Since the end of the 19th century, the city of Rio de Janeiro has witnessed the emergence and growth of informal settlements known as favelas. There have been many attempts to urbanise or even eradicate these settlements.
The strategies have not always acted in the best interests of those living in these settlements nor have they met social welfare demands as an objective. Many initiatives have been instituted due to the fact that most favelas occupy central regions and are in a permanent state of tension with the so-called asfalto or asphalt city, also known as the formal city. Among these public initiatives was the Favela-Bairro programme which began in intending to urbanise 15 medium-sized favelas.
The success of the infrastructure-driven programme has led to its expansion and the creation of other similar programmes — Bairrinho, for favelas with fewer than houses, and Grandes Favelas , for communities with more than 2, residences.
This study examines the growth of these programmes three decades after their initial development. According to the same survey IBGE, , p. Figure 1. In a sense, the action of going beyond the term slum or informal settlement and naming them favelas in the early 20th century, according to Fischer , was a way of not so much describing where poor people lived but rather spelling out the relationship between such places and their surroundings.
Yet, in Brazil, favelas are as much a part of the city as the planned city or the asfalto. They are products of needs self- co- produced by squatters and those marginalised by society. Historically, favelas are often devoid of basic sanitation infrastructure, accessibility to services, and adequate housing, among other easily features of the asfalto , easily recognised by people in general.
