Abstract
The favela as a social question presupposes a discursive field and action open to passion and reason, centered around a set of aporias sustained by arguments with which they simultaneously intend to become acquainted, judge, and propose, or, to be coherent with what has been enunciated above, propose, judge, and become acquainted. Thus, the main goal of this chapter is to understand the various conjunctures in which the favela enters the public debate must seek to elucidate the relations inherent between the explanation/assessment of its existence and its problems with the propositions of action.
This article was originally published in Portuguese in the book titled Favelas cariocas: ontem e hoje; edited by Marco Antonio da Silva Mello… [et al.], published by Garamond Press in Rio de Janeiro in 2012.
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Notes
- 1.
In Brazil, the definition of favela is a little controversial. For census purposes, according to the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística—IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics), favelas are “subnormal agglomerations” constituted of shacks/huts and houses, occupying or, until recently, occupied, land belonging to others, whether public or private, generally featuring a dense, disorderly layout, the majority lacking essential public services. http://www.ssrede.pro.br/ibge%20estatisticas.pdf accessed 8th March 2009.
- 2.
In this text, we assume the following concept of the social question: “a challenge that interrogates, brings into question, the capacity of a society to exist as a whole linked by relations of interdependence” (Castel 2009, p. 30).
- 3.
In Metamorphoses of the social question, Castel made a re-reading of the historical transformations from the 18th century to today, highlighting what is new and, at the same time, permanent, borne by its principal crystallizations, that is, present the metamorphosis regarding the previous question, which was to find out how a subordinate, dependent social actor become a fully social subject.
- 4.
Although the debate is firmly founded in the Cariocan (Rio) context, the political status of the city as the capital of the Republic.
- 5.
Topalov (1996) discusses this process in the European context.
- 6.
Understood here as the decision center.
- 7.
Integration of the favela to zones without favelas, understood as urbanistic intervention processes that sought to broaden access of these territories to the predominant urban infrastructure in the latter.
- 8.
Collective rented housing (tenements), traditionally occupied by the poorer social strata in urban centers until the end of the 19th century.
- 9.
The movements for urbanization and legalization of clandestine and irregularly occupied land, the experience of the Núcleo de Legalização dos Loteamentos da Promotoria Pública (Land Legalization Nucleus of the Public Prosecution Dept.), and the constitution of the Cadastro de Loteamento e Favelas da Prefeitura (City Hall Register of Land Division and Favelas), as the first administrative act of recognition of these territories, were determinants in the legitimization of the urbanization discourse.
- 10.
Despite the discourse strongly supported by the “integrating” housing policy and “urban order”, the new mayor ignored the Master Plan, approved in 1992, and created a Strategic Plan, with a focus on the attraction of foreign capital to the city, promoting mega projects—such as the construction of the Yellow Line highway, the Rio City Project, the Interlinked Operations, the candidature of the city to host the Pan American Games, besides the strong resistance to utilization of City Statute instruments (Cardoso 2007). In this aspect, if, on the one hand, the Cesar Maia government, once and for all, consolidated the discourse that defends the permanence of the favelas and their improvement by local state programs, this government also inaugurated a period in which the city would become the object of major capital through the possibility of holding great events.
- 11.
Although the violence in Rio de Janeiro assumed alarming proportions since the end of the 1980s, the housing and security policies were implemented independently in 2007, the year the Pan American Games were held in the city. On the one hand, the municipal government treated the issue as one of integration, facing the problem through cortiço upgrading programs. On the other, the state government remained responsible for security policies independently of other urban interventions.
- 12.
In 2008, the international financial crisis of December 2007 made the Federal Government announce it would strengthen the Accelerated Growth Plan, with the allocation of investment funds to favela urbanization on a scale never seen before in the city. The “new” city project seemed to be being designed: while the federal and state governments invested massively in large urbanistic projects in favelas near the high value areas of the city, and for the areas that must appreciate in value due to the holding of the mega events, the municipal government is undertaking city “clean-up” and “organization” projects.
- 13.
In May 2007, little more than a month from the holding of the Pan American Games, the state and national security forces conducted an operation in one of the largest favelas in the city, resulting in 19 fatal victims in just one night. From that point on, the security forces spent months on guard at one particular favela (schools in the area were closed for the three months), making a demonstration of force, almost exemplary, with the aim of containing any action that could adversely affect the Games. At that moment, the focus went well beyond that event, given that the city was a candidate to host the 2014 World Cup and also the 2016 Olympics, thus justifying any type of violence against these communities, once again, seen as “a threat to integration”.
- 14.
In January 2009, in his first month in government, the mayor, Eduardo Paes, had already published four decrees aimed at containing the expansion of favelas. These decrees accompanied the new program launched by the City Hall to bring “order” to the city. The program soon gained public sympathy, which gave rise to a major campaign for “control” over the expansion of the favelas, as well as removal of some or parts of some, established for a long time, with emphasis on the South and West Zones—the latter had already been the focus of removalist proposals since 2007, when works were underway for the Pan American Games (O Globo newspaper headlines: “Mayor issues decrees to contain favela expansion” [1/12/2009] and “Mayor will impose new eco-limits on favelas” [1/16/2009]).
- 15.
Here, the term, ‘grammars’ refers to the work carried out by Edson Nunes (published in English under the title Bureaucratic insulation and clientelism in contemporary Brazil: uneven state-building and the taming of modernity), in which he identifies four institutionalized patterns of relations that structure the ties between the society and the State in Brazil (denominated ‘political grammars’), articulated in a fluid, combined manner: clientelism, corporativism, bureaucratic insulation and universalism of procedures.”
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de Queiroz Ribeiro, L.C., Olinger, M. (2017). The Favela in the City-Commodity: Deconstruction of a Social Question. In: de Queiroz Ribeiro, L. (eds) Urban Transformations in Rio de Janeiro. The Latin American Studies Book Series. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-51899-2_12
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