Christopher Gaffney

I am an academic geographer, investigative journalist, and author living and working in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I have conducted research in Brazil since 2004 when I began work on Temples of the Earthbound Gods (University of Texas Press, 2008). Temples investigates the history and culture of football stadiums in Rio and Buenos Aires, using them as lenses to observe the shifting urban landscape from the late 19^th to the early 21^st century.

After finishing my graduate work at the University of Texas at Austin, I taught in the department of Geography, the Institute for the Study of the Americas, and the Curriculum for International Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. In 2009, I returned to Rio de Janeiro on a Fulbright Fellowship where I began an investigation of the urban, political, and economic interventions for the 2014 World Cup while teaching in the Geography Department at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). In the fall of that year, the IOC and Rio signed an agreement, opening up new avenues of research.

I am currently a Visiting Professor in the Graduate School of Architecture and Urbanism  at the Universidade Federal Fluminense in Niterói, just across the bay from Rio. I teach courses on  urban planning, the construction of Olympic Cities, and theoretical approaches to urbanism. My current research projects focus on:

§  The social and urban changes associated with the 2016 Olympics, in particular the installation of Bus Rapid Transit lines (funded through CNPq-PIBIC), changing security dynamics, and issues of real-estate / gentrification.

§  The development of a national-scale research project that analyses the social, political, economic, sporting, and urban impacts of the 2014 World Cup in its 12 host cities. This project can be accessed through the Observatório das Metrôpoles website at UFRJ.

§  The daily management of the city and the ways in which the Olympic City is being constructed on top of the “real” city. This includes the political, economic, structural, and symbolic. My refelections on these issues are the subject of most of the blog posts.

§  The discourse, symbolism, and function of the Maracanã, 1946-2016.

I work with a number of academic and civil society institutions on these projects, including: Comitê Popular da Copa e Olimpíada, Observatòrio das Metrôpoles (UFRJ), CatComm, ABRAJI,  among others.

A native of Vermont (USA) I attended high school in Texas, studied History and Philosophy and ran down the left side of midfield at Trinity University (San Antonio), traveled through Central America and Mexico before teaching English in Taiwan, where I won the 1997 Footballer of the Year trophy. I then taught ESL, Spanish and Geography and coached soccer at Suffield Academy (CT). I earned a M.Sc. in Geography from the University of Massachusetts at Amherst (thesis: Soccer and the Geographic Construction of Reality) while teaching in the Geography and Anthropology departments and a Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Texas at Austin where I taught courses on urbanism, Latin America, and cultural geography.