Despite the looming World Cup and Olympics, constitutional reform and powerful drug lords have kept redevelopment of Rio’s squatter settlements at bay – but the price is poverty and anarchy

The granite hump of Providencia gazes down like a stern guardian on the old port of Rio de Janeiro. It offers probably the finest viewpoint over any city I know. Rio’s great bay stretches inland to distant mountains. Below lies what was once the world’s third largest port, now mostly silent. Along the coast a parade of beach resorts march to the foot of Sugar Loaf Mountain, with Copacabana and Ipanema hiding beyond. Over them all towers a range of steep rain-forested hills, crowned by the art deco beacon of Christ the Redeemer. The sight is breath-taking.



I was admiring this view from the top of the hill when I felt a hand tugging at my belt. In this city of muggers, and eager to avoid a scene, I moved quickly along the handrail, only to be alarmed when the hand came and resumed its grasp. I then noticed it belonged to a blind boy with severe disabilities. I had been blocking his only route home. It was a wretched scene amid that firmament of wonder.

In most cities, Providencia would be a Montmartre or Nob Hill, a luxury retreat above the city smoke. Yet it is Rio’s oldest favela, settled in 1897 by a group of returning war veterans. Its cheap houses remain to this day, mostly unserviced and stinking of sewage, inaccessible except by precipitous steps.

At the last count there were roughly 600 such “informal” communities, accommodating a quarter of the city’s 6 million inhabitants. Over the past half century Rio’s centre of gravity has, as with many cities, drifted west from its original home. It now sprawls for over 20 miles of beaches and promontories, dramatically interspersed with mountains. Clinging to their slopes are squatter settlements, often lying immediately adjacent to rich districts “on the asphalt” below.

All developing cities – and most developed ones – have their slums. But Rio’s are remarkable in their ubiquity and in their survival in the same locations. While those on the flat can be reached by road, most are stacked on hillsides, hard to reach on wheels, flooded in storms and lacking sewerage and other public services. Until recently the favelas – named after scrub plants that once occupied them – were no-go areas for the police or government officials, and remained in thrall to feuding drugs gangs. They testify to the futility of criminalising the supply of what is a standard consumer product. The favelas are Blade Runner meets Italian hill town.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Violent protests broke out in a favela near Copacabana this month after a resident was killed in clashes with the army. Photograph: Christophe Simon/AFP/Getty

With the World Cup and Olympics looming, these places are testing Brazil’s civic conscience. Most cities would by now have contrived to clear such settlements, rehousing their inhabitants with varying degrees of compulsion elsewhere. The process can be seen from Mexico City to Lagos, from Johannesburg to Bangalore, or in London or Paris a century ago. Older areas are gentrified and this in turn draws tax revenue, private investment and political clout to deliver new urban infrastructure. Even in Rio this is happening to such historic central areas as Lapa and Santa Teresa, where old streets are starting to draw restaurants, shops and entertainment back to depressed quarters.



In Rio’s favelas, however, any such process has largely stalled. Their control by the drug lords kept all forms of government, including redevelopment, at bay, often at the point of a gun. A 1988 constitutional reform gave residents a degree of security of tenure, usually after five years of occupation, and title deeds are now reckoned to cover between a third and two-thirds of favela residents. Compulsory eviction supposedly requires local consultation and the availability of alternative housing near at hand.

Such security has not been totally effective, though. The Popular Committee for the World Cup and the Olympics, which has been behind recent protests against the football tournament, claims no fewer than 170,000 people are being removed from their homes for the games. But activists have held out against the sort of mass clearance experienced by British cities in the 1960s and 1970s and by Beijing before its Olympics. Rio has failed to remove the Vila Autódromo favela, which still stands defiantly by the fence of the new Olympic park.

For followers of post-modernism’s “new urbanism”, Rio is an exciting, infuriating place. As an urban form the favela is inherently robust, green and “sustainable”. It can offer high-density, low-cost living on locations penetrating the city centre and within reasonable reach of work. Its residents rely on walking and two-wheeled vehicles – taxis are ferocious motorbikes – creating close-knit, self-reliant communities in which ties of family and neighbour are strong. They delineate their own boundaries of loyalty and defensible space.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The ‘pacified’ favela of Cantagalo. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty

As a result the world flocks to study them. They have become intellectual works-in-progress to universities such as Pennsylvania, Columbia and the LSE. Pennsylvania even built its own campus “pop-up favela” for study purposes. A leading NGO champion, Theresa Williamson of Catalytic Communities, sees the favelas as the “ideal affordable housing stock”. Their buildings are mostly brick-built and sound, maximising every inch of space and fashioned to occupants’ needs. They are low-energy to a fault.



The challenge is somehow to upgrade them to meet even the minimal standards expected for modern urban living, without lurching into old-fashioned, state-sponsored clearance and renewal. It is the challenge of the “smart cities” movement. Rio’s authorities have long acknowledged the policy: Favela Bairro in the 1990s saw them as “civic assets” rather than “aberrations”. At its most basic, it secured the widespread concreting of alleys and stairways and introduced some sewerage. The theft of electricity was tolerated, through illicit wires that form a lethal canopy over back lanes.



Favela Bairro was assessed by the RioOnWatch website as having upgraded 168, or roughly a quarter, of the larger favelas by 2010. That year it was superseded by the Olympic “legacy” programme of Morar Carioca. Launched by the flamboyant mayor, Eduardo Paes, this allotted $4.5bn (£2.7bn) to achieve the complete “urbanisation” of the favelas by 2020. The city would be improved from the ground up and through “the participation of organised society … through assemblies and meetings in the communities”. In future, the favela would be seen not as Rio’s problem but “the solution … the visionary answer to how the world is going to deal with the third of humanity who will live in informal settlements by 2050”.

Morar Carioca was undeniably an imaginative exercise in sensitive urban renewal. Prepared with the Institute of Brazilian Architects , it would retrofit the city’s entire stock of low-cost housing, and do so free of the cost, misery and social disruption of traditional urban renewal. Houses would be left to their owners. The state would renew the public space round them.

The spirit of Morar Carioca lives, but those involved in it have been disappointed. A visit to the architects’ institute is a gloomy experience, as its president, Sergio Magalhaes, shuffles maps and plans from which one project after another has been removed. What had been “a special moment in mobilising the efforts, hopes and expectations of the people”, he says, had become merely an exercise in using the Olympics to direct investment to rich and expanding areas.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Teleférico cable car system soars over the Complexo do Alemão favela in the north of the city. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty Images

The promised investment has not been forthcoming, while government effort has been directed at favela “pacification”. Initiated in 2008, this rightly acknowledged that lasting improvement of favela living conditions required government control of law and order. Otherwise nothing would happen. This took the form of mass police incursions into one favela after another, driving the gang leaders out – even if they merely moved to others. The police then remained as a permanent presence. Favela police commanders would become, in effect, local mayors.



The programme has had its failures. Last week a police killing in the Pavão-Pavãozhino favela near Copacabana showed how easily the police can revert to old and brutal habits. The new police station in Alemão is reminiscent of Ulster’s fortified citadels during the troubles. They are hardly a sign of hearts and minds being won and have led the geographer and local blogger, Chris Gaffney, to describe it as having merely “replaced one arbitrary and militarised system of justice with another”. But killings in pacified favelas, by both police and gangs, have halved over the past five years. If pacification is not an end in itself it is the essential beginning of a process, the rule of some sort of law on which regeneration can proceed.

The trouble, as always, is the lack of resources for that regeneration. Brazil, like most modern political economies, is in thrall to mega-events. Glory lies in the grand gesture, the big scheme, the glamour project. Rio’s current pride and joy is the redevelopment of its disused port area, the Porto Maravilha project. An overhead motorway is being buried underground and a promenade laid out between the downtown and the water. Trump towers and a luxury hotel are to rise beside it. Historic 19th-century streets are being restored and an old slave dock uncovered. A curiously titled “museum of the future” designed by Santiago Calatrava is emerging on an old quay.

This is easy renewal, of a virtually empty zone of the old city. Nor has there been much attempt to repopulate it with socially mixed housing. An effort to clear a third of the adjacent favela of Providencia was balked by furious protests. A local hero, the artist Maurício Hora, campaigned against eviction by photographing threatened residents and projecting their faces on to their outside walls.

Providencia was eventually awarded not improved utilities but one of the more bizarre gestures of urban renewal I have seen. A heavily over-engineered $35m cable car runs just half way up its slope and then appears to have been abandoned. A similar contraption in London’s Docklands runs at barely 10% of capacity. Such investments are beloved of mayors, sponsors and contractors, but seldom of residents.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Brazilian artist Maurício Hora has documented daily life in the Providencia favela. Photograph: Antonio Scorza/AFP/Getty Images

A longer cable car, meanwhile, carries a trickle of passengers over the roofs of the sprawling favela of Complexo do Alemão in north Rio. Its otherworldly structure, constantly moving cars and white-gloved attendants would seem more appropriate to a ski-lift in Gstaadt. It stops near few houses and is unavailable for heavy goods. A ground-level funicular would have made more sense.



Attempts to upgrade low-lying favelas are eerily reminiscent of similar British projects of the 1960s and 70s. I walked through what is left of Manguinhos with Leona Deckelbaum, a local housing official turned activist. It was old-fashioned federal slum redevelopment: regimented tenements gave on to desolate open spaces, with allotments and kiosks in which local people were expected to find work. While a library has been opened, most of the area was smashed and deserted, the kiosks unused.

Next door, across a no man’s land of rubble, lay the remains of the surviving favela: a warren of lanes, alleys, workshops, bars, undrained and filthy. The place was regularly flooded by a polluted canal, but it was also a live community. “If only the money would have been spent just fitting drains and sewerage into the old favela,” Deckelbaum said. “But then, sewers do not look good at world urbanisation conferences – not like cable cars.”

The same lesson is evident on the outskirts of the city at Cidade de Deus. This was a state resettlement estate laid out in the 1960s and notorious as setting for the movie, City of God. It was built with only the most rudimentary infrastructure and left to run itself, which soon brought it under the aegis of drug gangs. With no government or planning and few public services, the area’s population grew to 70,000. Floors were added, yards were filled in, lanes disappeared. The original layout was swiftly obliterated. Cidade de Deus has recently been “pacified”. It yet could offer a better template of self-improved housing than a cluster of frigid municipal towers.

Yet that prospect for Rio has its own bugbears. After pacification, favelas adjacent to the coast such as Vidigal and Rocinha have seen rents and house prices surge, inviting complaints of gentrification. “Favela chic” has entered the language. TripAdvisor exults over “authentic eco-friendly favela” tours. Rocinha has coffee and sushi bars. A guest-house hotel on the summit of Vidigal has a view to rival any on the Côte d’Azur, even if it is desperate to reach. Hip restaurants and alternative bed-and-breakfasts are appearing on the back of discreet coach tours.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A boy rides a bike with no tires in the Complexo da Mare favela, which is being occupied by federal troops ahead of the World Cup. Photograph: Mario Tama/Getty

This presents Rio with the classic urban paradox. The superb location of many favelas gives them immense imputed value from gentrification and tourism, value that in most cities would have long drawn to them new residents, employers and investors. They in turn would have generated resources for better services.



Yet favelas are proud places whose residents enjoy a measure of security of tenure and a growing civic confidence. “We want to be happy and walk freely in the favela where we were born,” states a protest banner in Manguinhos. Another at Vila Autódromo boasts “a peaceful and orderly neighbourhood since 1967”. As these places are upgraded and made secure, there is an inevitable impact on their desirability and price – and on the desire of some residents to realise such assets as they have and move elsewhere.



All forms of social housing sooner or later must grapple with rights of property transfer. A federal proposal to build 2,200 social housing units in the new Porto Maravilha was challenged by Rio’s mayor, Eduardo Paes, on the grounds that their residents would just sell them. “Don’t come to me with laws telling them they cannot sell,” he told a recent conference, “because they do it … everybody sells their house.” While state-run estates, condominiums and co-operatives can impede this, the implied legal control is a far cry from a Rio favela. Besides, the essence of the favela sovereignty is local ownership.

Any visitor to Rio’s poorer districts sees a glaring conflict between the chronic need for investment and the frozen value of the land. People want services “from the ground up”, yet are sceptical of the necessary resources being generated by their own rents and taxes – even if it were to mean new residents, investment in infrastructure, jobs and civic clout. They see gentrification leading to evictions, even where the residents themselves would benefit from property sales. Their default is to see the state as responsible for retrofitting their communities.

All urban renewal is a conflict between social geography and the market for land. Since the 1980s, Rio’s favelas have “traded” a degree of security of low-cost tenure for dreadful living conditions and crime-ridden governance. The constitutional “right to occupy” a particular plot of land has been at the price of zero investment, poverty and anarchy. The freedom to stay put implies bondage, if it means being unable to up sticks and move, taking the value of one’s home with one. Paes himself recognises this, and is reluctant to control the housing market and become “the Fidel Castro of the favelas”.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Life in the Cantagalo favela. Photograph: Tasso Marcelo/AFP/Getty Images

The favelas are thus a test bed of every tenet of modern urban renewal. They are defended by new urbanists as the social housing stock of the future. But if they remain static communities, they will never see the investment they sorely need. Their aspiring and enterprising young will leave in search of more salubrious living quarters, while their parents stay, as in urban ghettos the world over, prisoners of an archaic poverty.



Rio’s favelas may entrance academics as sustainable informal housing, but academic fashion builds no drains, pipes, schools or clinics. Letting the property market rip is clearly not acceptable, and can be as traumatic to a community as were the mass slum clearances of the 20th century. But there has to be a compromise between gentrification and stasis. Somewhere in a freer residential property market lie the resources to update these places.

Favelas are exciting as a remarkable surviving pattern of urban living. A vision, sensitive and workable, is in place for their renewal. But Rio is still searching for a way to implement it.

• Simon Jenkins: the World Cup and Olympics threaten to overwhelm Rio – yet there is time to create a sensation out of disaster

• This article was amended on 1 May 2014. An earlier version of the first photo caption said in error that the Morro da Providencia favela rises above Copacabana and Ipanema beaches.