Slum Upgrading in Rio de Janeiro: Favela-Bairro

A pioneering project in slum-upgrading is Favela-Bairro (slum to neighborhood) in Rio de Janeiro. It has contributed to the mindset of urban planning as a participatory process. Largely attributing to its success were a committed local government, that was highly flexible to change existing regulations, and the involvement of grassroots initiators in the design process.

Favela-Bairro, initiated in 1993 and funded in by the Inter-American Development Bank, has reached a total of 147 neighborhoods to date. It was complemented by programs such as Bairinho, and Grandes Favelas, respectively aiming at small-scale and large-scale slums.



One of the key-figures of Favela-Bairro was architect Sérgio Magalhães. He described the main goals of Favela-Bairro as follows (Conde and Magalhães 2004): ‘Integration of slums into the city’, ‘strengthening the (existing) spatial relationship with the city’ and ‘adding new formal and symbolic ones’, as well as providing for ‘essential basic facilities and sanitation’ and infrastructure.

Concretely this was translated to the following design aspects:
• creating interconnections with surrounding neighborhoods;
• building new accesses and expanding the connection with the regular neighborhood public services;
• focussing on pedestrian flows, rather than roads for cars;
• clearly defining public spaces;

An important architectural consideration was that: ‘streets, squares, day care
centers, and buildings were designed according to contemporary trends, without resorting to a ‘simpler’ communication language, without simplistic semantics.’ (Conde and Magalhães 2004, p. 15). This consideration adds a layer of quality to the communities, equivalent to the qualities of the formal city. To architecturally treat the favela in the same way as a neighborhood, with the same means, is seen as the best way toward architectural integration in the city. Magalhães calls this: ‘tearing down material and symbolic barriers between slum and neighborhood’ (p. 15). These qualities in combination with thorough neighborhood analyses, problem-solving programs, the successful designs of Rio-based architect Jorge Mario Jaregui, among others, and grassroots participation have turned Favela-Bairro in a celebrated project.



Three UCL Bartlett scholars (Riley, Fiori, and Ramirez) praise the urbanism and architectural qualities of the project, but are critical about the project regarding its success in contributing to solving poverty: ‘Favela-Bairro will doubtlessly lead to real improvements in the lives of favela residents, giving them access to a wider range of services and infrastructure than ever before, yet as it currently stands, the program does not fulfill its potential to act as a catalyst for broader processes of democratization which are essential to ensure long-term and substantive poverty reduction.’ (Riley, Fiori, and Ramirez 2001, p. 531). If the stigma is purely geographical and based on community resident, rather than other discriminations - as acclaimed by anthropologists Brodwyn Fischer and Janice Perlman - we can not conclude otherwise than that successful urban integration of slums in the urban domain would lead to social opportunities, such as employment. However, the economical and social backgrounds, such as economic inequality on a broader scale, will not solely be solved with an urban design but require a broad effort within society.

Ananya Roy’s warning for the ‘aestheticization of poverty’ - the romantization or enchantment of the vernacular - has to be taken into account: ‘While the aestheticization of poverty can be seen as an attempt to return dignity to the urban poor, it must also be seen as a geopolitical enterprise that ignores the terribly difficult conditions under which the poor struggle and survive and aspire.’ (Roy in: Roy and AlSayyad 2008, p. 303). I think aspiration offers a prospect for the integration of the urban poor, not only in urbanization, but also in city planning. Aspiration is not limited to urbanization, but also requires a form of representation for these facilities. When Ananya Roy speaks about the aestheticization of poverty, she means the romantization of primitive ideas, such as the water-well as a place for social gathering (she refers to a housing project in India), while houses are built without their own water pipes. I think the aestheticization of poverty should be replaced by an aestheticization of urbanity. The facilities of the city must have a representation that is a celebration of urbanity, for which Favela-Bairro is a good, but modest, example. Particularly because, as chief architect Sérgio Magalhães emphasizes, the project does not resort to simple means of representation.

Favela-Bairro is a successful project in its attempt to urbanize slums, and to give this urbanization a representation. But, to place a critical remark: I think it lacks the ambition of integration into city planning at a larger level. The project is restricted to the community itself, and provides qualitative facilities for the community. Despite the emphasis on infrastructure connections, I think this may conceal, particularly for larger slums, a threat that would disconnect them from the surrounding city, by making the neighborhoods independent, that would turn the larger slums into autonomous neighborhoods. One must look for representations with larger, city-wide significance too.


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CONDE, Luiz Paulo; and MAGALHÃES, Sérgio, 2004. Favela-Bairro, Rewriting the History of Rio. [pdf] Rio de Janeiro: Viver Cidades. Available here: [pdf].

RILEY, Elizabeth; FIORI, Jorge; and RAMIREZ, Ronaldo, 2000. Favela Bairro and a New Generation of Housing Programmes for the Urban Poor. Geoforum, vol. 32, pp. 521-31. Available through: Elsevier Science Direct Database.

ROY, Ananya; and ALSAYYAD, Nezar, eds., 2004. Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia. Lanham (MD): Lexington Books.


Further reading:

MIT Urban Upgrading
Inter-American Development Bank
Municipality of Rio de Janeiro (Portuguese)
Sérgio Magalhães Consultória

Otto Koenigsberger’s views on the role of planning institutions

Otto Koenigsberger was trained as an architect in Berlin, and migrated in the early 1930’s to Egypt, where he worked as an archeologist. In 1939 he proceeded his career in India, first as chief architect in Mysore State (today: Karnataka State), after the independence of India in 1948 as federal director of housing in Delhi. In India, Koenigsberger was confronted with the needs of partition refugees in the northern provinces of India. He advised on the construction of the New Towns of Faridabad, Rajpura, Gandhidham, and Sindri. Koenigsberger proposed pre-fabricated housing, but as this plan did not succeed, Koenigsberger resigned and moved to London in 1951. In London, Koenigsberger co-founded the Department of Tropical Architecture at the Architectural Association in 1954, of which he became the head in 1957. In 1970 he established the Development Planning Unit at University College London. From the 1950’s onwards, Koenigsberger served as UN consultant on housing missions in several developing countries, where he worked closely with Charlas Abrams (main sources: Baweja 2008; and DPU-website).

Koenigsberger introduced the paradigm of ‘Action Planning’ in Architectural Association Journal in 1963. This was after he abandoned the idea of top-down planning, after his experiences in India.

Koenigsberger sought for a division of tasks in the provision of mass housing in third world countries. He defined the responsibilities of public sector agencies, such as local governments as: ‘the provision of housing plots, physical infrastructure, housing finance and, where necessary, subsidies. Their role will be to help, but not to control.’ (Koenigsberger 1986: 27). In the 1940’s and 50’s, there was a great demand for housing in the third world. Initially, the method of mass-produced, pre-fabricated housing units was proposed. This could reduce labor costs and consutrction time, and has proven successful in many western countries after the Second World War. However, as labor costs were already low in third world countries, this approach found little success. As a response to mass housing projects, USAID initiated ‘aided self-help’; future residents were responsible for the construction of houses, whereas the public sector provided for land, public services and provided for those parts of the job that required special skills of knowledge. This method was not widely applied, however, its success laid in the fact that it ‘established the principles of the division of labor and collaboration between private and public sectors’ (Koenigsberger 1986: 30), thereby paving the road for ‘sites-and-services’. Sites-and-services differed from aided self-help in a sense that allottees were provided with plots, roads, water, sewege, etc., and were free to construct their own houses. Hence, the investment of public institutions remained low. As the policy was embraced by the World Bank, sites-and-services turned into a successful instrument in the provision of housing in the third world. Koenigsberger, however, criticized sites-and-services, as the many of the projects did not reach the poor, but fell in the hands of middle-class residents, leaving the poor no other option than squatting. Koenigsberger favored slum upgrading, which he described, despite its limited application, as a ‘resounding success’, in particular in reforming our thinking about urbanism for the poor (koenigsberger 1986: 31). Slum upgrading was based on the squatter’s ‘goodwill and managerial gifts’, which it rewarded with security of tenure and basic infrastructure and facilities.

The process of building is a public affair, undertaken by the residents of the squatter settlements, while providers of public services, such as water and sewage, are poorly coordinated, and do not communicate their projects with each other or with planners. In the process of slum upgrading, Koenigsberger sees the need to redefine the role of planners. Koenigsberger advocates that ‘planners must learn to think of themselves not as controllers, but as initiators, and leaders of development’ (Koenigsberger 1983: 52); planners should start by laying out a public sector initiative, providing for plots and facilities, followed by attracting both rich and poor private investors to invest. This requires a role for the planner as an entrepreneur, as a ‘public sector developer’, or ‘development administrator’. He abandons the idea that planning should determine the exact outcome; planning does no longer mean the creation of blue-prints, but rather the initiation and coordination of processes, in which private and public sector initiatives should be brought together. This is brought forward in his most influential article ‘Action Planning’ in the Architectural Association Journal in 1963.


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Baweja, Vandana, ‘A Pre-history of Green Architecture: Otto Koenigsberger and Tropical Architecture, from Princely Mysore to Post-colonial London’, PhD Dissertation, University of Michigan, 2008.

Otto Koenigsberger, ‘Third World Housing Policies since the 1950s’, in: HABITATINTL., Vol. 10. No. 3, pp. 27-32. 1986.

Otto Koenigsberger, ‘The Role of the Planner in a Poor (and in a Not Quite so Poor) Country’, in: HABITATINTL.Vol. 7. No.112, pp. 49-55, 1983.

Community Action Planning

Lecturer: Gabriel Arboleda
University of California, Berkeley - College of Environmental Design
Course: Housing, An International Survey (Arch 111 / CP 111)
Lecture: Participatory Design (Lecture # 18)
Segment: Participatory Urban Planning: Community Action Planning - Otto Koenigsberger - CAP, A Case in El Salvador
Date: Spring, 2011