The Open Mumbai Exhibition (image source: http://www.pkdas.com/)

Taking a slight segue from the general narrative on our blog, I would like to introduce an extremely interesting phenomenon that is currently taking shape in Mumbai- articulating the need for “open space” in the city. Architect P.K. Das recently launched a phenomenal exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art (NGMA), Mumbai titled “OPEN-MUMBAI- Re-envisioning cities, the case of Mumbai”, an exhibition that re-imagines and expands the notion of public spaces within the city. In a dense and over-populated city like Mumbai, creating open spaces within the city has historically been a practice of community agency and participatory politics. Either through vote bank politics or through the support of religious trusts, or through sports clubs, open spaces are created and protected from being occupied. However, these efforts do not provide the necessary respite and pervious ground the city requires, making open space one of the many most contested planning issues in the city.

Architect P.K. Das takes this issue up and extends the idea of open space over every conceivable “natural asset or eco-sensitive” zone to make open space accessible to the city. Here Nullahs (open storm water canals), rivers, creeks, mangroves, lakes, ponds, tanks, seafronts, beaches, hills, forests, city forests, gardens, recreational grounds, historic forts, and railway stations all come under the radar of “greening”. As you walk along the halls of the NGMA, one iteration after another you see the city transform. With a clear before-after model, Das presents images of polluted, garbage infested plots or canals that are then physically cleaned, or virtually rendered to produce an after image, pristine, landscaped and fantastic . Based on a series of “international case studies” (through select images) he presents prototypes of what can be possible; from the West to the East, the imagination for an ‘Open-Mumbai’ emerges out of a pastiche of different cultures, identities and uses of space- a global city dressed for global consumption.

Revitalization of Bandra Bandstand (image source: http://www.pkdas.com/)

Proposed revitalization on the Irla nullah (storm water drain) (image source: http://www.pkdas.com/)

Proposed Mithi river revitalization project (image source: http://www.pkdas.com/)

Proposed revitalization of the sewri wetlands and mangroves (image source: http://www.pkdas.com/)

At the end of the long stairway was placed a map of possibilities with all the projects and iterations appliquéd on the fabric of the city, like a map from a lonely planet. Interestingly the base image is a high-resolution satellite image (possibly referenced from Google Earth) making this exercise of map-making a rather egalitarian process, which can be taken up by communities, political groups or neighborhood associations alike, to participate in the process of remaking the city (or seemingly so!). This adds yet another layer of complexity to this exhibition and its openness to engage different voices of the city, even those most often overlooked. However, a series of awkward encounters and questions emerge from this dialogue that not only, question the very act of opening up the city as a mere act of green-washing or beautifying the city, without addressing the politics of space making, but also, disregard the inclusion of community voices within the process of space making.

Open-Mumbai vision master plan (image source: http://www.pkdas.com/)

My next post will detail out some of these questions and encounters. I would like to leave you with the following article for more information and for those of you familiar with the context, to mull over some of these questions: http://www.indiatogether.org/2012/apr/env-mumbai.htm

Continued from Part 1 and Part 2 

Creation of the Bankable City

While the prime ministers speech explicitly speaks about making the poor bankable, the idea of making cities bankable is more implicit. The plans imagination of the bankable city has two aspects one it should be a city that attracts investment and second that it should be a city that can pay back its dues. The idea of slum freeness ties up to both these imaginations. This segment tries to trace the relationship of property tenure and slum freeness to the creation of a bankable city.

A World Class City: A city that attracts investment.

Until now Indian cities have largely been perceived as Mega Cities that are off the Global Cities Map. Unlike the global cities that are the command and control nodes of the economy, Mega Cities are perceived as being “big, but powerless”[1]. As Jenny Robinson notes the regulating fiction of the Global City vs Mega City has pushed Mega cities to try and make their way to the map by emulating the “best practices” and aesthetics of the global cities. A good example of this is the Vision Mumbai report produced by McKinsey and Co for Bombay first[2] The report stated that if Mumbai wanted to catapult itself into becoming an investor friendly, “World class city”, it should use Shanghai as its role model and push for neoliberal reforms. The report was quickly adopted by the Government of Maharashtra which set up a task force to put the plan into action. One of the targets that the report set up was to reduce the number of slums in Mumbai from 50 % to 10 %, making an implicit relationship between the presence of slums and investor unfriendliness. The idea of a “Bankable City”, relates closely to this idea of a “World Class City”. The Bankable City is the well serviced, efficiently running; investor friendly city that creates an atmosphere that guarantees returns. A city ridden with slums cannot be showcased, as the slum is seen as being symptomatic of bad governance and instability. Hence the issue of slum freeness becomes of prime importance for the “bankability” of a city.

Property Taxes: A city that pays its dues.

In his speech the prime minister states,

“As you are well aware, municipal finance is in an extremely unsatisfactory state. This is on account of an inability to properly tap and utilize proceeds from property tax, due to the inadequacies of the property valuation system and inefficiencies in tax collection systems. Municipal governments are not able to recover the cost they incur in providing different services. They use accounting systems, which do not correctly reflect their financial position and therefore their projects do not become bankable and viable”[3].

In order to modernize the city the JNNURM program is pumping in billions of rupees worth infrastructure. But a part of the money spent to money is expected to be recovered through taxes. Property tax is a large source of income for municipalities in India. But in order to tap into cities property tax resources there must be no discrepancy in the ownership patterns of property. A formal government record must show who is accountable to pay the government its dues for the property that is owned. Only a well mapped city with clear ownership patterns can be held accountable to for property taxes. The complex ownership patterns of a slum are not recognized by the state, let alone the idea of pinning down an owner who is accountable to pay taxes. The formalization of slums and awarding of tenure helps the municipality track down an owner liable to pay property taxes thus making the city bankable.

“Who loses? YOU ! : The taxes you pay will be used to subsidize amenities for slums as well as provide them houses. The money could have been used to improve city infrastructure and improve your quality of life” argues a newspaper that obviously targets the elite 10% in Mumbai for readership!

In reference to the SRS scheme, HT ran an article “How do slum freebies affect you?” The article addressed the grievances of the “Tax-paying citizen” that will be burdened once the poor become “propertied” citizens and start demanding the services that have not been extended to them until now. But to believe that the poor do not / will not pay for services is erroneous. Because on one hand where the government awards the slum dwellers with wealth it also makes them liable to regularly shell out a certain amount of money as property tax. Hence the government’s attempt to create a propertied citizen is closely tied to its attempt to make a tax paying citizen[4].

The RAY plan for slum free cities looks sees property ownership as a tool to create bankable entrepreneurial poor and bankable cities that draw investment and produce returns. The central government supports property ownership for the poor because it’s expected to play an important role in the fast paced economic growth of the neoliberalizing country. Yet there remain many kinks in this simplistic line of argumentation which I shall discuss in my last post.

Adriana’s last post, More Definitions: Informality vs. Informalities, made me think, once more, about the meaning of informality. I’m not talking in an academic or philosophical sense, but from the practical approach of someone that it is supposed to offer solutions to the problem. What does informality mean? Has this meaning any impact in our decisions as designers?

There are, certainly, many informalities, and most, but not all, of them are related with poverty and developing countries. The high class settlements South East Caracas and the street vendors in LA are only two examples of these exceptions.

Caracas is a showcase of any kind of informality we can think of: regular (traditional?) slums, street vendors and varied informal economic activities everyway, rich zones very beautiful but built according the same principles of a slum, the new vertical slums inside occupied buildings, non-regulated buildings in “formal” areas, and new slums protected and encouraged by the governments. Actually, formal and informal areas are nowadays so interconnected that I have started to believe we should stop caring about its limits or its differences.

Adriana asks how (and if) the formal sector should respond to informality. I would suggest do not think of them in terms of dichotomy:

As long as we accept the informal settlement not as a strange object but simply as part of the city our solutions and projects will be better, and the pendulum between simple and “poor” solutions and speculation and experimentation with the poverty will reach some equilibrium.

During the last decade we have been using some techniques and strategies to approach the informal settlements, by example consulting the community, knowing the settlement in detail, having all the projects approved and preserving the social network. Good intentions apart, often them only stress the differences between the formal and informal sectors, and delay the solutions of technical problems that should be tackled in a much more straightforward way. In despite of the particular character or circumstances of each settlement they share many problems, and it should not be necessary so extensive and detailed studies.

On the other hand, people living in formal areas are as entitled as their informal neighbors to be consulted and informed. Traditionally architects consult very little, but as more and more of us have the opportunity of work in informal areas, it’s becoming easier to transfer some of the techniques we use there to other parts of the city. Maybe with similar strategies and attitudes we will end with a more integrated and inclusive city.

Still the issues of land tenure, permits and regulations remains as the only true limits between the two zones, but the difference is quickly leveling. We already faced a trial regarding a construction without permit well inside an informal settlement. At the end we were declared innocent as the permit was not possible to obtain, but the case shows how thin the line between formal and informal is. And lately, the government with its aggressive housing plan has built a number of dwellings out of regulation in some of the main avenues.

Now legal or illegal, formal or informal, do not depend on the conditions of the land or the configuration of the settlement but on which entity is building.

“Or do without.” That’s the last line of the American axiom, left off of this World War II era poster promoting thriftiness in support of the war effort. It may be that the typesetters ran out of room, but more likely it became truncated for being the downer line. Who wants to do without after all? It’s bad for sales. Actually, according to Giles Slade author of “Made to Break” the US went in cycles of thrift and squander between the World Wars. As advertised in the propaganda poster, the wars created times of scarcity where all available resources were to contribute to victory on the battlefield. However, after the war machines went quiet, sales could not be allowed to slump and so the watchwords once again became buy new, buy now.

It’s a troubling fact that our world now revolves around the sun of economic growth. If capitalism isn’t growing, if sales plateau, it’s failing. This dubious wisdom is now inextricably built in to our lives. We are consumers. In fact, if everyone had the ecological footprint befitting and resulting from this American ethos of consumption, we’d need more than five planets.

It’s worth taking a look at your own ecological footprint if you haven’t yet. Click through if you’re interested.

And thank goodness, not everyone does live like we do. While in Rocinha, I asked people what they liked about living there, a fairly common answer was that a person could get everything she needed right there. I know a fair few people of the American persuasion that would not be able to find everything they “need” in Rocinha. You get the idea.

These peoples’ “needs” have outstripped the earth’s ability to provide. And yet, requisite to the growth-bound tendencies of modern capitalism, this consumer culture is being exported in greater and greater numbers every year. In Brazil, it’s influence is felt with near ubiquity. And it is creating waste the same way in Brazil as in its birthplace.

In Brazil, there is some hope. Hope in a source, that I know does not recognize itself as a hope, but is none the less.  There is a basic aspect of favela life that will with any luck at all make it’s way into the dominant culture in time. The culture of thrift.

This seamstress in Rocinha had clothing repairs stacked to the ceiling just inside her shop door.

In previous posts I have discussed the aesthetic of Sambinha, it is fundamentally an aesthetic of thrift. In Rocinha, as I am sure with many favelas, one could have repairs done on of course cars and motorcycles, but on things that are rarely repaired elsewhere such as electronics, appliances, shoes and more. As well, one can by second hand goods at kiosks on Rua do Valão, in the Camelôs, in smaller shops in becos all across the neighborhood such as the once pictured below on Rua 3. I even ran into a metal salvage operation on Estrada da Gâvea. The men were dismatling broken refrigerators and separating the parts by metal type for sale and reuse.

Second hand store, Rua 3, Rocinha.

Metal salvage, Estrada da Gâvea, Rocinha

There is of course no doubt that this culture of thrift is born of necessity, the same as is was in the Depression Era US.  However, the thriftiness of Sambinha culture reminds us of something we refuse to learn, something elemental: that all resources are scarce. We are warned over and over that we are ignoring the scarcity that our economic system has created. It’s only in In lean times that we scrape the bottom, in times of plenty we ignore the excesses and indulge in waste. This obviously doesn’t apply only to time but place. Where there is financial wealth there is an illusion of inifity: the ruse that the pool of resources has no bottom. We buy, we discard in never ending cycles with no thought to when the final outcome. And we are running an ecological debt: to the tune of 5 Worlds.

Of course industries such as these: salvage, second hand stores, repair and maintenance, as important as they are in their waste-mitigating role, in their reduction of ecological impacts, they are perhaps not unique to favelas. There is another whole industry that, at least in Rio, is nearly exclusive to favelas and that I find eminently necessary, and therefor as worthwhile and noble as any mainstream profession known to capitalism: the profession of the catador, the “picker” of recyclable material from the refuse of consumer capitalism.

We often hear of how capitalism reduces or eliminates waste by free market forces. But the consumer capitalism that has taken over the globe promotes and creates enormous amounts of waste. In the US alone people discard enough disposable serveware to encircle the globe three times. The US leads the world in electronic waste per year at 3 million tons. Even with the spread of municipal recycling programs, solid waste in the US has increased from 3.66 in 1980 to 4.43 in 2010. Catadores are the tourniquet on the hemorrhage of capitalism’s waste.

Catador with his cart of recyclable cardboard in Copacabana.

Recycleables collected from trash bins around the city, neatly bundled for sale and shipment in Portão Vermelho, Rocinha.

Business leaders who prevent waste of time, money, or capital are be praised and rewarded. CEOs offer themselves bonuses, managers are promoted. There are whole consultancies founded on the notion that waste is bad, and elimination of waste is good. But somehow, in the free market system, that is always touted as the most efficient way to meet people’s needs, the catador remains outside the mainstream. In the documentary “Waste Land” artist Vik Muniz explains that he set out to make the world aware of the work of catadores in Rio’s Jardim Gramacho “Because the picker is a person like this garbage, that nobody knows about.”

While in Rio last year I tended to be wandering around the Zona Sul about the same time the catadores are out with their carts: just before the garbage trucks come in the very early hours of morning. One, particular guy about my age became very upset when he noticed me photographing him. When I explained to him my line of work, and how I intended to use him as example for how we should behave he left in good spirits. He had been ashamed momentarily for the work that he does. A severely misplaced shame brought on him by the throwaway culture that provides the fruit of his harvest.

Another man, much older was collecting cardboard. He had his large handcart heaped high with salvage. I asked how much he made. He told me R$ .10 per Kilo or about $.02 per pound. No wonder he had such a heap. I thanked him for providing such a valuable service.

It’s worth your while to watch Vik Muniz’s documentary. In it Valter dos Santos, veteran catador of 26 years explained his role in the world this way: “Sometimes people say, ‘It’s just one little can.’ One little can is great importance. Because 99 isn’t 100. And that little can will make all the difference.”

Mr dos Santos explains, that for every recyclable item he collects, it means “less material that would pollute the rivers and lagoons that won’t clog the sewers or be buried here in the landfill doing such great harm to nature and the environment.” That is a man who knows his business, and knows how waste works, and knows his role in the world. The rest may have good intentions even, but we’d do well to learn from people who know scarcity, for people who live simply, because there is a greater attunement to improvidence: excess is excess and waste is truly abhorrent.

Dramstad, Wenche E., James D Olson, and Richard T. T Forman. Landscape Ecology Principles in Landscape Architecture and Land-use Planning. [Cambridge, Mass.] : Washington, DC : [Washington, D.C.]: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 1996.

With today’s post, I am diverging a bit and beginning with a focus on street vending in Los Angeles, where I reside.

At the recent American Planning Association’s Annual Conference in Los Angeles, I participated in a workshop dedicated to informing local efforts to legalize street vending – alarming to some, but, yes, in Los Angeles all street vendors, from the shopping cart tamale vendor to the stand-alone freshly-sliced fruit vendor are, to put it simply, selling their goods illegally. The organizers of the workshop, largely members of the local Leadership for Urban Renewal Now Network, hoped that the workshop could assist in “laying out an innovative municipal code that legalizes mobile food vending and incorporates street vendors into the community to support culture, jobs, business activity, and safety.”

We were broken into different focused groups – safety, public health, licensing, scope of activity, and area. I ended up in the “area” group in which fellow group members and I were tasked with discussing “the areas in which vendors should be permitted,” with consideration of the following questions: Should the ordinance prioritize certain areas of the city? How can the city help drive traffic to areas that need more business activity? What departments should be engaged, and what are the issues we should consider?

On an “informed” whim, I reverted to my knowledge of landscape ecology, given my background in landscape architecture, to rationalize my group’s perspective to the larger workshop group on, if limitations were necessary, which areas should be prioritized. I described the “edge effect,” an edge being where adjacent habitats or environments meet. Particularly notable about edges is how easily and often species flow between these adjacent environments – essentially, edges are where the action is happening, where exchanges and transactions are occurring, and, too, where species are especially vulnerable because of the increased predation that occurs along edges.

My group and I had agreed that transit areas would be an ideal “prioritized area” because of the high foot-traffic provided by these locations “because which vendor (in their right mind!) would want to be in the middle of a patch where there is no traffic? Vendors want to be along the edge, where the action is happening.” In this way, we considered the transit areas, along with their immediately adjacent corridors, as “edges” where bustling movement between different environments occurs. In essence, we had proposed for somewhat of a “transit-oriented development ordinance” tailored to street vendors.

Certainly these concepts’ relevance goes past street vendors, as in the aforementioned transit-oriented development, which could be said to be largely founded on this. Too, it would seem that other concepts of landscape ecology could inform one’s understanding of informal spaces and activities and perhaps provide some coherence and some “logic” to these seemingly incomprehensible and organic forces.

Given my declarations from that day, I decided to look at how my research on street vending in Latin America could validate my points on patches, edges, and street vendors. Here are some findings found in my Santiago, Chile and Buenos Aires, Argentina archives that loosely illustrate how vendors move and congregate along edges:

Jeff Gillette, “Mondrian,” image courtesy of the artist

The title of this post is taken from a series of paintings by Jeff Gillette, a Southern-California-based mixed-media artist and painter. Gillette, in his artist’s statement, writes of his visits to several slums in Kolkata, Mumbai, and Delhi: “Aside from the seething humanity, the suffering, the unfairness and cruelty of the slum was a strange beauty. The cacophony of filthy debris rising from oceans of garbage comprises an architecture of poverty and necessity. What emerges is a living environment of aesthetic wonder, of spectacular variations of color, form, and texture.”

Gillette’s paintings display a high level of artistic control. Building materials, topography, and structural forms are clearly specified and arrayed in rhythmic compositions. The kaleidoscopic colors and textures are just bright enough to signal that the viewer is in a hyperrealistic environment, and to call attention to the consumer-waste origin of the building materials. Human inhabitants are absent (though human and Disney characters are sometimes included in order to make a visual pun on “squatting.”)

I wanted to focus on Gillette’s work here because it is a good reference point for discussing representations of urban informality and aestheticization of poverty, topics we frequently address here in Favelissues. As Gillette expressed to me, the visual and aesthetic are the primary content of his work, and his approach is basically objective. In that sense his images are the ultimate aestheticization of slums, as he is occupied with problems central to art and philosophy, not policy.

Jeff Gillette, “Caracas,” image courtesy of the artist

But Gillette’s paintings can stand in for a tendency in our own minds to let an image or the “skin” of an informal settlement push aside a fuller understanding of the complexity of urban informality. It’s so much easier to hold an image in our minds than a complex set of political, social, and economic relationships. In looking at these images it is clear how far an image can take us from not only the daily life of a slum but from an understanding of the political economy of urban informality.

Two aspects of the work are, for me, particularly striking. The title Slumscapes brings up issues related to naming and labeling informal settlements. The style and content of the work impairs one’s ability to name the subject matter anything other than “slum.” We can’t call it an informal settlement, as that carries connotations of economic interdependency, for which there are no markers. We can’t call it a squatter settlement, with its connotations of poor people’s political agency, for there are no people. The word “slum,” which occupies a deep place in the historical memory for English speakers, is unique in its ability to call up negative connotations about inhabitants (slum dwellers), not just their living conditions.

Gillette chooses not to include people in his paintings as a way of focusing our attention on that which he admires, the physical objects and settings. But for some viewers, the absence of inhabitants along with their laundry, furniture, and stored building materials will signify an abandoned city, reinforcing the idea that slums and informal settlements are only about constructed form. Yet in another sense, the exclusive attention to the materiality of post-consumer constructions and garbage-filled canals calls our full attention to environmental degradation which otherwise might not receive it.

In Ananya Roy’s essay addressing the “politics of representation“, she argues that there are different “genealogies of representation”, one which arises from an aesthetic  relationship with urban informality and another from a political one. Roy argues for a genealogy of representation that “views the city not as a unique ecology but as a mundane articulation of production and social reproduction; not as a magical precartographic realm of vernacular authenticity but as a mapping and unmapping of interests and power; not as a separation of First and Third Worlds but as the constant interpenetration of these geopolitical axes.” The challenge is to imagine what such a representation would actually contain, and how to create it.

Jeff Gillette, “Shadow City Minnie,” image courtesy of the artist

“Sport Mega-Events and the Crisis of Youth Exclusion” source: http://youthandsport.idebate.org/

Last week I attended a conference about youth and social exclusion in the context of sporting mega-events. Sport and play are strongly associated with children and youth; and as the organizer’s note, the Olympic Games and FIFA World Cup “were founded on the theory that by providing healthful, demilitarized spaces where the youth of the world could realize their potential, they would come to embody a new kind of non-nationalistic, peaceful breed of humanity.” The present-day reality of mega-events, particularly the Olympics and the FIFA World cup, ironically rely on exclusionary policies and police practices that disproportionately affect young people. The organizers and participants of the conference; a healthy mix of academics, activists, and youth advocates; explored this contradiction and asked “How can public policy makers, youth organizations and event organizers ensure that the arrival of these sports mega-events, which are almost universally heralded as economic and social opportunities for their host communities, do not isolate, exclude and target local underprivileged youth?”

One of the sessions addressed ‘security’ and young people in Rio de Janeiro as the city prepares for the 2014 FIFA Men’s World Cup followed by the Summer Olympic Games two years later. The speakers included a sociology professor from the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) and two community activists who worked with NGOs in different favelas in the city. The three presenters were congenial—they got a long; they sat in a row together in the audience before presenting. They all seemed committed to social and economic justice, human rights, democratic participation and citizenship. They all denounced police corruption and abuse in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas and agreed that reducing inequality in the city ultimately rested with the state’s ability to guarantee the rights of all citizens. Despite the vast common ground, the three presenters had a major point of contention dividing them: The Pacifying Police Unit (Unidade de Policía Pacificadora, or UPP).

The UPP is a “community policing” division that “occupies” favelas after a period of military “invasion” and “pacification”. Its tactics signals a paradigm shift in Rio where the modus operandi for police in favelas was shoot ‘em up and get the hell out (over simplification and bias acknowledged). The UPP is meant to stay put in the favelas and form part of the communities they are policing as part of the new idealized integrated Rio de Janeiro (which I’ve alluded to in past posts).

The UERJ professor is currently conducting a study evaluating the results of the UPP in the so-called pacified favelas. Although he recognized the marginal effects of the UPP in the grand scheme of things (the UPP is currently occupying only a fraction of the city’s favela neighborhoods), the continued repression of individuals’ rights, and persistent widespread police corruption; he expressed general optimism about the direction of the UPP and stressed the positive effects that it has on the lives of the residents under the unit’s jurisdiction. In contrast, the two community activists seemed incredulous of reports touting the success of the new police paradigm and insisted on drwaing focus to the continued disregard for favela residents’ human rights. When the sociologist cited data showing that residents of favelas under UPP jurisdiction had positive opinions about the new police force and that residents of “unpacified” favelas actually want UPP occupation, the community activists countered saying that everyone they talk to mistrust or hate the police. When the academic claimed that the UPP brought security to the favelas and allowed residents to walk to and from work and children to play in the streets without fear of a shoot-out (either between rival gangs or the police and gang members), the community activists contested with anecdotes of continued police brutality and insisted that the police ‘rule’ the favelas with the same tactics as the drug lords: intimidation and threats of violence.

And so went the debate, tit for tat. The audience, as well as the event organizers, voiced opinions closer aligned with the activists, and called for ‘alternative methods’ of achieving security in the city. The academic in turn seemed exasperated that nobody was willing to acknowledge any achievement of the state because it meant an implicit endorsement of police tactics.

I spoke with the sociologist above after the debate, and he told me that his name “used to be mud” to Rio’s police commanders because of his publically scathing reports on human rights abuses and extrajudicial killings. Since he started working with the government and the UPP, he bemoaned, he feels attacked from both the left and the right.

I found this debate interesting, albeit frustrating, because the academic (left) in Brazil is often so radical and critical of the status quo, that it’s a rarity to find a university professor actually defending the state and much less the police. In my limited experience following Brazilian researchers, they usually seem in-step with leftist political movements and community organizations. However, I am repeatedly seeing leftist academics (sociologists, geographers and anthropologists) cautiously (or in some cases eagerly) embracing the UPP and the current favela-integration paradigm while the majority of well-known favela-based political organizations (and oddly enough many foreign researchers) adopt a highly critical platform or reject it all together.

In my next few posts on favelissues, I will explore the problem of framework when researching Rio’s favelas, the UPP, the integration paradigm and urban violence. I’ll address positionality and perspective, academic objectivity and moral compass. Because most researchers, architects/planners and ‘development specialists’ that I know who work in Rio’s favelas (and poor urban settlements everywhere for that matter) want to affect change, my goal is to map out the very real political choices we make that inform our work and our research.

Socrates, a great player with a political conscience (1954-2011)

June of 1982.  The Seleção directed by Tele Santana enchanted the world with their beautiful soccer. I clearly remember the first game against the USSR (it happened on my birthday, as it very often do). The soviets scored first and Brazil spent the whole game on attack.  The equalizing goal came only at 30 min of the second half. With 3 minutes left Paulo Isidoro crossed from the right before the penalty area, Falcão opened his legs for the ball to continue its transversal to Eder who shot one of his cannon balls into the goal. Brasil 2×1 against a strong Soviet team. Paulo Isidoro and Eder (plus Luizinho and Cerezo) being from my beloved Atlético Mineiro I could not get a better birthday present.  Three weeks later they lost to Italy and entered history as the another great Brazilian that deserved to win but did not.

June 1982. The same day that Brazil played the Soviets marked the cease fire at the Malvinas (or Falkland) islands. Argentina’s war adventure had failed and the result is that they broke their own treasury, accelerating the end of the dictatorship. As dominos falling, that year would see defaults in Mexico and Brasil. By the end of the year all major Latin American countries were in economic trouble. By the end of the decade all dictatorships had fallen: Argentina, Brasil, Paraguay, Chile and Uruguay.

Redemocratization brought new hope for the favelas. Social movements were now part of the political process and not underground organizations. Newly elected governments in Rio de Janeiro for instance started to recognize the favelas not as a problem (to be extirpated) but as cheap solutions to an enormous housing shortage. Oscar Niemeyer started designing the CIEPS, full time schools built on the periphery of Rio to educate, feed and entertain kids.  The largest Brazilian cohort ever was born that year (1982) and is now turning 30, certainly enjoying the best labor market ever since.

But the same crisis of external debt that helped bring the dictatorships down also ensured that the 1980s would be the “lost decade” in Latin America. Brasil, Argentina and Mexico saw their economies stagnate during the 1980s. The effect on the favelas was that the new political liberties were not matched by parallel investments for absolute lack of money (supported by IMF stringent guidelines). Later in 1986 Diego Maradona won the World Cup almost by himself while at home the fresh (and still financially broke) democracies of Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay were cooking Mercosur, starting a collaboration that changed the region’s geopolitics.

Sometimes loosing here helps you win further down the road.

www.eafit.edu.co/escueladeverano/cursos/Paginas/modelo-medellin-urbam.asp