MUD: Rio de Janeiro - Informality and the Agency of Design

Informality and the Agency of Design: Learning from the favelas of Rio Kit Krankel McCullough Urban Design Studio I Summer 2012 The favelas of Rio de Janeiro are representative of the most common form of urban expansion around the world—the informal slum. It is estimated that about a billion people live in such settlements—one sixth of the world’s population and growing. It is expected that this population will double by 2030 to two billion, one in four people on earth. Like slums around the world, Rio’s favelas arose from humble origins—shanties built on the hillside along a dirt track. But today the favela offers a picture of a possible future for the world’s shantytowns. Although built in a condition of temporariness, most informal settlements are longstanding, having been built progressively over decades. Rio’s favelas within the city proper are well established, no longer growing, and have become permanent and rigid swaths of urban tissue. Tin shacks have been replaced by multi-‐story, stuccoed concrete houses. Electricity and electrical meters have been installed. New streets have been paved and widened. The city has built libraries, schools and health centers. National and global brands are moving in, including grocery store chains, bank branches, cable providers and fast food franchises. As self-‐built environments, the favelas are intimately connected to the lives of the inhabitants and so in many ways are exquisitely attuned to the needs of residents. To the extent that Rio has been successful in improving the lives of favela inhabitants, it is because the city recognized relatively early that the favelas were places of value, and that eradicating the slum was not the solution. After the failure of Modernist social housing developments, new government programs such as Favela Bairro and Morar Carioca (see the following interview with Jorge Ponte) took a different approach. Rather than erasing the informal tissue, these programs sought to integrate the favela into the urban fabric both physically and programmatically. Informality is seen as a legitimate form of urbanism that should be retained and improved upon. Rio’s favelas are now at a point of significant maturation. While no government anywhere has yet found the perfect solution to housing the poor, Brazil has probably done more than any other country to improve conditions in its slums. The government’s ambitious experiments are worth examining for both their successes and failures. Our own inquiries found that Rio’s favelas offered a perfect laboratory for examining agency in the built environment. What is the role of the resident, the government, the

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