Emergent Ecologies
rio de janeiro
With its extensive coastline, Rio de Janeiro seems to offer abundant opportunities to cool down. But the reality is much starker: A disproportionate number of residents who live close to the beach are white and wealthy. They walk only a few blocks from their condominium buildings, where they have access to air conditioning, to spend their leisure time enjoying the beach. But millions of Rio residents, who are more likely to be low income and brown or Black, live in landlocked neighborhoods that constitute urban heat islands, where temperatures can soar much higher than coastal neighborhoods. As in the Imperial Valley, California, these areas often feature a lot of brick and concrete and few trees. Rio de Janeiro is one of the few cities in the world that can boast a location within a rain forest, and the city features many green spaces. However, trees only help cool people in the immediate area around them, leaving many low-income areas with views of trees, but without the cooling benefits.
Heat impacts people differently, depending on their access to cooling technologies in their homes, as they move around the city, and in the places they work and go to school. Residents who live in distant suburban neighborhoods can commute 2-3 hours each way for work, on buses and trains that don’t always have working air conditioning. People employed in manual labor can work outside without access to shade or water, both in jobs in construction or garbage collection or as part of the informal economy, as ambulatory beach vendors.
Homes without air conditioning, which are common in Rio’s low-income neighborhoods, often do not allow residents to cool down sufficiently, even at night. Favelas often feature auto-constructed houses that can lack regularized connections to the city’s electrical grids. Service is poor, transformers are often overloaded, and fires that cause blackouts are common, especially in the summer. When blackouts occur, residents can wait days to have service restored, meaning that they are unable to cool down with fans and sometimes even water (which needs to be pumped to the tanks on the roofs above houses) can be restricted or run out. While a significant percent of the city’s residents live in concrete-block houses with few windows built high up on the hills, which residents often access through narrow alleyways with many steps, a whiter and wealthier minority live in modern condominium buildings with elevators and well-established sources of water and energy. During recent heatwaves, the hottest neighborhoods in Rio de Janeiro have reached a real feel temperature of 144º F.
Visual content by Marcelo Costa Braga. Exceptions include the final nine photographs: five by Jennifer Roth Gordon and the last four by Erika Larkins.
