All developing cities – and most developed ones – have their slums. But Rio’s are remarkable in their ubiquity and in their survival in the same locations. While those on the flat can be reached by road, most are stacked on hillsides, hard to reach on wheels, flooded in storms and lacking sewerage and other public services. Until recently the favelas – named after scrub plants that once occupied them – were no-go areas for the police or government officials, and remained in thrall to feuding drugs gangs. They testify to the futility of criminalising the supply of what is a standard consumer product. The favelas are Blade Runner meets Italian hill town.

With the World Cup and Olympics looming, these places are testing Brazil’s civic conscience. Most cities would by now have contrived to clear such settlements, rehousing their inhabitants with varying degrees of compulsion elsewhere. The process can be seen from Mexico City to Lagos, from Johannesburg to Bangalore, or in London or Paris a century ago. Older areas are gentrified and this in turn draws tax revenue, private investment and political clout to deliver new urban infrastructure. Even in Rio this is happening to such historic central areas as Lapa and Santa Teresa, where old streets are starting to draw restaurants, shops and entertainment back to depressed quarters.

In Rio’s favelas, however, any such process has largely stalled. Their control by the drug lords kept all forms of government, including redevelopment, at bay, often at the point of a gun. A 1988 constitutional reform gave residents a degree of security of tenure, usually after five years of occupation, and title deeds are now reckoned to cover between a third and two-thirds of favela residents. Compulsory eviction supposedly requires local consultation and the availability of alternative housing near at hand.

Such security has not been totally effective, though.

 On Mar 14, 2008, at 3:43 PM, Architexturez-IN wrote:

``I'm not interested in what people say,'' Niemeyer said in a Nov. 11 interview from Rio. ``I'm not going to waste my time discussing these things. I won't talk to people who know nothing about architecture.''

That is the bittersweet verdict of Oscar Niemeyer, the legendary architect who designed many of the city's civic monuments and is a keeper of its original flame. In a rare interview Niemeyer, now 100 and still professionally active, told the Guardian that his masterpiece was out of control.

"The way Brasilia has evolved, it has problems. It should have stopped growing some time ago. Traffic is becoming more difficult, the number of inhabitants has surpassed the target, limits are being exceeded."

Instead of 500,000 people as planners envisaged, the population has ballooned to 2.2 million, choking infrastructure and, in the rundown outskirts, ushering in scenes of gang violence more commonly associated with the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Some areas have been nicknamed the baixada federal, invoking the baixada fluminese, Rio's most homicidal region.

cont'd....
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/mar/12/brazil