In this post I will indicate a major trend in the development of favelas in Rio de Janeiro: how favelas ever more emerge in the outskirts of the city. I will also briefly discuss the governmental response over the past decade, and the practical impact of the City Statute (Estatuto da Cidade) in Rio de Janeiro.
A major shift, in more than 120 years since the first favelas emerged in Rio de Janeiro, is their location. Favelas initially sprang up on the hillside in proximity of the city centre, later, during the 1930s to 70s, in the proximity of factories, and after that on marginal spaces, such as the spaces between infrastructure elements.
Slum communities today are increasingly appearing in the far suburban regions, such as Barra da Tijuca and Santa Cruz. Teresa de Almeida Faria, in her doctoral dissertation at the planning institute of UFRJ, states that urban poverty moves to the edges of the city, ‘far from the city centre, from work, and from collective facilities and services’. Here the residents expect to find better social and economic conditions than in the central favelas. The poor do not only move to communities on the edges of the city, but also to regular popular neighborhoods, where they are able to buy their own property with legal entitlement. De Almeida Faria calls this process ‘peripherization’, and partly relates this back to the theory of John Turner, who saw ‘autoconstruction as a solution for urban poverty’ (de Almeida Faria 2004, pp. 22-5). It would be a positive development if poor favela residents have the opportunity to move to better and safer neighborhoods outside the city centre, albeit legal or illegal, but it requires investments in these peripheral neighborhoods from the local government, as residents of these peripheries still contribute largely to the flourishing of the city centre by working there.
We can state that the appearance of new favela locations has followed a parallel development as formal city planning. This is a consequence of the proximity to work. Janice Perlman enhances the position that new favelas today are continuously constructed in the proximity of service and construction jobs in more affluent areas (Perlman in: Roy & AlSayyad 2004, p. 109). Today these areas are not only concentrated in the city centre, or near factories, but ever more found in the peripheries. The proximity to individual economic opportunities is a more important motive to move than the proximity to urban services, schools, or an improved quality of life. It is not a coincidence that we observe the largest increase in community residents near Barra da Tijuca, the city’s major expansion area. In this area there is a great demand for laborers and work force, ranging from construction to domestic work.
Communities in the West Zone show the strongest growth rates today. The expansion of the existing communities - particularly in Zona Sul - often does not manifest itself through more land occupation. Rather we can observe vertical growth. People sell their roof rights to friends or family, permitting them to construct another one or two floors on top of their house (Neuwirth 2006, p. 56). Often the houses are prepared for this, steel bars of the reinforced concrete stick out at the top of the columns to allow vertical expansion. In favelas such as Rocinha many buildings are at least six floors tall. As these buildings are often improperly constructed of low cost materials, this leads to hazardous conditions. The road networks and urban services have insufficient capacity for the increasing density of inhabitants.
Despite all efforts in the past two decades, the number of favelas and community residents is still increasing today. Besides their political backgrounds, the legal status of slum communities seems to be a political instrument. As an example I will briefly discuss the community of Nova Cidade, in the lower class neighborhood Inhoaíba in the West Zone.
Nova Cidade
Nova Cidade is in terms of land occupation the second largest favela of the city. The community is indicated on the 2008 census map of favelas by the municipality of Rio de Janeiro, but was not yet indicated on the map of the 2005 census. Using dated photos from Google Earth it is clear to see that the neighborhood already existed in 2005; it has, in fact, barely changed nor expanded since 2005. The only thing that changed was its legal status. How this neighborhood emerged as a ‘new' favela is unclear. Further research needs to be performed on whether this kind of numerical increase of favelas is informal, and unplanned.
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| Nova Cidade 2005 |
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| Nova Cidade 2010 |
I can only suggest some possible explanations for this case, assuming
that the houses have been constructed without legal entitlement on land
owned by the municipality:
- The municipality
indicated the community as favela, so that it can invest in improvements
of the neighborhood and implement a project such as Favela- Bairro or
PAC (which seems to be not the case at this moment);
-
The municipality has plans to use, sell, or exploit the land, and needs
to relocate the residents currently occupying the land;
- Increasing violence or circumstances have raised awareness and interest in this community;
Either way, the condition in which the legal status of a neighborhood
can change, without the neighborhood changing, raises concerns. The
level of
urbanization seems to stand separate from this characterization, as
adjacent houses, just outside of this area, are constructed along an
unpaved street, while all the streets in Nova Cidade are paved.
Hernando de Soto describes the complications of legal property rights in developing and development countries. He uses examples from Haïti and Peru, and also refers to Brazil. De Soto states that once property rights are obtained through formal, legal means (which is often a process of years, if not decades), it is often as difficult to sustain the legal status of the property rights as it was to obtain them (Soto 2000, p. 29). This appears to be the case in Nova Cidade.
The City Statute
One instrument has become very important for the eradication of poverty in Rio's favelas: the City Statute (Estatuto da Cidade), a national policy implemented in 2001.
James Holston describes in four points what the value of the City Statute is, emphasizing the unique status of the City Statute not only for Brazil but worldwide (the italics are added to extract the key points): ‘First, [the City Statute] defines the social function of the city and of urban property in terms of a set of guidelines that are substantive in nature. Second, on that basis, it frames its directives from the perspective of the poor, the majority of urban residents, and creates mechanisms to redress some of the most evident patterns of illegality, inequality, and degradation in the production of urban space. Thus it establishes social equality as a principal objective of urban planning and turns planning into an instrument for social equatization and justice. Third, the statute requires that local master plans and policies be developed and implemented with active popular collaboration. Fourth, it is not framed as a total plan (as in the paradigm of Brasília) but instead as a series of innovative legal instruments that allow local administrations to realize and enforce social function.’ (Holston 2008, p. 292). This fourth point is also addressed by Evaniza Rodrigues and Benito Barbosa who refer to this approach as ‘piecemeal’ interventions (Rodrigues and Barbosa in Cities Alliance 2010, p. 29), a term derived from Karl Popper’s idea of ‘piecemeal engineering’. In this idea, which is one of the key arguments in Popper’s book ‘The Open Society and its Enemies’, social engineering (and I think we can in this case extend this to city planning) is not used as an utopian goal but as a problem-solving instrument. This is a fundamental change from earlier perceptions of city planning in Brazil.
The City Statute is characterized by a strong emphasis on housing. One of the main problems that was tried to bridge with the implementation of the City Statute, was the condition in which private owners of land, often speculating on the increase of the land value, were able to make a stronger claim on the use of public facilities than people who could not afford to legally own land. The City Statute is used to create a more equal balance in land distribution, and in the distribution of urban facilities. This is achieved by departing at the level of the federal government. Whereas earlier the creation of social housing was an issue on municipal level, this responsibility was now shifted back in the hands of the federal government. This shift has resulted in policies such as ‘Minha Casa, Minha Vida' and PAC (Programa de Acelaração do Crescimento, Accelerated Growth Program).
The City Statute in Brazil has provided favela residents with legal means to entitlement of the land where they live after five years of occupation. This does not automatically expell the indication ‘favela’ after five years. There are still possibilities to remove the favelas, but in this case the residents can make a stronger claim on the value of their house, and have a stronger position in the legal issues and plans, and relocation. I will illustrate this with the example of the community Vila das Torres in Madureira.
Vila das Torres
Vila das Torres favela was constructed in the 1960s in the neighborhood of Madureira, on a long strip of undefined land between the transmission lines and the railroad. The community exists of one long street, with houses on both sides. It is approximately four kilometers long and forty meters in width, enclosed between a railroad and a right of way for the high voltage transmission lines. The municipality has proposed a plan for a park on the adjacent area of the transmission lines, Parque Madureira, making relocation of the community residents necessary. The community residents have been offered three possibilities: partly sponsored relocation to regular houses in the neighborhood (R$ 10.000,- + 20% funding for the new house), relocation to a new building sites in proximity of the park with temporary housing during construction works (part of the Minha Casa, Minha Vida program), or a sum of money for their house of R$ 10.000. The latter option is discouraged by the municipality as it is neither in the interest of the residents, nor that of the municipality, for they would loose sight of the residents and their new living conditions. The City Statute and its offsprings, such as Minha Casa, Minha Vida, offers the community residents these opportunities. A condition like this, in which the residents are offered three choices, was unlikely before the implementation of the City Statute.
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| Vila das Torres in January 2010 |
Conclusion
I believe that the City Statute is a successful instrument for residents of slum communities, as the social value of their property is recognized. The Statute offers a legal instrument for residents to more appropriate housing. It stood at the basis for several programs in the interest of the urban poor. The availability of nationally financed programs, such as PAC, will stimulate municipalities to search for innovative solutions for slum communities in cooperation with private parties. But the problems are far from solved. With the city in the spotlights of the world press, at least until 2016, Rio still has a long way to go. It must not limit its scope to large projects in the established central areas, but also recognise the increasing metropolitan problems in peripheral zones, and use the City Statute as an instrument to invest in those peripheral zones.
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FARIA, Teresa de Almeida, 2004. Favelas na periferia: (re)produção ou mudança nas formas de produção e acesso à terra e moradia pelos pobres na cidade do Rio de Janeiro nos anos 90. PhD, UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro. Available at: < http://www.ippur.ufrj.br/download/pub/TeresaCristinaDeAlmeidaFaria.pdf > [Accessed: 18 October 2010].
HOLSTON, James, 2008. Insurgent Citizenship: Disjunctions of Democracy and Modernity in Brazil. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press.
NEUWIRTH, Robert, 2006. Shadow Cities – A Billion Squatters, A New Urban World. New York: Routledge.
ROY, Ananya; and ALSAYYAD, Nezar, eds., 2004. Urban Informality: Transnational Perspectives from the Middle East, Latin America, and South Asia. Lanham (MD): Lexington Books.
SOTO, Hernando de, 2000. Het Mysterie van het Kapitaal (Original: The Mystery of Capital, Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else). Translated by Joost Zwart. Utrecht: Spectrum.
