Favela

Favela is an umbrella name for several types of impoverished neighborhoods in Brazil. The term, which means slum or ghetto, was first used in the Slum of Providência in the center of Rio de Janeiro in the late 19th century, which was built by soldiers who had lived under the favela trees in Bahia and had nowhere to live following the Canudos War. Some of the last settlements were called bairros africanos. Over the years, many former enslaved Africans moved in. Even before the first favela came into being, poor citizens were pushed away from the city and forced to live in the far suburbs.
Most modern favelas appeared in the 1970s due to rural exodus, when many people left rural areas of Brazil and moved to cities. Unable to find places to live, many people found themselves in favelas. Census data released in December 2011 by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics showed that in 2010, about 6 percent of the Brazilian population lived in favelas and other slums. Favelas are located in 323 of the 5,565 Brazilian municipalities. The 2022 Census indicated that there were 12,348 favelas and urban communities, with 16,390,815 individuals, or 8.1% of the country's population. However, as one report states, "There is inherent difficulty to measure these territories as they are extremely dynamic and, to a great extent, do not have either officially established boundaries or registered housing units."

History

The term favela dates back to the late 1800s. At the time, soldiers were brought from the War of Canudos, in the northeastern state of Bahia, to Rio de Janeiro and left with no place to live. When they served in Bahia, those soldiers had been familiar with Canudos' Morro da Favela – a name referring to favela, a skin-irritating tree in the spurge family indigenous to Bahia. When they settled on the Providência hill in Rio de Janeiro, they nicknamed the place Favela hill.
The favelas were formed prior to the dense occupation of cities and the domination of real estate interests. Following the end of slavery and increased urbanization into Brazilian cities, a lot of people from the Brazilian countryside moved to Rio. These new migrants sought work in the city but with little to no money, they could not afford urban housing.
During the 1950s, the favelas grew to such an extent that they were perceived as a problem for the whole society. At the same time the term favela underwent a first institutionalization by becoming a local category for the settlements of the urban poor on hills. However, it was not until 1937 that the favela actually became central to public attention, when the Building Code first recognized their very existence in an official document and thus marked the beginning of explicit favela policies.
The housing crisis of the 1940s forced the urban poor to erect hundreds of shantytowns in the suburbs, when favelas replaced tenements as the main type of residence for destitute Cariocas. The explosive era of favela growth dates from the 1940s, when Getúlio Vargas's industrialization drive pulled hundreds of thousands of migrants into the former Federal District, to the 1970s, when shantytowns expanded beyond urban Rio and into the metropolitan periphery.
Urbanization in the 1950s provoked mass migration from the countryside to the cities throughout Brazil by those hoping to take advantage of the economic opportunities urban life provided. Those who moved to Rio de Janeiro chose an inopportune time. The change of Brazil's capital from Rio to Brasília in 1960 marked a slow but steady decline for the former, as industry and employment options began to dry up. Unable to find work, and therefore unable to afford housing within the city limits, these new migrants remained in the favelas. Despite their proximity to urban Rio de Janeiro, the city did not extend sanitation, electricity, or other services to the favelas. They soon became associated with extreme poverty and were considered a headache to many citizens and politicians within Rio.
In the 1970s, Brazil's military dictatorship pioneered a favela eradication policy, which forced the displacement of hundreds of thousands of residents. During Carlos Lacerda's administration, many were moved to public housing projects such as Cidade de Deus, later popularized in a widely popular feature film of the same name. Poor public planning and insufficient investment by the government led to the disintegration of these projects into new favelas.
By the 1980s, worries about eviction and eradication were beginning to give way to violence associated with the burgeoning drug trade. Changing routes of production and consumption meant that Rio de Janeiro found itself as a transit point for cocaine destined for Europe. Although drugs brought in money, they also accompanied the rise of the small arms trade and of gangs competing for dominance.
While there are Rio favelas which are still essentially ruled by organized crime groups like drug traffickers or by organized crime groups called milícias, all of the favelas in Rio's South Zone and key favelas in the North Zone are now managed by Pacifying Police Units, known as UPPs. While drug dealing, sporadic gun fights, and residual control from drug lords remain in certain areas, Rio's political leaders point out that the UPP is a new paradigm after decades without a government presence in these areas.
Most of the current favelas greatly expanded in the 1970s, as a construction boom in the more affluent districts of Rio de Janeiro initiated a rural exodus of workers from poorer states in Brazil. Since then, favelas have been created under different terms but with similar results.
Communities form in favelas over time and often develop an array of social and religious organizations and forming associations to obtain such services as running water and electricity. Sometimes the residents manage to gain title to the land and then are able to improve their homes. Because of crowding, unsanitary conditions, poor nutrition and pollution, disease is rampant in the poorer favelas and infant mortality rates are high. In addition, favelas situated on hillsides are often at risk from flooding and landslides.
File:Vidigal, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.jpg|thumb|350px|The lights of Vidigal favela in Rio de Janeiro as seen from Ipanema and Leblon beaches. The cone spire to the far right is part of the Morro Dois Irmãos.

Service in Favela	Percent
Sanitation	67.3
Water	88.3
Electricity	99.7
Garbage collection	95.4
People in Favela	Population
Favela residents of Brazil's population	11,400,000
Demographics in Favela	Proportion
Pardo or black	68.4
Illiteracy	8.4

Public policy towards favelas

In the late 19th century, the state gave regulatory impetus for the creation of Rio de Janeiro's first squatter settlement. The soldiers from the War of Canudos were granted permission by Ministry of War to settle on the Providência hill, located between the seaside and centre of the city. The arrival of former black slaves expanded this settlement and the hill became known as Morro de Providência. The first wave of formal government intervention was in direct response to the overcrowding and outbreak of disease in Providência and the surrounding slums that had begun to appear through internal migration. The simultaneous immigration of White Europeans to the city in this period generated strong demand for housing near the water and the government responded by "razing" the slums and relocating the slum dwellers to Rio's north and south zones. This was the beginning of almost a century of state-sanctioned interventions marked by aggressive eradication policies.
Favelas in the early twentieth century were considered breeding grounds for antisocial behavior and spread of disease. The issue of honor pertaining to legal issues was not even considered for residents of the favelas. After a series of comments and events in the neighborhood of Morro da Cyprianna, during which a local woman Elvira Rodrigues Marques was slandered, the Marques family took it to court. This is a significant change in what the public considered the norm for favela residents, who the upper classes considered devoid of honor altogether.
Following the initial forced re-relocation, favelas were left largely untouched by the government until the 1940s. During this period politicians, under the auspice of national industrialization and poverty alleviation, pushed for high density public housing as an alternative to the favelas. The "Parque Proletário" program relocated favelados to nearby temporary housing while land was cleared for the construction of permanent housing units. In spite of the political assertions of Rio's Mayor Henrique Dodsworth, the new public housing estates were never built and the once-temporary housing alternatives began to grow into new and larger favelas. Skidmore argues that "Parque Proletário" was the basis for the intensified eradication policy of the 1960s and 1970s.
The mass urban migration to Rio de Janeiro in the 1950s resulted in the proliferation of favelas across the urban terrain. In order to deal with the "favela problem", the state implemented a full-scale favela removal program in the 1960s and 1970s that resettled favelados to the periphery of the city. According to Anthony, some of the most brutal favela removals in Rio de Janeiro's history occurred during this period. The military regime of the time provided limited resources to support the transition and favelados struggled to adapt to their new environments that were effectively ostracized communities of poorly built housing, inadequate infrastructure and lacking in public transport connections. Perlman points to the state's failure in appropriately managing the favelas as the main reason for the rampant violence, drugs and gang problems that ensued in the communities in the following years. The creation of BOPE in 1978 was the government's response to this violence. BOPE, in their all black military ensemble and weaponry, was Rio's attempt to confront violence with an equally opposing entity.
In the 1980s and early 1990s, public policy shifted from eradication to preservation and upgrading of the favelas. The "Favela-Bairro" program, launched in 1993, sought to improve living standards for the favelados. The program provided basic sanitation services and social services, connected favelas to the formal urban community through a series of street connections and public spaces and legalized land tenure. Aggressive intervention, however, did not entirely disappear from the public agenda. Stray-bullet killings, drug gangs and general violence were escalating in the favelas and from 1995 to mid-1995, the state approved a joint army-police intervention called "Operação Rio". "Operação Rio" was the state's attempt to regain control of the favelas from the drug factions that were consolidating the social and political vacuum left by previously unsuccessful state policies and interventions.
Since 2009, Rio de Janeiro has had walls separating the rich neighborhoods from the favelas, officially to protect the natural environment, but critics charge that the barriers are for economic segregation.