Views of Vidigal: negotiating opportunities and risks in a gentrifying favela in Rio de Janeiro

The contested dynamics of slum gentrification in Rio de Janeiro came into focus during the brief period of relative peace brought by the pacification policy leading up to the 2016 Olympics. In this unprecedented moment, Rio's South Zone favela residents experienced a respite from the daily confrontations with police operations and drug trade violence. This article examines a neighbourly dispute over an ocean view in Vidigal – a favela in one of Rio's wealthiest areas – to explore the interplay between what I call Rio's racialized moral geography and Vidigal's moral economy of melhorar de vida (to improve one's lot in life). While Rio's moral geography, shaped by a legacy of racialized governance of precarization, sustained patterns of inequality, Vidigalenses mobilized fluid and pragmatic values of self‐improvement and belonging to resist and reappropriate gentrification. By framing gentrification as an extension of historical dynamics of exclusion and a lived process, this analysis advances conventional studies that emphasize capital accumulation, displacement, and state‐led urban renewal. It shows how ethnographic attention illuminates the ways structural forces and racialized histories are reworked through everyday reinterpretations of urban change, as people navigate both opportunities and risks in their struggle to assert the right to prosper.