Wednesday, June 8, 2011

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

1 comment:

  1. this blog is pure gold! thanks soo much! superbly well written. you should make the world a better place and keep updating!

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