By next month memories may be all she has. After a 12-year court battle with residents of a nearby apartment block, which owns the land on which Glorinha's father built his wooden shack nearly 100 years ago, Vila Alice's residents are preparing for eviction.

"I won't leave here without being given compensation," she says. Glorinha, whose full name is Gloria Roque Adriano, slumped into a battered classroom chair outside her home. "What will I do? Sleep in the road?"

Across Rio, hundreds of impoverished Brazilian families, like Glorinha's, are now facing the threat of eviction, as the idea of favela remoção (removal) gains increasing currency among better-off sections of Brazilian society. Fourteen shantytowns, the majority in upper-class boroughs such as Gávea and Jardim Botânico, were recently earmarked for removal by Rio's public prosecutor, while there has been a recent jump in the number of legal battles, like the one over Vila Alice.

José Nerson de Oliveira, vice-president of the Federation of Favelas in Rio de Janeiro, believes as many as 70 communities could be at risk. "We won't let them come into the favelas that we have built with our blood and sweat and destroy everything we have managed to achieve," he told the Guardian. The official reasons for the evictions vary from ownership disputes to attempts to protect the environment and concerns over the safety of those living in the hilltop favelas. But for those fighting removal, the motivation is simple. "It isn't about land or trees or anything like that. They don't want the poor close to them," said Sebastião Machado, 47, a community activist and odd-job man involved in the battle for Vila Alice.

Rio's wealthy benefit from the cheap labour provided by the favela, he says, but at the same they don't want to live with their poorer neighbours. "They want two things at the same time. Isn't it me who fixes things in the bacana's [rich kid's] house? Doesn't it look good when I do?" he jokes.

The idea of remoção is nothing new to Rio de Janeiro, where nearly 20% of the population, a million people, now live in about 750 slums. During the 19th century, town planners forced thousands from the slums of central Rio in a bid to turn the city into a "tropical Paris". In the 1960s, the politics of removal again came to the fore as favelas were bulldozed in the city's south zone and their residents sent to the housing projects on its outskirts. Forgotten by the city's politicians, many of the projects, like Cidade de Deus or City of God, underwent a process of favelização or "favelisation", and are now controlled by drug-trafficking gangs.

Now, after a campaign by sections of the Brazilian media, the question of favela removal has been thrust back on to the political agenda.

Those in favour of removal, like the councillor Leila do Flamengo, whose proposals to reintroduce remoção are being considered in Rio's Assembly, see it as a way of preserving Rio's natural beauty, while creating bairros populares (popular boroughs) further away from the city centre that would offer good quality, low-cost housing to the city's poorest citizens.

"The decadence of public power has allowed Rio de Janeiro to become a city without laws," she says. "This is called urban disorder ... The destruction of the environment here is leading us to an environmental catastrophe and people are joking about it.

"Since so many politicians have electoral bases in the favelas, it has been more convenient to allow this destruction of the physical beauty with which Rio de Janeiro is blessed."

Leila do Flamengo argues the rights of the taxpayers in the nearby apartment block are more important than those of the "squatters" in Vila Alice.

Sectors of the tourist industry also back removal. With Rio hosting the Pan American Games in 2007, several partial removals are being planned around venues in the suburb of Barra da Tijuca, although compensation has been offered to those affected.

"I'm absolutely in favour of removal," the president of the Brazilian Association of Travel Agents, Carlos Alberto Ferreira, recently told Globo newspaper, arguing that without the favelas blighting the landscape, tourism levels would rise, the profits of which could be channelled into fighting poverty.

But from the granite outcrop on which Vila Alice's shacks are stacked, the view is different. Machado is unimpressed by claims that his community is being removed to protect the environment.

"Look at those mansions up there," he says, gesturing across the hillside to clusters of towering homes with thick security walls and elegant balconies. "They destroyed the forest to build the road up there and they destroyed the forest to build the mansions. Isn't that the environment? Nature has nothing to do with it. They just don't want us. Their problem isn't nature - it's poverty."

Ricardo Gouvêa, an architect and human rights campaigner from the Bento Rubião Foundation, says fear of urban violence is feeding support for the relocation of Rio's poor to more distant parts of the city.

"People are confusing the issue of violence and the issue of favelas. The middle class are scared of the violence but it's not removal that will solve this. In the past ... removal has only helped change the address of this problem," he said, citing the example of the Catacumba favela, whose expelled residents went on to form the Complexo da Maré, a sprawling slum near Rio's airport often referred to as the "Gaza Strip" because of its high death rate. "In the 1960s more than 100,000 families were brutally removed and this didn't solve the problem," he said.

Gouvêa also rejects the idea that Rio's shantytowns have a negative impact on its ability to attract foreign tourists. "Violence is a serious problem in Rio that needs a sensible public security policy. But if they put an end to the favelas there will be a big drop in the number of visitors because of the cultural question, particularly the favelas' links to samba and capoeira."

As the planned eviction on November 8 gets closer, Gouvêa is supporting plans to use federal money to purchase the land for the residents of Vila Alice. But residents are pessimistic.

"There are never enough resources for the poor," says Machado bluntly, standing by a tangle of plastic piping that siphons drinking water to Glorinha's home at the foot of Vila Alice. The pumps are turned on every two days, he says.

A similar uncertainty continues for thousands of favelados. "How can I start over again? With what?" says João Carlos, who was born in Vila Alice and has grandchildren there. "You start thinking stupid things ... If they [the police] come here to destroy everything we have built up, it'll end in violence."