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As American jazzmen discovered in the 1960s, alighting from a plane in Rio de Janeiro is a transformative experience: blood temperature rises ever so slightly as arteries start pumping to the syncopated rhythms of samba. In the cab transporting him to the
lively streets of Old Rio, Stan Getz would be perplexed today to find a TV screen on the back of the driver’s seat, enabling passengers to keep up with their favourite telenovela. (Some attribute the country’s declining fertility rate to an on-screen trend – part of a larger ‘soap opera effect’.) Such cabs, however, lack the appeal of the picturesque bondinho
– the oldest operating tramway system in the world. Other locally-sourced sights and sounds have been collected at the new Museu de Arte do Rio, where exhibition topics range from the act of surfing to the state of Pernambuco. But Rio’s most exciting visual art venture lies outside their walls: the Favela Painting Project
has covered those of Santa Marta in vivid swaths of colour, hoping to spill onto the city’s 750 other favelas – potentially brightening the lives of an estimated 1.4 million people. Despite sometimes rosy reports, these have largely been left out of the World Cup’s funding bonanza, making such participatory initiatives a promising alternative to top-down redevelopment and police pacification units: as the late Jane Jacobs once said, ‘Cities have the capability of providing something for everybody, only because, and only when, they are created by everybody.’
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