Favelas: Contested Territories

“..."I categorize São Paulo thus: The Palace is the living room. The City Hall is the dining room and the city is the garden. And the favela is the backyard where the trash is thrown.” In 1960, the Canindé favela was eradicated. Gone was shack number 9 on Rua A, where the paper collector from Minas Gerais, Carolina Maria de Jesus, wrote her classic ‘Quarto de Despejo’: a kind of diary of hunger in the favela, from which the excerpt above is taken. The Tietê Expressway opened there.

Informal settlements (UN-Habitat), subnormal agglomerates (IBGE), stilt houses, shacks, areas of special social interest, sub-housing areas, pockets of poverty/areas of social interest, invasion.

There are many terms for what was named a favela over 130 years ago, an occupation that began on Morro da Providência in the Central Zone of Rio de Janeiro around 1890, when soldiers from the War of Canudos arrived and improvised homes, along with people evicted from tenements by Mayor Pereira Passos’ urban reform. However, the concept of the favela is still not entirely settled. Despite this, these territories have not stopped growing in the country over the decades.

The phenomenon of “favelization” intensified with the crisis in the world of work starting in the 1980s, leading to unemployment, automation, and “Uberization” of workers. The deterioration of wage conditions, worsened by the dismantling of the welfare state and increasing financialization, gave the real estate sector new prominence.

This reshaped urban dynamics, evicting residents from historic centers and raising rents, property prices, and the price per square meter of land. The result was an explosion of occupation, especially in São Paulo, where arson proliferated.

In his doctoral thesis, the economist Rafael Pucci hypothesized that these incidents were linked to real estate speculation.

Using maps of favelas from the São Paulo City Hall and cross-referencing data from the Fire Department and the Urban Land and Building Tax (IPTU), the study presented in 2021 at the Institute of Education and Research (Insper) found that fires destroyed up to three times more occupations in upscale neighborhoods, and more frequently on private than public land. The data analyzed identified more than 500 favela fires in São Paulo between 2011 and 2016.

In 2012, a Parliamentary Inquiry Commission (CPI), established in São Paulo’s City Council, described in its final report the probable causes of the constant fires: “low humidity, lack of rain, power overload in precarious installations, use of gas cylinders and wood in constructions.”

The sociologist Tiaraju Pablo, a professor at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp), claimed that the inequalities of the peripheral populations have been exacerbated by neoliberalism.

“The ways of relating in the informal world, whether as a snack seller on the train, an app driver, or a delivery person among the younger ones, are ways that the master Soró (José Soró, community leader 1964-2019), a great leader from Perus, called ‘sivirology,’ the worker without social rights,” he said in an interview in 2022.

This has brought harmful results, such as a lack of prospects for the new generation and a widespread lack of belief in politics and the state as a guarantor of rights or an agent of social change.

“The dismantling of the state has allowed for the creation of a series of private services aimed at the low-income population, such as cheap health clinics and schools. It is a way of undermining the state, of not trusting in the public,” stated Tiaraju Pablo.

Another consequence of this state void is the deepening of state violence, criminal organizations, militias, and the prosperity theology of neo-Pentecostalism, with extremist nuances.

“This leads to solutions that seek to provide a social regulatory ethic, hence the growth of religious fundamentalism and criminal organizations. This widespread lack of belief also brings distrust of bourgeois liberal democracy, making people tend to vote for those who promise to destroy the system, even from within the system. And this happens worldwide,” points out the sociologist who coordinates the Center for Peripheral Studies.

The architect and urban planner Raquel Rolnik questions the assertion that the issue with housing in São Paulo is the absence of a political project. “I bring evidence from the city’s history that all the problems we experience today are the result of public policies, not the lack of them.”

Rolnik, a full-time professor at the Faculty of Architecture and Urbanism at USP, states that it is actually the result of a neoliberal economic model that turned land into a commodity rather than a place to live, a fundamental right.

“Housing is subject to real estate products that follow a logic dependent on the profitability of the built space. Increasingly, the real estate sector has transformed into one of the fundamental elements of the global financial circuit.” The situation analysis model could also be applied to any urban center in the country and the world.

Beneath viaducts, on abandoned land, factories, and buildings, slopes, risk areas, blended into the landscape, the policy of removing favelas in prime areas of the city catered to these private interests.

It was between 1960 and 1970 that simple houses were built through municipal and state agencies, financed at low interest rates, on low-cost land on the outskirts of cities, known as housing developments.

“At the moment, there is no federal, state, or municipal housing policy. The municipality is now starting to take action, focusing on public-private partnerships that clearly do not serve the poorest, as they need to generate profitability for the investor,” said the architect in a 2022 interview.

The census of these areas, which began in the 1950s, has always been problematic and inconclusive. The need to refine data on this population sealed partnerships between the IBGE and Data Favela, founded by Renato Meirelles, the Central Única de Favelas (Cufa), chaired by Preto Zezé, residents’ associations, among other agents to close the gaps in the 2022 Census.

And preliminary figures indicate that there are 11,400 favelas in the country, housing about 16 million people, spread between 6.55 million housing units. That’s more than the entire population of Portugal, Greece, Belgium, Sweden, Austria, and Hungary, or the sum of the populations of Denmark, Finland, Croatia, and Lithuania.

In the IBGE’s sociogeographic definition, favelas and the like are forms of “irregular occupation of public or private land, characterized by an irregular urban pattern, lack of essential public services, and locations in areas with restrictions on occupation.”

According to IBGE projections based on 2010 Census data, one in four of these subnormal clusters are located in the states of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. In other words, 9.4% of São Paulo’s population live in favelas, according to the 2022 Inequality Map published by Rede Nossa São Paulo.

The percentage reaches 32.7% in Vila Andrade and 23.7% in Sacomã, both in the South Zone of the municipality. São Paulo is divided into 96 districts, of which only a dozen have no informal settlements. The preliminary result of the 2022 Census represents an increase of about 40% in the number of Brazilians living in favelas in the last 12 years.

However, the numbers are even higher in capitals like Belém (55.5%), Manaus (53%), and Salvador (42%). But while for decades, the analysis of official parameters emphasized the absence, violence, precariousness, alienation of fundamental rights, and religious fundamentalism, it failed to highlight what remained there: a culture of “making do,” of “jerry-rigging,” of “improvisation,” which denotes creativity and imagination used in the service of common causes.

This struggle for the common good was triggered by the lack of public policies that met local needs for basic services, education, health, and access to property titles, avoiding evictions. Residents began to organise themselves into associations and social movements that also spread to Brazilian and foreign NGOs, which also fought prejudice and gave visibility to local demands and talents.

Inclusion, quotas, ancestry, entrepreneurship, structural racism and human rights were themes that began to circulate inside and outside the so-called communities, a term that emerged in the 1980s in an attempt to mitigate historical prejudice. Over the years, new generations began to reclaim the old name, favela, as a way to underscore their origin, identity, and cultural, religious, and artistic values.

Percussion and religions of African origin gave birth to Rio de Janeiro’s samba in the then-capital of the Empire in the 19th century. And samba left its mark on bossa nova, samba soul, and samba-rock pagode.

To talk about samba is to talk about the favela, and to talk about the favela is to talk about samba schools, and also about the passinho dance, slang, children’s haircuts, bikini brands made of duct tape after sunbathing on the slab, lan house, MV Bill, favela balls that spread American black music in the 1970s, Bonde das Minas, and countless soccer players.

Meanwhile, in São Paulo, the “quebradas,” from the 1980s and 1990s, saw the birth of Racionais MC’s with Mano Brown, Ice Blue, Edi Rock, and KL Jay, graffiti, pixo, rap, Linn da Quebrada, the Center of Black Cultures, Hip Hop Eastern Culture House, Criolo, Sabotage, Rashid, JR Blaw, Rota de Colisão in Praça São Bento, Planet Hemp, Pavilhão 9, Detentos do Rap, Cambio Negros, and Xis & Dentinho.

The so-called relationship between periphery and asphalt has always generated – and continues to generate – tensions and ambiguities. Hélio Oiticica, Noel Rosa, and Rosa Magalhães were some middle-class artists who drew from the creative source and extolled the culture of the “hill,” the cradle of samba and its musical subgenres.

Dona Ivone Lara, Noca da Portela, the favela movies, Gerando Falcões, Seu Jorge, Anitta, CopaRoca, Emicida, Fióti, and the Laboratório Fantasma, Nós do Morro, Dendezeiro, Majur, and Liniker. There are many artists who draw from the ethos of these territories, produce art and culture, and successfully export it to the world as something genuinely Brazilian.

Sociologist Tiaraju Pablo, a professor at the Federal University of São Paulo (Unifesp), also highlights the historical importance of the musical richness of favelas and the peripheries. “The soundtrack to re-democratization was pagode, Fundo de Quintal, Zeca Pagodinho, Beth Carvalho, Jorge Aragão,” he says.

“At the turn of the century, the hip hop movement emerged and sang about the genocide of black youth.” The prevalence of funk, he says, has to do with a sense of urgency among young people. “With no security about what might happen in the future, the simple lyrics of funk list these immediate desires.” He also examines the emergence of movements “made in” the peripheries, such as fashion collectives, slams, marginal literature, cine clubs, poetry readings, dance groups, theater, and audiovisual, which also pave the ways for social and political demands.