Rio De Janeiro Favelas to Get Facelift As Brazil Invests Billions in Redesign
Rio de Janeiro favelas to get facelift as Brazil invests billions in redesign
Architects grapple with the problem of integrating the shanty towns into the city
Tom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
The Guardian, Sunday 5 December 2010 18.33 GMT
A military helicopter flies over the Morro do Alemao favela. Photograph: Antonio Scorza/AFP/Getty Images
Behind a turquoise, graffiti-scarred door on the edge of downtown Rio sits a 67-year-old man wearing Bermuda shorts. Glancing between two computer monitors, he hammers out a plan to save his city.
"It's not even about ideals," he says. "I have four children, a load of grandchildren and they live here. All I can do is try to improve a little bit of the city for those [generations] that are coming. It is fundamental."
Welcome to the practice of Luiz Carlos Toledo, a veteran Brazilian architect and one of hundreds of local urbanistas battling to create a bold new blueprint for one of the most pressing and perplexing questions in Rio and much of our increasingly urban world: how to transform, develop and integrate sprawling, often crime-ridden slums into the outside city?
Such issues are nothing new to Rio, one of the world's most unequal and violent cities, where the rich and poor live side-by-side yet in apparently distinct universes.
But they are increasingly urgent, following the latest round of deadly gunfights between police and drug traffickers that culminated in thousands of security forces storming the city's most notorious shantytown and evicting hundreds of heavily armed gang members last week. At least 39 people were killed.
With the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympics on the horizon, authorities are engaging in two simultaneous battles to improve life in the favelas: implementing "pioneering" pacification schemes in the slums and splashing out billions of dollars remodelling the favelas as part of an urbanisation initiative called Morar Carioca (roughly "Rio Living").
The selection process, which ends next month, will see 40 architecture practices tasked with redesigning 582 inner-city slums that house around 1.2 million impoverished and excluded Brazilians.
Last week Rio's mayor, Eduardo Paes, said 19 creches, five health clinics and one cinema would be constructed in the Complexo do Alemao and the Complexo da Penha slums, the scenes of some of the worst violence.
"This will be the biggest and most extensive intervention in the favelas in Rio's history," said Pierre Batista, the city's undersecretary for housing. "Our goal is to urbanise all of the favelas by 2020 – no matter where they are."
For most of last century authorities and many residents gazed up at the favelas and heard one word: "removal". Slums in the city centre and its beachside south zone were bulldozed and their residents dispatched to drab and distant housing estates such as the City of God, made famous by Fernando Meirelles's blockbuster film.
Sergio Magalhães, the president of Rio's Architecture Institute, the IAB, which is co-ordinatingMorar Carioca, admits that until the early 1990s most architects had given favelas hardly a thought.
Now, he believes, that mentality is changing as planners focus on "integration" rather than removal and some firms start to specialise in, and profit from, such work.
"An architect can no longer believe he has miraculous formulas which he can impose on society. Contemporary urbanism is not a closed model. It is about [embracing] all possibilities … and above all the recognition of what already exists and what each community has already managed to build. In this sense Rio de Janeiro is a very important lesson in urbanism for the world."
Like Toledo, Magalhães has spent decades grappling with the Rubik's Cube of how to integrate marginalised slums with the wider city. Until Haiti's January earthquake he was working on similar projects in Port-au-Prince.
Magalhães said Brazil's growing expertise in favela urbanisation and the economic impetus of the Olympics meant it was now "technically possible and economically viable" to give the slums an unprecedented facelift.
"London's Olympics can be a very important example – the way London is using the Olympics to recover a poor and rundown area. But here the Olympics can be much more relevant than in London … a city with far fewer problems than Rio. Here it could [revolutionise] the city," he said.
In several giant, drug-ridden favelas work has already begun. Walkways, cable-cars, roads and swimming pools are springing up in areas such as Rocinha, Manguinhos and the Complexo do Alemao, a gritty sea of redbrick shantytowns that was recently "conquered" by thousands of security workers following intense shootouts involving helicopters, armoured personnel carriers and tanks.
Future projects, funded by the state and federal governments and international banks, could see light railways erected.
Toledo's most recent intervention, a radical remodelling of the city's largest shantytown, Rocinha, even featured a dramatic, curved walkway by Brazil's legendary architect Oscar Niemeyer. Niemeyer, now 102, reportedly handed over his design free of charge.
"I have been involved in major projects but I have never done such important work as in Rocinha," said Toledo, who spent a year working out of a temporary practice in the shantytown developing ideas with suggestions from some of its estimated 110,000 residents.
"When I urbanise a favela I'm trying to activate that economy, hoping that the area will gain a social and economic dynamic that is similar to the rest of the city."
Toledo described his work as an attempt to demolish the "invisible walls" that had been erected around the city's slums since his childhood, when he roamed freely in the Fogueteiro shanty near his home. Today the dilapidated slum is controlled by rifle-toting members of the Red Command drug faction and off-limits to most outsiders.
"This city was not divided like it is now. There was not this segmentation. Today it is as if they have put invisible walls up around the favelas … It is intolerable living in Rio de Janeiro today. It is a city under siege. It reminds me of Northern Ireland during the Troubles, when you couldn't go from one block to another. It was madness and Rio de Janeiro is the same."
But, privately, some urban planners wonder if installing cable-car networks is an effective use of public money or merely an attractive proposition for contractors.
Others fear the favelas will be given a superficial makeover to "beautify" the city for tourists and warn that without major investment in job creation and education schemes, urbanisation alone will not be enough.
"We welcome urbanisation, as long as there is community participation and as long as it is not just makeup," said Jose Martins de Oliveira, a 64-year-old community leader from Rocinha. "Residents must be heard. If they don't listen to the community it can be a very dangerous process."
Concern that some communities will be "removed" from areas close to Olympic venues also persists. Some limited demolitions have already been announced.
"It worries me," said Oliveira. "I know of places they are planning to totally remove. Removal is an affront to a family. Urbanisation is one thing. Removal quite another."
Batista, the undersecretary, said Morar Carioca could represent the "great social legacy" of the Olympics, with the construction of "clinics, creches, schools and transport". "It is a daring plan, but one that we will see through. After this project there will no longer be this barrier between the slums and the city below."
In his practice, a stone's throw from the city's transsexual red-light district, Toledo was putting the finishing touches to his vision for Rio's future.
"I'm an old man," he sighed. "Today I fight for this – as an architect, a citizen, a father and a grandfather – because without this the city has no solution … If we do not face up to this problem the city will become unsolvable before the Olympics … and for me [the solution] is about habitation."