McCann, Bryan.Hard Times in the Marvelous City: From Dictatorship to Democracy in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2014. xi + 249 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Bibliography. Index (original) (raw)
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The Myth of Marginality Revisited the Case of Favelas in Rio De Janeiro, 1969-2003
2005
This popular samba, "I Am Favela" reveals a lot about the term "marginal" and its relationship to poverty and to favelas. Favela is the Brazilian term for squatter settlements, shantytowns, or irregular settlements (known officially by the Brazilian census-IBGE-as "subnormal agglomerations"). There are at least 752 favelas in Rio de Janeiro today with approximately 1.65 million inhabitants. 2 For the urban poor who cannot afford to enter the formal housing market through purchase or rental, these communities solve the problem by providing a place to live. All of the traditional distinctions between favelas and the rest of the city have become useless as denoters of how and where to draw the boundaries. This is not to say that the "formal" and "informal" parts of the city are indistinguishable, but that the standard ways of bifurcating the urban space in this manner (the "cidade partido" or divided city 3) either never applied or no longer apply. For instance, favelas can no longer be defined by their "illegality" (as they were originally when people invaded open land on hillsides, marshes, watersheds, and roadsides), as most now have de facto tenure. 4 They can no longer be defined by lack of urban services, since over time almost all have obtained access to water, sewage, and electricity. They can no longer be defined according to the precarious construction materials of stucco, wood, or scrap materials, as most are now brick and mortar and two stories high or more. They cannot even be defined as "free" places to live as there is now a thriving internal real estate market for rental and purchase, with prices in the most desirable favelas of the South Zone, such as the famous Rocinha, rivaling those of regular neighborhoods. 5 Finally, they cannot be defined as communities of misery or chronic poverty as not all the people in favelas are poor and not all the urban poor live in favelas. In fact, today, as in the 1960s, there are great differences in wealth and well-being both within and between favelas. This is clearly demonstrated in the
Journal of Community and Applied Social Psychology, 2015
With the holding of the Football World Cup in Brazil this year and the Olympics in 2016, the situation of the poor in Rio de Janeiro and the chasm between the poor and the rich in that city is receiving more attention than usual in the world press. However, it is still difficult for outsiders to understand the reality of the situation. Who controls the favelas? Why do favela dwellers not move out of their environment and settle in other parts of the city? How can one reconcile the harsh conditions inside the favelas with the popular imagery of the carioca spirit: carnival, bossa nova, Carmen Miranda and her fruit hats, and the passion for football? Are these real but separate worlds, or are they just stereotypes which an outsider employs to simplify a much more complex picture? The authors of a recent book that explores these issues are Sandra Jovchelovitch and Jacqueline Priego-Hernandez. Because of their background, experiential and academic, they are ideally placed to bring to this work the sensibility of those who know well the situation in the favelas together with the analytic gaze of professional researchers of social psychological issues. This book examines the complexities of life in a favela. The book does not provide a historical exposition of how the favelas came to be or predict the future course of events. The authors give an in-depth analysis of the situation now, which they present with some optimism without minimising the arduous tasks ahead for everyone who is working to improve the circumstance of favela-dwellers. Rio de Janeiro is a cuidad partida, a divided city. The favela-dwellers, those living in the morro, the hills, are living a life made underground through social, political and geographical exclusions. But in spite of this, the authors describe how the favela-dwellers managed to construct an intricate web of sociabilities, which is often built around the festive, gutsy and defiant carioca nature of life within the favela itself. In the preface, Jovchelovich writes that the researchers 'wanted to understand how communities living under poverty and exclusion could produce positive responses and new pathways for social and individual development'. The protagonists of the book, apart from the favela-dwellers themselves, are the NGOs AfroReggae and Central Única das Favelas (CUFA) and the Unidade de Polícia Pacificadora-Police Pacification Units (UPPs). The backdrop to the story is organised crime and the drug trade, which often replaces the State in shaping life within the favelas. Residents must always take into account rules for daily life set by drug cartels and the police. Made famous in the 2005 award winning documentary 'Favela Rising', AfroReggae is an NGO established in 1993 by an ex-drug dealer in response to a massacre in 1993 when police entered a favela and killed 21 people as a retaliatory attack against the drug trade. This NGO attracts youths from the favelas by organising workshops on ethnic dance and music such as reggae, hip-hop and percussion. It shows young residents that education offers their best opportunity for social emancipation away from a life of violence of the drug trade on the one hand and police oppression on the other. CUFA is another movement, set up in 1999, which focuses its activities on education, culture and sports in order to empower the inhabitants of favelas to be able to help themselves, rather than relying on the State or the protection of the drug barons. The research described in this book draws on various data collection techniques, such as interviews and surveys. The authors employ narrative and factor analysis, amongst other techniques, to analyse the data. They try to understand how the activities of these NGO's, which are deeply embedded in the culture of the favelas, furnish the favela-dwellers with identities that
The favelas of Rio de Janeiro: A temporal and spatial analysis
GeoJournal, 2002
A spatial and temporal analysis, at a city wide scale, is given of the main type of informal housing (favelas) in Rio de Janeiro. Rapid change in the number and distribution of favelas and their inhabitants (favelados) over time is seen as the outcome of two opposing ...
Rio de Janeiro and the divided state: analysing the political discourse on favelas
DISCOURSE & SOCIETY, 2015
This paper analyses the discourse on favelas produced by Brazilian society and consumed in the political field of local administration. The ideological conception of favelas (slums) determines the creation of public policies that reinforce the prejudicial notion of favelas. This work employs Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) so as to analyse several texts extracted from mass media stories and press releases of the Rio government. It shows that state praxis reproduces the understanding of slums as a phenomenon detached from the rest of the society. This alienated vision impacts on different utterances blaming the poor (analysis 1); perpetuating poverty (analysis 2); and reinforcing exclusions (analysis 3).
Favela Associations: Between Repression, Violence and Politics
The article analyzes the dynamics and structures of oppression and marginalization of favela residents in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, as well as the modalities of agency that members of favela residents’ associations have used to respond to the changing situation. I analyze the spatial differentiation between favelas and the formal parts of the city, and how this is reflected in the notion of how the favelas and their residents are characterized. Some single elements, such as violence, have been taken as markers to define the whole space of the favelas as well as their residents. In state policies, the views as well as the agency of favela residents have often been ignored, thereby treating the favela residents as only subjects of different politics and measures. The study presents the analysis the members of favela associations make of state politics, and how their own modalities of agency have contributed both to maintaining the structures of oppression as well as challenging it. The focus is on the favela residents’ associations in two favelas of Southern Rio. The article can be found online at the page of the Journal of Finnish Anthropological Society, vol. 40, No 2 (2015): http://ojs.tsv.fi/index.php/suomenantropologi/issue/view/4169/showToc