaged the additional construction of 4.7 million m2 involving 2 billion US dollars. The government carried out the infrastructure works, and the waterfront was revitalized with the insertion of new leisure and cultural equipment. The permission to build buildings more than 50 meters high, which are foreign to the city's urban standards, means a break in the landscape. So far the private sector has invested shyly in the area, we still have uncertainties about the transformation of this space.