{"id":8136,"date":"2013-04-02T13:01:06","date_gmt":"2013-04-02T16:01:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/?p=8136"},"modified":"2019-08-16T12:19:12","modified_gmt":"2019-08-16T15:19:12","slug":"a-history-of-favela-upgrades-part-iii-morar-carioca-in-vision-and-practice-2008-present","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/?p=8136","title":{"rendered":"A History of Favela Upgrades Part III: Morar Carioca in Vision and Practice (2008 \u2013 2013)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Clique aqui para Portugu\u00eas<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

This is\u00a0Part 3<\/strong>\u00a0of a three-part series on the History of Favela Upgrades in Rio. Click\u00a0for\u00a0Part 1<\/a><\/strong>\u00a0and\u00a0Part 2<\/a><\/strong>.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n
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The cable car in Complexo de Alem\u00e3o, opened in 2011, was funded through the federal Growth Acceleration Program (PAC).<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In Rio, the end of the 2000s brought a trickle of funding to a few delayed upgrading projects from the Favela-Bairro program and its spinoffs, the Bairrinho and Grandes Favelas programs. During this time the federal\u00a0Growth Acceleration Program<\/a>\u00a0(PAC) began to install public works in favelas as well. These tended to be attention-grabbing projects and those visible from the edges of communities such as the\u00a0cable car<\/a>\u00a0in Complexo de Alem\u00e3o and the Oscar Niemeyer-designed\u00a0bridge<\/a>\u00a0at the entrance to Rocinha, as well as some good examples of\u00a0public housing<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0cultural facilities<\/a>. That said, the need for quality and comprehensive public services in Rio\u2019s favelas continued to far outweigh supply.<\/p>\n

With this, Mayor Eduardo Paes made a bold\u00a0announcement<\/a>\u00a0in July 2010, that as part of the social legacy of the 2016 Olympics,\u00a0all of the favelas in Rio would be upgraded by 2020<\/a>\u00a0through a municipal program called\u00a0Morar\u00a0Carioca. The program would have an R$8 billion budget and a partnership with the Brazilian Institute of Architects (IAB<\/a>), who, as was the case with\u00a0Morar\u00a0Carioca\u2019s predecessor, Favela-Bairro, would be responsible for arranging the upgrades in all favelas with over 100 homes. The number of favelas and complexes of favelas in the city was remanaged to facilitate grouping and upgrading under\u00a0Morar\u00a0Carioca, from 1020 to 625.<\/p>\n

The specific budget and timeline of the\u00a0Morar\u00a0Carioca\u00a0program have never been published in their entirety but rather have been alluded to in bits over the past few years. In November 2010 Mayor Paes\u00a0named a budget<\/a>\u00a0of R$9 billion for the project and said he would finance it in three phases of R$3 billion each, with money coming from the city budget, credit from the federal government, and loans from the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), saying, \u201cour idea is that the IDB enter with R$300 million per year for five years.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite discussions of the program beginning two years prior, the\u00a0official guidelines<\/a>\u00a0for\u00a0Morar\u00a0Carioca\u00a0were only published in a document\u00a0signed into city decree<\/a>\u00a0on October 29, 2012.<\/p>\n

Morar\u00a0Carioca\u00a0on Paper<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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Pica-Pau, in the North Zone’s Cordovil, is one of 815 favelas to receive upgrades according to the Morar Carioca decree. Residents say their hopes for the upgrades center on water and trash collection.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Morar\u00a0Carioca\u00a0is designed to build on the learning of the Favela-Bairro program<\/a> and continue its work. In\u00a0some of the literature\u00a0about the\u00a0IDB’s US$150 million loan for the project<\/a>\u00a0it is referred to as \u201cFavela Bairro\u00a0Phase III<\/a>.\u201d Learning from Favela-Bairro\u2019s strengths and weaknesses,\u00a0Morar\u00a0Carioca\u00a0pledges to carry out large-scale upgrading (public works to improve water and sewerage services, drainage systems, road surfacing, street lighting, the provision of green areas, sports fields, recreational areas, and the construction and equipping of social service centers), plus\u00a0land titling\u00a0and social services such as education and health centers in favelas. According to its precepts,\u00a0Morar\u00a0Carioca\u00a0will reach 815 favelas\u00a0listed by name<\/a>, and is budgeted at R$8 billion, in comparison with Favela-Bairro which totaled R$1.2 billion between its two phases, and the interventions proposed in each favela will be more extensive and tailored.<\/p>\n

Morar\u00a0Carioca\u00a0guarantees the right to \u201cthe participation of organized society\u2026in all stages of\u00a0Morar\u00a0Carioca\u00a0through assemblies and meetings in the communities\u201d and through the \u201cpresentation of works and debates open to the participation of civil society and citizens.\u201d It pledges to reduce the surface area of favelas in the city by five percent, remove homes that lie in areas of environmental risk, and follow legal guidelines to rehouse<\/a>\u00a0those residents near their original homes. Finally, it pledges to implement new zoning regulations for each favela once upgraded,\u00a0transforming each into an “Area of Special Social Interest” (AEIS), based on the federal\u00a0\u201cSpecial Zones of Social Interest<\/a>\u201d (ZEIS<\/a>) in accordance with the federal Statute of Cities passed in 2001 that established these areas in order to secure their continued preservation as affordable housing.<\/p>\n

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In the favela of Asa Branca, children enjoy newly paved streets.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The<\/span> Morar Carioca decree begins<\/a>\u00a0by acknowledging explicitly that favelas developed as a solution to the absence of adequate public housing in the city: \u201cthe historic absence of housing policy made informal production and self-building the alternative through which the lowest income population attended to its housing needs, and that informality ceased being the exception and became instead the rule for the majority of this population.\u201d E<\/span><\/span>duardo Paes, when mentioning the\u00a0Morar\u00a0Carioca\u00a0program in a 2012\u00a0TED talk<\/a>\u00a0in Long Beach, California, said \u201cfavelas can be a solution.\u201d<\/p>\n

Morar\u00a0Carioca\u00a0concludes from past experiments upgrading favelas in Rio that, if upgraded in a participatory way, favela-style development is a valuable urban form for the city. It is a partial but nonetheless visionary answer to the question that planners around the world are asking:\u00a0how are we going to deal<\/a>\u00a0with the\u00a0third of humanity\u00a0who will live in urban informal settlements\u00a0by 2050<\/a>?\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

Morar\u00a0Carioca\u00a0in Practice<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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Eighty-nine architecture firms from around the world entered the IAB contest for Morar Carioca Phase II. They were tasked to design interventions on generic favelas in flat and hilly areas and larger “complexos.” Many of the winning designs, such as this, recommended opening public and pedestrian spaces.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

In accordance with its role in the Morar Carioca program, the IAB hosted a design competition in 2010 in which over eighty architecture firms from around the world presented sample designs for favela upgrading. Forty winning firms were chosen, and each was assigned a \u201cgrouping\u201d of favelas to create plans specific to their topography, layout, and social service needs. In early 2011, municipal Housing Secretary Jorge Bittar said the goal was for all of these upgrades<\/a>\u00a0(set to reach 216 favelas listed here<\/span><\/a> by architecture firm) to be complete by the World Cup in 2014.<\/span><\/p>\n

Yet what followed was a waiting game where firms with the best of intentions, holding regular meetings amongst their teams to prepare to move forward, were left waiting until mid-2012 for resources to be released. At the same time, communities slated for upgrades were waiting, anxious and hopeful, for what were generally perceived to be positive and necessary investments that would occur in a potentially empowering way.<\/p>\n

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To prep for Morar Carioca in Asa Branca, iBase organized workshops in which residents spoke about both their desires from and their duties to the government and each other in the urbanization process.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Once resources were freed for ten firms to begin in June 2012, they set to work. In accordance with Morar Carioca guideline<\/span>s, all firms had a social worker or anthropologist on the team,<\/span> committed to doing qualitative evaluations of the current use of public space in the communities. In addition, the NGO iBase was contracted by the City Housing Secretary to perform a \u201csocial diagnosis\u201d\u00a0<\/span>that included<\/span>\u00a0focus groups<\/a>,\u00a0documentary filming<\/a>,\u00a0<\/span>and individual door-to-door surveying about the <\/span><\/span>improvements that residents thought were most important.<\/span><\/p>\n

In late 2012, some plans were presented\u00a0privately<\/a>\u00a0to City officials such as those from the Secretary of Housing and the Secretary of Transportation.\u00a0Others\u00a0were\u00a0presented to the\u00a0community itself<\/a>. This paradigm of the City working with residents to determine their priorities is miles away from the \u201crecivilization\u201d policy of the\u00a0proletariat parks<\/a>\u00a0to which residents were evicted in the 1940s.<\/p>\n

As the year came to completion, communities participating in the program were\u00a0hopeful<\/a>. That said, there has been at least one reported case in which a community that was initially promised\u00a0Morar\u00a0Carioca\u00a0upgrades and received iBase crews surveying them for community preferences and needs,\u00a0were told instead\u00a0that they\u00a0face complete removal<\/a>. In most others, after positive initial steps, residents were waiting excitedly, with no cases having broken ground as of March 2013.<\/p>\n

Is it all\u00a0Morar\u00a0Carioca?<\/strong>\u00a0<\/strong><\/strong><\/h3>\n
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According to Mayor Eduardo Paes public interventions in Provid\u00eancia, where work has been stalled by a judge due to lack of participation, is part of ‘Morar Carioca.’<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The\u00a0Morar\u00a0Carioca\u00a0program has been very difficult for many people to pin down and understand because, though the decree and procedures are clearly delineated as described above, when the program was first announced in July 2010, Mayor\u00a0Paes simultaneously announced that \u2018Morar\u00a0Carioca\u2019 was already underway in fourteen favelas (quotes used when the program’s decree or other guiding documents are not being followed).<\/p>\n

According to the Mayor, there are two phases of\u00a0Morar\u00a0Carioca\u00a0upgrades underway in Rio. The first phase used firms contracted outside of the IAB competition to intervene structurally in favelas with no participation, in cases like\u00a0Provid\u00eancia<\/a>\u00a0(where the works are\u00a0currently halted<\/a>\u00a0by a court injunction due to a public defender\u2019s charge of\u00a0lack of public audience<\/a>\u00a0before the work began), Penha, Babil\u00f4nia, and Jacarezinho. And the second phase, according to the Mayor, is that which formally only began in 2012, described in the previous section of this article.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat a lot of people don\u2019t realize is that the city government is using the label \u2018Morar\u00a0Carioca\u2019 to refer to all sorts of upgrades that were not designed as part of this program,\u201d says\u00a0Mariana\u00a0Cavalcanti, a Funda\u00e7\u00e3o Get\u00falio Vargas professor and anthropologist who was hired by one of the first architecture firms selected in the formal IAB competition. \u201cThey are using it to describe works going on in Borel and Chap\u00e9u Mangueira, for example, that were left over from the PAC years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

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The Morar Carioca logo is frequently used by the City on public works regardless of adherence to the program’s principles.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Indeed, in many of the favelas identified by the Mayor as already undergoing \u2018Morar\u00a0Carioca\u2019 in 2010, such as sections of Col\u00f4nia Juliano Moreira, Mangueira, Manguinhos<\/a>,\u00a0and Guarabu, upgrades have been scheduled through the PAC for several years and will continue with PAC funding but under the new label of \u2018Morar Carioca.\u2019\u00a0Paes and IAB President Sergio Magalh\u00e3es originally said all favelas with over 100 homes would fall under the official\u00a0Morar\u00a0Carioca\u00a0program, receiving participatory upgrades designed through the IAB partnership, but the City has begun non-participatory interventions\u2014even forced\u00a0evictions<\/a>\u2014on several favelas fitting this description, including all those mentioned above.\u00a0In the case of Provid\u00eancia, the construction crew has been using plans left over from the Favela-Bairro program, for which the only resident who gave an opinion was an informal representative of the Comando Vermelho, the drug trafficking faction that controlled the community at the time.\u00a0And in Rio das Pedras, \u2018Morar\u00a0Carioca\u2019 was announced when the\u00a0sole outcome<\/a>\u00a0for residents would, in fact, be removal.<\/p>\n

Morar\u00a0Carioca\u00a0Today<\/strong><\/h3>\n
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The President of the Asa Branca Residents’ Association watches as a resident is interviewed by an iBase documentary film crew in preparation for the community’s upgrades under Morar Carioca. This began in ten groups of favelas; iBase’s contract was then cut.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Morar\u00a0Carioca\u00a0was frequently mentioned during Eduardo Paes\u2019 re-election campaign in October 2012, in which Paes said that 55 favelas had received\u00a0Morar\u00a0Carioca\u00a0works so far and that the next step was to urbanize 100 more. He was referring solely to \u2018his\u2019 \u2018Morar\u00a0Carioca\u2019, however, since no favela upgrades at that point had been done using the IAB-sanctioned participatory process. In fact, in January 2013 iBase\u2019s contract to undertake the public consultation aspect of the IAB-selected upgrades was cut and since then several firms have been told to take down plaques claiming\u00a0Morar\u00a0Carioca is present in their communities. Needless to say leaders\u2014and residents\u2014of these communities are at a loss.<\/p>\n

And while\u00a0Morar\u00a0Carioca\u00a0as originally envisioned has barely been implemented\u2014and has actually been stalled\u2014so far, results can be gleaned for how upgrades, no matter the type, will impact Rio\u2019s communities if not carefully implemented. One clear outcome has been the rapid rise in home prices, since the very important step of zoning these communities and establishing them as ZEIS\u2014areas recognized and maintained as affordable housing\u2014has not been carefully applied and even when it is applied, has not been capable of curtailing gentrification. Morar\u00a0Carioca\u00a0spokeswoman Sonia Lopes predicted this effect in an\u00a0interview with an international investment guide<\/a>\u00a0in October 2010, when she said the program \u201cwill help keep the market for real estate strong whilst also creating new areas of opportunity.\u201d For many favela residents, the consequence of this speculation is that they can no longer afford to live in their homes.\u00a0Last month, in one favela in the Complexo de Alem\u00e3o, which has received UPP police and PAC upgrades,\u00a0the President of the Residents\u2019 Association was priced out of her home<\/a>\u00a0along with 416 other families when rent rose over 300%. Community leaders and local academics\u00a0refer\u00a0to gentrification in favelas as a second kind of removal: \u201cremo\u00e7\u00e3o branca<\/a>,\u201d or white removal.<\/p>\n

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President of the Vila Uni\u00e3o de Curicica Residents’ Association, Vania Neri, awaits word from the city government on whether her community will be upgraded, as was the original plan, or destroyed.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Despite the incredible promise of\u00a0Morar\u00a0Carioca\u00a0in theory\u2014not only for Rio to engage in an inclusive form of sustainable urbanization, but for it to serve as a model of how to handle informal settlements in an increasingly urban world\u2014in practice, the program\u2019s name has been used so far by local authorities only to undertake authoritarian and unilateral, often arbitrary, interventions in Rio\u2019s favelas.\u00a0In the historic trajectory of \u201cto remove or to upgrade,\u201d the current City government has arrived at a third, contradictory path with Morar Carioca: a proclamation of upgrading but a practice that emphasizes home removals, both through overt demolition and enabling of gentrification.<\/p>\n

References<\/em><\/strong><\/h3>\n

Mello, Marco Antonio da Silva, Luiz Antonio Machado da Silva, Leticia de Luna Freire, and Soraya Silveira Sim\u00f5es, eds.\u00a0Favelas cariocas: ontem e hoje.<\/em>\u00a0Rio de Janeiro: Garamond, 2012.<\/p>\n

Perlman, Janice.\u00a0Favela: Four Decades of Living on the Edge in Rio de Janeiro<\/em>. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010.<\/p>\n

Morar Carioca charter document<\/a><\/p>\n

List of favelas to receive Phase II Morar Carioca upgrades by architecture firm<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clique aqui para Portugu\u00eas This is\u00a0Part 3\u00a0of a three-part series on the History of Favela Upgrades in Rio. Click\u00a0for\u00a0Part 1\u00a0and\u00a0Part 2. In Rio, the end of the 2000s brought a trickle of funding to a […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":15292,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[335,1282,329,328,1329],"tags":[1787,27,804,829,1261,525,609,272,187,11,65,205,830,188,282,26,634,354,746,637,147,197,37,152,193,144,529,10,1616,1445,2634,1026,206,592,365],"writer":[611],"translator":[],"illustrator":[],"photographer":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-8136","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-policies","8":"category-research-analysis","9":"category-solutions","10":"category-understanding-rio","11":"category-by-international-observers","12":"tag-aeis-zeis","13":"tag-asa-branca","14":"tag-borel","15":"tag-brazilian-institute-of-architects-iab","16":"tag-central-rio","17":"tag-chapeu-mangueira","18":"tag-colonia-juliano-moreira","19":"tag-mayor-eduardo-paes","20":"tag-favela-bairro","21":"tag-forced-evictions","22":"tag-gentrification","23":"tag-growth-acceleration-program-pac","24":"tag-guarabu","25":"tag-history","26":"tag-housing","27":"tag-housing-rights","28":"tag-ibase","29":"tag-law","30":"tag-mangueira","31":"tag-manguinhos","32":"tag-morar-carioca","33":"tag-morro-da-babilonia","34":"tag-north-zone","35":"tag-participation","36":"tag-penha","37":"tag-morro-da-providencia","38":"tag-public-works","39":"tag-real-estate-speculation","40":"tag-reference","41":"tag-rio-das-pedras","42":"tag-series","43":"tag-series-history-of-favela-upgrades","44":"tag-upgrading","45":"tag-vila-uniao-de-curicica","46":"tag-zero-participation","47":"writer-catherine-osborn"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8136","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8136"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8136\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/15292"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8136"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8136"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8136"},{"taxonomy":"writer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fwriter&post=8136"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftranslator&post=8136"},{"taxonomy":"illustrator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fillustrator&post=8136"},{"taxonomy":"photographer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fphotographer&post=8136"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}