On the night of 7 April 2010, Luciano Machado was doing electrical work on a roof in the hillside favela Morro do Bumba. The Rio de Janeiro area had just experienced its worst summer downpour in history — nine inches of rain in 24 hours. The weather had cleared and Machado was back on the roof, untangling wire, when Bumba’s summit suddenly cratered out. Machado was just able to jump out of the way as the landslide punched through dozens of homes. When he looked back, there was only a river of mud.

Bumba was only one of several favelas across Rio devastated by mudslides that day, a cruel lesson in the city’s polarised geography. The asfalto, or legal city, experienced severe flooding but only a few deaths. The collapse at Morro do Bumba alone killed 267 people, and at least a hundred more perished at other favelas. Upwards of 10,000 were left homeless.

Rio had only a few months before it won its bid to host the 2016 Summer Olympics. “Too many people have no choice but to live in dangerous areas like this,” Machado said. “Politicians want the games to bring in tourists and to raise the country’s morale, but what’s the point if we don’t begin addressing these problems first?”

In the wake of the disaster, every level of government promised to do more for favela dwellers – though whether they are better off now than four years ago is an open question. The state's favela "pacification" programme has tackled crime: from their own centralised command centre HQ, the police have cracked down violently on gangs, and earned criticism for using draconian force.

But Rio’s mayor, Eduardo Paes, also discovered during the 2010 storm how woefully inadequate were the city's more mundane tools for dealing with a major crisis: monitoring the rain, sharing information across departments, directing emergency crews and orchestrating repairs. (One story goes that the room where Paes directed the disaster response lacked enough electrical outlets to keep everyone's phones charged.) No doubt with one eye on the Olympics and World Cup, Paes admitted Rio’s emergency preparedness was “less than zero”.

His attempt at a solution is one tangible result of the 2010 mudslides, and can be found in an intimidating, two-storey box of reflective dark glass in the Cidade Novo district.



Inside the box is what aims to be a mission control room for a 21st-century city: Centro de Operações Preifetura do Rio de Janeiro (COR), the world’s most ambitious integrated urban command centre.



A giant wall monitor is broken into a grid showing status graphs, meteorological reports and live video feeds from traffic and CCTV. Photograph: David Levene Photograph: David Levene

COR brings together the municipality’s 30 departments and private suppliers in a single monitoring room. Here, they track real-time conditions in the city, when necessary coordinating a response to emergencies and disruptions. Other cities have similar projects – Madrid has one control room for police, fire and ambulance services – but none are as big or broadly operational as Rio’s.

COR’s creators did not go to the trouble of hiring a Hollywood set designer to emulate the bridge of the Enterprise from Star Trek, as General Keith Alexander did when building the NSA's Information Dominance Centre. Rather, COR is a dimly lit auditorium, with the functionality of a Bond villain’s techno-lair. About 70 COR staff, clad in crisp white jumpsuits, sit before banks of desktop screens. A giant wall monitor is broken into a grid of status graphs, meteorological reports and live video feeds from traffic and surveillance cameras. There are Google satellite and street maps networked to the city’s information systems, which staff can toggle for close-ups and additional data overlays. A map might show the present location of every city bus, the nearest hospitals to an emergency or designated at-risk areas during storms.



Information is shared real-time between city staff from various departments – from transportation to sanitation, health to emergency services – as well as with the private contractors that own the transit lines, do road work or collect trash. For example, staff from Rio Águas, the City Hall entity tasked with preventing floods, monitor the level of the rivers; the people from the CET-Rio traffic agency keep tabs on vehicle flow via the video wall, changing traffic lights if necessary and calling field agents to manage accidents as soon as they happen. Upstairs is a room for journalists, who can access much of the same information – effectively acting as COR’s megaphone, and helping crowdsource information back to it.

Andrés Luque-Ayala, an urban geography researcher at Durham University, calls it the “quintessential smart city project”. Cradled spectacularly between mountains and sea, the city’s geography presents unique challenges. About three-quarters of Rio’s districts have areas at risk of landslide, and much of the city is vulnerable to flooding. Temperatures can rise as high as 45 degrees in 'heat islands'. Even basic communications can be problematic: the hillsides in some neighbourhoods render mobile broadband and mobile phone coverage spotty.

“Rio has a very specific topography and local weather system,” says Luque-Ayala, “so [COR] has its own advanced monitoring systems installed across the city. Rio is also a place that’s historically been hard to govern, and it’s about to face some crunch moments, like the Olympics and World Cup, that will put more stress on its infrastructure. By integrating all these key departments COR definitely improves the capacity of the city to react to emergencies.”

Paes enlisted IBM Brazil to build COR after the mudslides at a cost of R$14m (£3.76m), according to the mayor's office, but it remains a work in progress. The human element is a large reason for that. It is tricky to integrate information and decision-making across dozens of city departments and private suppliers – some of them rivals, all of them with their own cultures and bureaucracies. “There are still challenges,” says Pedro Junqueira, the 32-year-old chief executive of COR. “We are only four years old, some of these departments are 30, 40, even 100 years old, like the street cleaning companies. Integrating them is a daily job. And it’s not a vertically structured situation – we collaborate and make decisions together. The operations centre did not just become the boss of those 30 departments.”

COR staff all wear the same jumpsuits, regardless of department or company, to encourage solidarity. Photograph: David Levene Photograph: David Levene

That sort of ad hoc collaborative intelligence was on display last month as Rio was again drenched by heavy summer rains. COR staff worried certain favela hillsides could collapse. “We debated all night whether to send a notice to those communities,” says Junqueira. “We were over the protocol number after which you must decide whether to sound the alarm. We were on the edge, and we’re talking about people’s lives.”

“The Civil Defence preferred to think about it more, and look at weather predictions with the meteorologists, to see if the rain would return more heavily. By having the conversation, this was an example of the Civil Defence being more precise than my team. We saw that the rain that was supposed to come wasn’t so much. In the end, we thought sounding the alarm would be a waste of our credibility.”

COR had already been tested by two major disruptions during the past year. In March, trash collectors went on strike during Carnival, leaving even posh districts in Zona Sul looking and smelling like open dumps. “It was horrible,” Junquiera says. “We treated it like a crisis situation and made use of every resource the city had.” The team at COR reassigned other city workers and contractors to assist with the cleanup. “We worked with many different companies, contracted by city hall, in different areas, to maintain the minimum. But the minimum was still far below our needs.”

The nationwide protests of June 2013, which drew their largest crowds in Rio, presented an even thornier issue. Coinciding with the city’s hosting of Fifa Confederations Cup matches, one demonstration of more than 300,000 people erupted into clashes between police and protesters. With the World Cup kick-off just weeks away, a new round of strikes and protests has already begun.

Though police are present at COR and have access to its cameras, maps and data, the state runs its own separate surveillance and command centre – leaving security and public order outside COR’s purview. COR focused instead on setting up roadblocks to divert traffic and using social medias and the COR-based press to help residents avoid congested areas.



“We don’t want to get into the issues of the demonstrators, whether they’re right or wrong,” Junquiera says of COR. “For us it’s about the rest of the city being able to maintain their routines. We communicate the situation to citizens, and keep the city flowing around the interruption.”



Of course, causing a disruption of some magnitude is usually the whole point of mass demonstrations. Junqueira won't say much about COR’s preparations for the World Cup, but he concedes that COR’s profile was, in effect, enhanced by last year’s protests.

Separate from COR, the military and police run Rio's World Cup security operations from their own Integrated Command and Control Centre. Photograph: Reuters Photograph: © STRINGER Brazil / Reuters/REUTERS

As for enhancing profile, everyone in Rio knows that COR is Paes’s baby. He gives live TV interviews and press conferences from the control centre and gets daily morning briefings. Most decisions are arrived at by consensus, with Paes providing explicit direction once a week or so, but COR gives Paes more than just a powerful tool for running the city – it gives him a platform from which to project his particular style of governance.

“COR plays a key role in positioning the mayor as somebody who’s in control of his city,” says Luque-Ayala. “Rio has historically been very unruly, very difficult to command – and now there’s a central operations centre that’s connected to not just social media but Globo TV and local radio stations. And they’re constantly reporting not from the mayor’s office, but from COR, very often with the mayor there, giving the public this impression that the city’s being managed; that Paes is in action, everyday, through the COR. Of course this is being contested, because if you talk to anyone they’ll tell you the city is a mess.”

Part of the mess is simply the result of all the construction happening around Rio. But a lot of it has to do with Rio’s anarchic nature, something COR must constantly battle. I asked Junqueira, who studied business administration in university, what he did prior to running COR.

“I ran a shopping mall in Belo Horizonte,” he said. “It’s very different, but also not. In a shopping mall you are dealing with many different interests and systems, with people’s daily lives. You are also solving problems all the time. You have a medical centre, food court, sanitation, parking, cinemas, all this stuff—it’s a city too, just a smaller city. And this city you can close.”



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