ancient cities

270 Favela
as an evil, a “cancer to be extirpated from the
city.”
In Brazil, most of the policies at the time sought
to remove them from central areas. The first interventions
intended to remove the shacks by force
and to relocate inhabitants in temporary residential
sites until they could be rehoused in the periphery.
Most of these earlier experiences failed. First
of all, this was because forced removal was usually
accompanied by great violence, which had a negative
impact on the lives of the residents.
In the middle of last century, abjectly poor
housing areas—that is, favelas—were part of the
scenery of major cities. The cities grew and spread
out beyond their original boundaries. This meant
that many favelas stood on land that once had no
other use but now became very attractive for
expanding commercial activities or even new residential
areas.
The state’s policies allied to pressures from the
property market engendered eviction projects:
road works and urban improvement projects
invariably passed through the favelas and required
expropriations. The high value given to the lands
adjacent to favelas put the population under pressure
from real estate agents. The market strategies
for acquiring land were subtle but efficient and led
to a so-called White expulsion.
Favelas as the Outcome
of Structural Poverty
The 1970s brought a new way of looking at favelas:
The theory of marginality was proposed as a
model to explain urban poverty and the persistence
of favelas in many cities. The theory considered
that poor people’s inability to be included in
the formal industrial circuit explained who this
mass of urban residents were. The favela was no
longer seen as a problem in isolation but as the
consequence of structural forces leading to social
exclusion and consequently poverty. The structural
situation of developing countries was also
explored by theories on dependency or imperialism
and was used to explicate enduring poverty in
these contexts.
Sociologists began to look at favelas as phenomena
worthy of attention. In Brazil, the American
sociologist Anthony Leeds devoted much time to
an extensive and in-depth study of favelas. He
dedicated himself to understanding the diversity of
these spaces by living in the favelas of Rio de
Janeiro. The first Brazilianists consolidated a local
view that contradicted the theory of marginality
and the culture of poverty, which considered the
presence of a subculture of the poor as responsible
for their neither being suited for, nor able to adapt
to, the urban environment.
The Consolidation of Favelas
Within the City
Urban policies in the 1970s saw the issue of the
favela as one of housing shortage, and a most
ambitious program was set up to build large housing
estates on the outskirts of cities. The solution
was again to remove people from shanty homes in
the central areas to apartments and houses on the
periphery. The results of this policy were well
reported by social researchers, who demonstrated
the inadequacy of the solution. When people who
mostly lived on income from informal jobs were
removed to a place where they had to bear the
regular costs of running a home and paying for
urban services, they often abandoned the housing
projects. The favelados sold their homes to people
with formal jobs, who were able to absorb this
type of commitment, while they themselves returned
to other favelas in the city.
Several types of housing were proposed as housing
solutions for the poor. The general model adopted
was low-rise apartment buildings. This modern
typology was shown to be very unpopular with
favela residents. Apartments did not offer flexible
solutions for family growth, and this type of condominium
living demanded an internal organization
that did not exist among the rehoused residents.
Pieces of evidence from other Latin American
countries showed the need for new perspectives
that considered the inhabitants as assets and had
respect for their achievements. A new approach
advocated that favelas must remain in the cities
and that governments should seek solutions to
improve housing and to supply settlements with a
basic set of infrastructures.
Architects such as John Turner offered an original
framework of analysis. In 1972, Turner, who
worked to understand the favelas or barriadas in
Peru, criticized the proposed solution of housing
estates and, from a point of view that borders on