For the original article by Preto Zezé published in O Globo, click here.
In the year Milton Santos would have turned 100, perhaps the best tribute to the Bahian geographer is not to simply repeat his concepts in universities, but to return his ideas to the ground he taught us to observe: territory as a lived experience. He showed that space is not a neutral landscape but, rather, participates in inequality, struggle, coexistence and invention.
When I look at Brazilian favelas, I see more than low-income housing, the absence of the State or statistics. I see a geography of their own—complex, intelligent and little understood by official Brazil.
Favelas are usually explained by what they lack: sanitation, security, schools, credit and transportation. All of this is true and must be tackled. But this reading is incomplete. If the favela were defined only by absence, it would have already ceased to exist. What keeps these places alive rarely shows up in official diagnoses: networks of care, commerce, culture, the strength of women, creative youth and the ability to produce solutions in a context of scarcity.
Milton Santos used to speak of lived territory. Not the one from cold maps or spreadsheets, but the territory lived by real people. In this sense, the favela is one of the country’s greatest geography lessons. The alleyway, the rooftop, the bar, the school, the soccer pitch, the mom-and-pop shop, the mototaxi stand, the funk ball and the small business form a daily engineering of survival, income, affection and creation.
The country still insists on relegating the favela to the margins, when it is the center of many answers. Anyone who wants to understand cities, youth, the popular economy, culture, violence, racism, mobility, communication and the future needs to deal with the favela not as an object of pity, but as a place of knowledge.
Milton Santos also spoke of mutilated citizenship. The expression explains the lives of millions. Citizenship is fractured for those who live in favelas. Residents are recognized as consumers, workers, voters and bill payers, but not always as individuals fully entitled to rights. They can buy, but deal with unfair credit. They can work, but lose hours on transportation. They can produce culture, but often see their aesthetics fill someone else’s pockets.
This mutilation is not an accident. It is the result of a history that distributed the city unequally. The country built centers with infrastructure and protection, while pushing part of the population into areas where rights arrive late, insufficiently or halfway. And later on, it still saw fit to label these places as problems.
But favelas are not the absence of city. They are the city built with less investment and more collective intelligence. Where Brazil lays bare its debt, but also its potential.
In Toward an Other Globalization: From the Single Thought to Universal Conscience, Milton Santos described globalization as fable, perversity and possibility. The favela knows all three well. The fable promises inclusion, while leaving millions without decent internet access, credit, training and infrastructure. Perversity turns the favela into a consumer market and an aesthetic resource without paying it back in the same proportion. Possibility emerges when these places create networks, businesses, leadership and life technologies.
The favela’s geography does not fit within the narrow lens of prejudice. It requires method, listening and respect. It requires its recognition as a place of thought and not just suffering; of strategy and not just improvisation; of economics and not just informality.
If Milton Santos taught us to read territories, the favela teaches us to rewrite Brazil through them.