A young, black, little boy dutifully overseeing the entrance of the favela, exposed to drugs and arms, invisible, filled with hatred, waiting in the dark: that is how the fighting sensibility of MV Bill, a Brazilian rapper and leader of CUFA describes the predicament of children employed by the drug trade in the favelas of Rio. They are the other face of Rio, a city whose raw human and natural beauty co-exists with poverty, inequality and violence. Although levels of victimization, inequality and poverty drastically decreased in Brazil and to some extent in Rio de Janeiro, the urban landscape of the city, both in absolute number and in human experiences of suffering, loss and segregation, continues to challenge the imagination of politicians, social scientists and policy makers.
This wonderful and mixed city is also a broken city (cidade partida), where the beauty of the natural landscape, the warmth and conviviality of the carioca and openness to the world co-exist with violence, crime and radical social divisions.
Already for two decades the idea of a broken city/divided city proposed by Ventura (1994) captures the complexity of the divisions and lines of segregation that characterise Rio de Janeiro, and to some extent the whole of Brazil. This is an idea that adds to the notion of Belindia (a neologism constructed out of the names of two contrasting countries, Belgium and India) that has marked for a whole generation the condition and image of Brazil as a country made of immense inequality, containing in itself both India and Belgium, a product and at the same time producer of an acute internal separation that came to be known as the Brazilian social apartheid.
Although more recent debates invite us to reposition the classic description of Rio as a broken city and recognise it as an integrated whole made by the multiple interconnections of its different areas and citizens (Souza e Silva, 2003, 2009), the socio-economic indicators and the subjective experiences of its poor provide compelling evidence that the metaphor of the broken city cannot so easily be laid to rest. The reality of segregation and inequality in Rio is clear in numbers, in the low level of services provided by the State and by the private sector inside favela territories and in the voices of favela-dwellers. In 2010 more than 20 per cent of Rio’s population was living in sub-normal agglomerates, as the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) describes areas known as favelas or communities (comunidades) in Rio.
Favelas are defined as subnormal urban agglomerates, irregular settlements in areas considered inappropriate for urbanization, such as the steep hillsides of Rio’s mountains: a set constituted by at least 51 housing units (shacks, small houses, etc.) occupying – or having occupied – till recently, land owned by a third party, private or public); disposed in general in a disordered and dense form, and lacking in their majority, essential services, public and private.
Over a million people live in these areas of the city, which have grown dramatically since the 1950s as can be seen in Table 2.1.
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Rio de Janeiro: Wonderful City, Broken City
table 2.1 Population Growth in Favelas and in Rio de Janeiro
Year Favelas’
1950 169,305 2,337,451 7.24% -
-1960 337,412 3,307,163 10.20% 99.3% 41.5%
1970 563,970 4,251,918 13.26% 67.1% 28.6%
1980 628,170 5,093,232 12.33% 11.4% 19.8%
1990 882,483 5,480,778 16.10% 40.5% 7.6%
2000 1,092,958 5,857,879 18.66% 23.9% 6.9%
2010 1,393,314 6,288,588 22.16% 27.5% 7.4%
Source: IBGE.
Figure 2.1 shows the disparities in the Human Development Index (HDI) for Rio’s different neighbourhoods. With some higher than Norway, which held the highest HDI for a country in 2000, and others close to Kyrgyzstan, ranked 102, the different areas of the city show, in their staggering inequality, what Rio’s imagination calls the division hill (morro) and asphalt (asfalto). There is a sharp distinction between the favelas in the hills and the elegant neighbourhoods in the asphalted areas.
Figure 2.1 llustrative Comparison of HDI in Rio’s Neighbourhoods and Countries
Source: IPP, 2004; UNDP, 2002.
Since 2000 there have been marked changes in the landscape of poverty and inequality in Brazil. The poverty index sharply decreased in the last decade, and Brazil is part of a select club of nations whose GINI has improved. But the city of Rio did not follow this development as we can see in Table 2.2. The indices for inequality and poverty show that little has changed in the last years in terms of inequality in Rio (Neri, 2010).
Today it is higher than Brazil as a whole. The poverty index for the city has equally increased, although poverty in the favelas has actually decreased. The increase is due to impoverishment and inequality hitting the administrative regions of asphalt, as we can see in the table below.
table 2.2 GINI and Poverty Index: Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, Favela and Asphalt
GINI Poverty index
1996 2008 1996 2008
Brazil 0.602 0.549 28.82% 16.02%
Rio 0.577 0.576 9.61% 10.18%
Favela 0.397 0.384 18.58% 15.07%
Asphalt 0.564 0.570 7.87% 9.43%
Source: Neri, 2010.
Important as it is, improvement in the poverty index of favelas does not erase other numbers that continue to tell a story in which early death by homicide, low income, illiteracy and teenage pregnancy, amongst other indicators, have a clear address in the city. A more recent report from Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV) (Neri, 2010) comparing the five larger low-income communities of Rio with its high income neighbourhoods found that it is the variable ‘favela’ that explains more than half of the differentials related to income per capita. To live in a favela significantly
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Rio de Janeiro: Wonderful City, Broken City
decreases the average income of people with similar occupations. For instance, professionals who live in favelas earn in average 4.8 times less than professionals living outside favelas. Monteiro (2004) found that residence in a favela and lack of maternal education play a major role as determinants of mortality at young ages, with increased risk of mortality among under five year olds being particularly prominent in the favelas.
The social, economic and geographic context gives a clear indication of the problem, but its overall configuration goes far beyond this context to acquire specific cultural and psychological dimensions. The favelas of Rio are environments of great psychosocial and cultural complexity, where the institution of internal and external borders circumscribes the experience of individuals and groups living both inside and outside these territories. The relations between the favela and the city, characterised by the dichotomy morro/asfalto bring to the surface the political and psychosocial problems of segregation and exclusion which are produced by representations that systematically discriminate and stigmatise the favela-dweller.
As we heard many times during the research,
“... we do have some prejudices, police is police, favelado [favela-dweller] is favelado, each one in their patch and place let’s say… Favelado… favelados are all the same, they do not make for good people, they carry the seed of what is bad.”
(UPP Police Commander, community based)
The social psychology of the favela shows that the chronic invisibility of the underground sociability is produced through lenses that erase its lived reality to make it into a criminal and violent identity, ‘a seed of what is bad’. To be of the favela, to live in the favela, and to go about town with the social marking of the favela constitute an experience made of discrimination and identification struggles that take away from its population the right to a positive self-interpretation.
“
“Here, what happens is this, not in the hill but in the asphalt.
They look at you ‘oh, you are from the hill...’, without shame, hide their bags, pretend that they are talking to someone behind you, ‘hello there’, just to cross the street, no shame, they run.”
(Cantagalo, male, 21 years old)
“The place where I live, is hard to travel to work… for instance, I have lost some four to five jobs, just because of the place where I live. You say City of God and people start... they look at you, it is also because of the colour of your skin, you see, there is a lot of prejudice, because of the area and also the skin colour…”
(City of God, male, 25 years old)
However, as we will see later, it is precisely to resist and to fight this predicament that the new social initiatives produced by favela communities are forged.