The urbicide battlespace in Rio de Janeiro city

Abstract

The article operating, methodologically, by the concepts of battle space and urbicide shows that the urban spectrum of militarization in the city of Rio de Janeiro, can no longer be conceived in a “traditional” surface conception, be it zonal or networked, but must to be intelligible as a whole, that is, as a volume, taking into account its multiple spatial rearrangements and new forms of violent expropriation, which characterize urbicide and show the city's configuration, if not in all, at least in certain areas, spatially segregated, in complex battle spaces. Rio de Janeiro illustrates, precisely, this complex scenario of overlapping scales and reorganization of territories, associating representations and actions, in space and territories, which question the approach of the horizontal notion of geography, of classic cartography. To elucidate these territorial changes, we propose a spatial model for understanding the current militarization dynamics of the city, in a three-dimensional perspective, built in an intuitive way, which proves to be original and questioning the traditional ways of conceiving space as a territory in dispute by different groups.