In praise of shantytowns

http://www.nextcity.com/main/town/2shanty.htm

In praise of shantytowns
Beyond the crime and grime, Third World slums get it right
by Jeb Blount
Discussion

IT MUST HAVE SEEMED THE LAST PLACE A TOURIST WOULD venture — up the
narrow winding streets of Rio de Janeiro's notorious mountainside
shantytowns, or favelas. But during the 1992 United Nations Earth
Summit, hundreds signed up for $30 half-day trips to the slums. City
bureaucrats did everything they could to stop the tours. Showing
foreigners the poverty, gang warfare and inadequate sanitation clashed
with Rio's desire to sell visiting summiteers a vision of green
urbanity: a modern, oceanside metropolis crisscrossed by ancient,
hunchbacked mountains and tropical forests.

But Rio's natural beauty made the slums' clay-colored march up the
mountains impossible to ignore. Curiosity was high, so the tours went
ahead. And what impressed the foreign visitors most? It wasn't
poverty, gang violence or inadequate sanitation. Nor for that matter
was it any of the other things commonly associated with urban, Third
World squalor. As they made their way back down the mountainside to
the beaches of Copacabana and Ipanema, to the nightclubs and hotels,
the tourists' talk concentrated instead on how pleasant the favelas
were. They discovered that shantytowns are not necessarily desperate
and dysfunctional zones of poverty and violence. In spite of great
obstacles, shantytowns get far more right than they get wrong, and
they have much to teach us.

MY FRIEND JAIMIN SILVA, A HANDYMAN, LIVES IN VIDIGAL, a favela that
towers over the Rio Sheraton just beyond the swankiest part of the
city's affluent South Zone. The first time he invited me to his house,
I accepted, but immediately had reservations. Most of my Brazilian
friends warned me against the visit. They said they were certain
Vidigal was bad news. At the time, kidnappings were a daily occurrence
in Rio. The papers regularly reported shootouts between Vidigal's
rival drug gangs and between drug gangs and police. Some even
published pornographically violent pictures of the carnage. I wanted
to trust Jaimin, but I was scared. I knew my gringo geniality could
get me into trouble, and there was the added problem of how to get
there. Friends warned me that my car might be stolen and if I took the
bus, I might be robbed. In the end my curiosity outweighed my fears. I
took my car and followed Jaimin's directions.

The formal city of highrises and houses, parks, office districts and
shopping streets ends just past the beachfront neighborhoods of
Ipanema and Leblon. There the eggplant-shaped peaks of Pedra dois
irmãos (Two Brothers Rock) force those going beyond to follow a narrow
but busy mountain road carved into Precambrian granite about 30 metres
above the Atlantic surf. Beachfront palms and sidewalk mosaics give
way to jungly shade and sweaty rock. Five hundred metres on, the
Sheraton Hotel pokes out of the forest above a tiny, isolated beach,
and about 200 metres further, Vidigal begins, climbing the face of a
steep, wide gap like a festive Navaho village on steroids.

I turned right at Vidigal's only road entrance: an informal asphalt
plaza full of buses shuttling heavy Saturday traffic to and from the
beach. Downshifting, I began winding my way up the favela. The road
was lined with shops. Fishmongers, butchers and fruit vendors hawked
food from rickety market stalls. The bakeries, beauty salons and
hardware stores were doing brisk business as tenants leaned out the
windows of the apartments stacked precariously above them. Here and
there people spilled out of bars, gesturing wildly with cups of beer.
A drunk, his bottle of 90-proof caçhasa empty beside him, slept
beneath a tree. The going was slow. Overloaded Volkwagen microbuses
and Beetles strained against the incline. Shirtless and barefoot
adolescents weaved impatiently through the traffic on battered
motorbikes as families carrying loads of groceries trudged carefully
up and down the roadside.

I saw Jaimin waving to me beside an auto repair shop near Vidigal's
midpoint. I parked my car on the street. We shook hands and patted
bellies in the Brazilian fashion and headed down a narrow, roughly
paved footpath. It was a glorious day. Looking back down the mountain
to the city, beaches and island-dotted ocean, I realized I had nothing
to fear. Children flew colorful kites from the roofs of terraced
cinder-block houses as women put out laundry beside them. Many homes
were freshly stuccoed and brightly painted. Many appeared unfinished,
but people were at work at all points along the sloping 50-storey
neighborhood adding new rooms and building higher. Men pushed
wheelbarrows full of bricks, sand and cement up and down the concrete
paths. Amid all this focused activity, I felt safe and contented.
People seemed to know each other and they exchanged greetings; they
were getting on with their daily business in a civil and relaxed
fashion. Vidigal was not what I had expected.

Nor for that matter was Jaimin's house.

From the dark narrow lane it was built on, it didn't look like much.
Excess mortar had oozed out between the clay bricks and dried in ugly
lumps. The iron grate closing the shed where he kept his motorcycle
was falling off. The steps to the kitchen door were uneven and
crumbling. Inside, however, it was different. The kitchen was almost
suburban. Brown, floral tiles covered the walls. The fridge and stove
were large and relatively new. As I was introduced to his wife, Maria,
I lost my reluctance about accepting food from the "desperately poor."
The meal she was preparing on the stove was simple — beans, rice, beef
and squash — but impossibly huge.

Jaimin gave me a tour. We headed upstairs to the living room. It was
carpeted and furnished. His two children, a son and a daughter, sat on
one of several couches studying. Their dog lay curled up beside them.
The TV was off, but music came from the stereo. The best thing,
however, was the view. From the open sliding windows at the front, I
saw more of Rio than I had ever seen at one time. The entire South
Zone with its highrise buildings and long beaches was far, far below,
framed in the distance by the ocean and dark, tropical mountains. The
next floor had bedrooms. Jaimin and Maria's had the same view as that
of the living room. The kids and Jaimin's brother each had rooms at
the back. Next was the roof, where a table and set of patio chairs sat
beside some potted plants and a children's merry-go-round. At the
back, in the "penthouse," Jaimin had built his wife a knitting and
sewing studio complete with a small power loom. Maria owned a clothing
store near the bottom of the favela, and made her merchandise herself.
The family shared two bathrooms. Most astounding of all, they had two
telephone lines. Thanks to Brazil's chaotic state telephone system,
phone service is both spotty and expensive. It costs between $1,500
and $3,500 to get a phone line installed. Thus, a single phone line
can be a luxury even for the well-off. Two are a luxury for anyone.

After lunch, we sat around, chatting. After helping the kids with a
math problem (Jaimin is largely illiterate) I showed off my saxophone
playing to Maria. She takes lessons and plays in the band at her
Baptist church. The church was built by Jaimin and his neighbors —
nearly all of whom are evangelical Baptists — on land the congregation
bought outside the favela. A neighbor dropped by to chat. They wanted
to hear some American music, so I played Fats Waller's Ain't
Misbehavin' on the sax. I found Amazing Grace in Maria's hymn book and
they sang along in Portuguese.

As the sun began to set, Jaimin walked me back to the car. It hadn't
been stolen, nor had the groceries I had left inside — even though I
had forgotten to lock one of the doors. I headed back home full and
pleasantly dazed. .

NONE OF THIS SHOULD SERVE TO GLOSS OVER THE PROBLEMS of shantytowns.
Even in Vidigal, one of the nicest favelas in Brazil, there are
thousands of extremely poor people earning Brazil's legal monthly
minimum wage of slightly more than $130. Many live in houses made of
cardboard and scrap wood. The community lacks sufficient doctors,
nurses and medicines. After rainstorms many hovels in the favela's
upper reaches either collapse or risk washing away in mudslides. The
situation in the lowland shantytowns of Rio's industrial North Zone is
even worse. In Vidigal and other South Zone favelas, construction is
done on mountainsides. Sewage and rainwater leave the area by gravity.
This is no blessing to the residents of the formal city below: Illegal
favela sewers pollute beaches. But the steep locations allow the
favelas' primitive sanitation systems to function reasonably well. In
the North Zone, however, there are fewer hills. Favelas there are
often built on the swampy flood plains of the Fluminense Lowlands that
spread out around the upper reaches of Guanabara Bay. They stink
during the dry season and after rains they flood, filling homes with
sewage. In Jacarezinho (or Little Alligator), another reasonably
well-off favela by Rio standards, meningitis is often epidemic during
the chilly rainy season. Two years ago, eight children died of the
disease.

Then, of course, there is violence. Nightly body counts from drug wars
and police shootouts can be higher than 20. Bad holiday weekends in
Rio have been known to result in more than 100 murders. Most of the
victims are teen-age boys and young men involved with Rio's
flourishing, favela-based cocaine trade. Many of the victims are
tortured beforehand and mutilated afterward. Prosecution of murder
suspects is almost unheard of. More than 90 per cent of Rio homicides
are never even investigated. When a friend's father was murdered in
his lunch trailer in a fairground, police didn't show up for hours.
Weapons such as the AR-15 assault rifle, fragmentation grenades and
rocket launchers give such gangs as the Commando Vermelho (Red
Commando) and Terceiro Commando (Third Commando) military-style
firepower. The police, corrupt, poorly paid and highly unprofessional,
are not much help. After an assault on a South Zone favela and
drug-gang hideout, a local commander summed up in one phrase the
force's cruelty and incompetence.

"Damn, we shot off 10,000 rounds and didn't kill anybody."

In August 1993, 24 residents of Vigario Geral, a North Zone favela,
were massacred by a police hit squad. None of the dead were criminals.
The killing was revenge for the murder of two policeman by drug
dealers. In this Wild West environment, several people die each week
from stray gunfire. Firefights fill the night sky near some favelas
with the phosphorescent glow of tracer bullets. The battles force many
apartment dwellers to sleep in their buildings' public corridors to
hide from the gunfire. Things got so out of hand last November that
the federal government called in the army, navy and air force to
occupy the biggest and most dangerous shantytowns. Within sight of the
tanks and helicopters, residents were summarily searched for drugs and
weapons. Very few criminals were caught. But the situation is a bit
calmer now.

Yes, these problems are serious and cry out for attention. They are
not, however, different in kind from the problems faced by the poor in
North America, particularly the poor in public housing. Violence, drug
dealing, poor nutrition, low-quality education and inadequate health
care may not be as extreme as they are in the Third World, but they
exist nonetheless. And ultimately, successfully dealing with these
problems may be easier in shantytowns than in North America's urban
centres.

A good point of comparison is Toronto's Regent Park. The first major
public housing development in Canada, it compares favorably with
similar projects in the United States. I pass it almost daily, and
while I can't say it fills me with dread like Chicago's Cabrini-Green
and Robert Taylor Homes, I've never felt an ounce of the comfort or
calm I've felt in the shantytowns of Brazil, Chile and Bolivia.

The people of Regent Park appear materially better off than shantytown
dwellers. They are better fed and better dressed. The public schools,
hospitals and transport options within walking distance testify to a
society more than passingly interested in the public welfare. Their
dwellings are reasonably modern and far sturdier than the average
shantytown house. But Regent Park is a dead zone in a way that Vidigal
is not. In a place full of energetic young people and many idle adults
there's not a single shop, no shingle advertising a service, nobody
trying to sell me lemons or apples, not a single person with a rolling
toolbox ready to repair flat tires or tune up a car at the curbside.
Short of drug dealers, one would be hard pressed to find even a
smidgen of economic vitality.

And why not? Primarily because it's not allowed. There are some women
who hold bake sales and others who cook at home clandestinely for the
retail trade, but both activities run very close to the law. Health
regulations are not kind to people baking for the public at home.
People who try to open beauty parlors or repair shops in their
apartments risk losing welfare benefits and contravene zoning and
commerce bylaws. Under such circumstances, what in heaven's name do
people in Regent Park — so many of them unemployed and on public
assistance — do with themselves all day? Most shantytowns are hives of
economic activity. Even in poverty, people have something to do. In a
climate free of restrictions, business prospers and the communities
gain dignity, cohesion and the interpersonal relationships that make
neighborhoods work. People care for each other, provide neighbors with
jobs, build social clubs, provide day care, lend money and cups of
sugar. When somebody needs a house, people chip in like Amish barn
raisers.

Shantytown dwellers understand the basic strength of their
communities. The proof of this is in their resistance to government
attempts to get them to move, no matter how awful conditions may
appear to others. When I visited a garbage dump favela in the
Northwestern Brazilian city of Recife, the city was trying to shut the
place down and move the people out of the houses they had built with
their own hands. The locals were furious. They made their living from
the garbage, selling scrap and other recyclables to industry. They
weren't about to move, so they suggested the city let them stay, give
their kids a school and provide them with gloves, protective clothing
and tools to allow them to do their jobs more safely. The garbage
workers were proud to have me visit their shacks. They offered me food
and drink. Their kids wanted to play soccer. That favela was the most
foul place I've ever visited, but I came away feeling that their
community was worth saving.

That's not what I feel when I leave Regent Park. As with other public
housing projects I've visited, I rarely cross paths with outwardly
friendly people. The atmosphere is edgy and defensive, probably
because people have so little to do. Offence is expected and if not
delivered, assumed. People come and go anonymously, leaving few clues
as to their activities, and no neighborly gestures inviting an
exchange of pleasantries.

When the armed forces occupied Rio favelas, I got a cab, went to the
worst location (a helicopter had been hit and brought down there two
days earlier) and chatted easily with local health workers,
shopkeepers and café patrons, despite cops speeding by with machine
guns and shotguns poking out of squad car windows. Some did not want
to talk about the problems, but most were willing to give me
directions to those who would. I remember the reaction of a reporter
from Los Angeles who had covered that city's poorest areas. On his
first visit to Rocinha, a favela of 300,000 just behind Vidigal, he
returned slightly stunned.

"It wasn't that bad," he said. "Sure, people were poor, but I felt no
menace. Not even from the tough guys. It wasn't like the projects. I
didn't feel like any move or gesture, any eye contact might ‘dis'
somebody and get me in trouble."

In short, he felt welcome. I don't feel welcome in Regent Park. More
important, I don't think most people who live there feel welcome
either. The difference is that people in shantytowns feel ownership of
their communities. After all, most people live there for a very simple
reason: Shantytowns offer a better life than the residents could
expect elsewhere. Most of the millions living in the favelas of Rio,
São Paulo and other Brazilian mega-cities are migrants or children of
migrants. Like the residents of North America's big-city tenement
districts earlier this century, shantytown dwellers are searching for
greater opportunities. By the standards of their previous lives, or
those of their parents, many are better off.

To this day, Jaimin is a rural landowner. He has a tiny mountain plot
outside Rio that has been in his family for generations. But land
ownership is not necessarily a living. Rural life offered no future
for him or his family. Back in the mountains the best he could expect
was subsistence. He had little time for school. When he first moved to
Rio he rented an apartment in the formal part of the city, but found
the obligation to pay rent too risky in a precarious economy. When his
wife inherited a plot in Vidigal, they moved willingly and slowly
built their house. Today, their children go to school. Maria has a
business and several employees. Jaimin has regular work and provides
his brother with a job and a room. His home is appreciating in value
and he is considering trading up for something better elsewhere in
Vidigal. Jaimin and Maria have enough leisure to take part in frequent
church activities and enough wealth to donate part of their income to
the church's charities. They are not desperate or helpless and they
are by no means alone in their modest prosperity.

I have met teachers, journalists and other professionals who have
moved to Vidigal and Rocinha.You can build bigger houses for less
money in the favela than you can anywhere else in the city. The number
of satellite dishes in these communities is testament to a thriving
favela middle class. For the millions who have moved to cities from
the poor and semi-feudal Brazilian Northeast, the chance for a better
life is even greater. Many have enough money to go back if they wish,
and many have homes and family plots in their native states. They stay
in the favelas, despite the poverty, drug-gang violence and lack of
services, because they know life back home is nastier and more
brutish. People are still migrating to big-city shantytowns because
shantytowns still hold out the prospect of a better life. So many stay
because their life there is better.

Can you say the same about Regent Park and other North American
housing projects? Not really. Public housing does not belong to its
residents in the way that Vidigal belongs to Jaimin. Residents have no
stake in their homes, no freedom to alter their physical and economic
environment. If they are on social assistance they are little more
than wards of the state, condemned to idleness or driven to
subterfuge. More money would do little more than slap a few flakes of
gilt on a rusty cage.

A large percentage of South American shantytown dwellers come from
semi-feudal regions still wrapped in the customs of slavery or
peonage. For all their problems, many breathe a sort of freedom in the
favela. They stand or fall on their own wits and can see the profit or
loss of their efforts. The profit is rarely large and the losses are
sometimes great, but these people are masters of their own lives.
Unlike North American public housing developments, shantytowns are
bureaucracy-free zones. And it's easier to start a business in a
shantytown than it is to start one outside it. Hernando de Soto, a
Peruvian economist, sent his students out to see if they could obtain
the permits required to legally open a business in Lima without
resorting to special favors or bribes. They gave up after six months.
Conditions are much the same in Rio's formal areas. The situation is
not all that different for Regent Park's would-be bakers or
hairdressers.

In a shantytown, you buy some stock or supplies and, with your family
alongside you, hang out a shingle, open your door to your neighbors
and get down to work. Unlike North America's low-income public
housing, in Rio de Janeiro's favelas nearly everyone has a job.
Rocinha has an amazingly diversified economy. In addition to the basic
services — bakeries, groceries, beauty salons, and so on — you can
find business academies, language schools, TV and radio repair shops
and private health clinics.

Shantytown people have homes. They also have businesses. Where the
government has ignored them, they have created institutions on their
own. In Vidigal and Rocinha, both communities founded by squatters,
the inability to get clear legal title to homes and the lack of legal
protection in disputes has resulted in the creation of local property
registers that are honored within the community, if not without. These
have helped create a thriving local property market. Despite drug
violence, there is little property crime. If you steal, you die. The
solution isn't pretty, but it works. Jaimin doesn't lock his doors at
night, a situation unheard of in the formal parts of Rio. The drug
dealers themselves have more than a little community spirit, funneling
some of their profits back to the community by building sewer systems,
day-care centres, soccer pitches and community centres. They also
protect the community from the police, who are reviled far more than
the gangs. As Jaimin said: "I don't have anything to do with the
dealers, but I prefer them to the police. They live here. When the
police come they steal and ask for bribes."

As Jane Jacobs pointed out 35 years ago in The Death and Life of Great
American Cities, creating new communities from scratch, even with the
best of intentions, has been disastrous for our cities. What many
people considered squalid slums were actually poor but functional
communities. When places such as North Boston and Toronto's South
Cabbagetown were swept away for giant planned developments, the
positive elements of these neighborhoods' businesses and social
structures were swept away with them. Needs were no longer met with
the materials and skills at hand; a market that once channeled much of
the neighborhood's energy back to the residents themselves was no
more. They no longer shopped and worked at neighborhood groceries,
bought their Sunday best from neighborhood tailors or spent their
leisure in neighborhood bars, bakeries and pool halls.

Fortunately, some governments are beginning to get the idea. In Rio de
Janeiro, old ideas of slum clearance and universal public housing are
giving way to the idea of urbanização. The city is now recognizing the
favelas and formally integrating them into the day-to-day life of the
city. Informal community title is getting legal standing in Brazilian
law. Favela residents are receiving new and better water, sewage and
electrical services, and are paying for them through meters and
property taxes. Slum clearance is now confined to environmentally
sensitive land chartered as biological reserves and to homes built
under bridges and viaducts. These residents are not merely driven out.
They receive market-based payments for their homes, allowing them to
buy dwellings in other favelas. There is a danger that governments
will try too hard to reshape favela life, but most big shantytowns are
too complex, independent and organized for a poor and inefficient
government to do much damage.

SHANTYTOWN LIFE TEACHES US THAT PEOPLE, EVEN THE poor and oppressed,
have great capacity to take care of their own needs. Building a
community on a steep mountainside, with little more than cinder blocks
and cement, is no mean feat. If that energy and resourcefulness could
be tapped here, by people who are better educated, better fed and
desperate for work, imagine what might result. We have lost touch with
our human ingenuity because so many of our vibrant but poor
communities have been wiped off the map. Society's well-intentioned
efforts to improve and re-engineer the lives of the less fortunate
have narrowed the options. Many laws prevent the poor in North America
from exercising the kind of resourcefulness that Jaimin and others
have shown in Vidigal. It is harder and harder to provide people with
meaningful help when they are made more and more dependent. Welfare
rules stifle economic initiative. Zoning bylaws restrict commerce, and
building codes reduce the opportunities to build truly affordable
housing. As a result, social service agencies provide the poor with
more and more of their basic needs. It is a process of
infantilization, and governments are finding out that they have
neither the stomach nor chequebook to continue on this course. It's
time they took a hint from shantytowns and set about unleashing forces
that would allow the poor to take control of their lives and
governments to spend their tax money more efficiently. Give our poor
deeds to their government-made slums and watch them thrive. Lift bans
on street vending. Remove inflexible zoning laws that discourage
business and job creation.

It would be wonderful to be able to visit Regent Park in several years
and see residents hammering away at additions to their houses, to see
shops sprouting in once-dead open spaces, beauty parlor signs hanging
from the windows of upper floor apartments, teens tuning the engines
of suburbanites' cars in the parking lots and local men and women
happily relaxing at sidewalk cafés after work. Then I might drop in on
my way home and leave as happy and surprised as I was when I first
visited Vidigal. I might even live there.

Jeb Blount can be reached at

A small dwarf called P E T E R P A N said:
http://www.nextcity.com/main/town/2shanty.htm

In praise of shantytowns
Beyond the crime and grime, Third World slums get it right
by Jeb Blount
Discussion

IT MUST HAVE SEEMED THE LAST PLACE A TOURIST WOULD venture ? up the
narrow winding streets of Rio de Janeiro's notorious mountainside
shantytowns, or favelas. But during the 1992 United Nations Earth
Summit, hundreds signed up for $30 half-day trips to the slums. City
bureaucrats did everything they could to stop the tours. Showing
foreigners the poverty, gang warfare and inadequate sanitation clashed
with Rio's desire to sell visiting summiteers a vision of green
urbanity: a modern, oceanside metropolis crisscrossed by ancient,
hunchbacked mountains and tropical forests.

This is the crap of Brazil. Not that I mean Brazil is crap, I just mean the
excrement, reject, useless thing. The politicians have turned Brazil into a big
toilet.


Renan.

--
[]s Renan \|/ E-mail: \|/ Slack9.1
Canoas, RS, | renan.birck | FreeBSD
Brasil com S, | @ | Damn Small Linux
seus gringos! | ibestvip.com.br | Win 9x + VMware
LRU: 349031 /|\ Minha banda - /|\ www.thedus.cjb.net

"Chaos Master" wrote in message
...
A small dwarf called P E T E R P A N said:
http://www.nextcity.com/main/town/2shanty.htm

In praise of shantytowns
Beyond the crime and grime, Third World slums get it right
by Jeb Blount
Discussion

IT MUST HAVE SEEMED THE LAST PLACE A TOURIST WOULD venture ? up the
narrow winding streets of Rio de Janeiro's notorious mountainside
shantytowns, or favelas. But during the 1992 United Nations Earth
Summit, hundreds signed up for $30 half-day trips to the slums. City
bureaucrats did everything they could to stop the tours. Showing
foreigners the poverty, gang warfare and inadequate sanitation clashed
with Rio's desire to sell visiting summiteers a vision of green
urbanity: a modern, oceanside metropolis crisscrossed by ancient,
hunchbacked mountains and tropical forests.

This is the crap of Brazil. Not that I mean Brazil is crap, I just mean
the
excrement, reject, useless thing. The politicians have turned Brazil into
a big
toilet.

Porra meu! Faz favor de não dar corda para gringo que vem aqui encher o
saco.



Renan.

--
[]s Renan \|/ E-mail: \|/ Slack9.1
Canoas, RS, | renan.birck | FreeBSD
Brasil com S, | @ | Damn Small Linux
seus gringos! | ibestvip.com.br | Win 9x + VMware
LRU: 349031 /|\ Minha banda - /|\ www.thedus.cjb.net

A small dwarf called Leonardo Cavalcanti said:


Porra meu! Faz favor de não dar corda para gringo que vem aqui encher o
saco.

Sorry, não resisti! Foi mal. Cagada minha.

Renan.

--
[]s Renan \|/ E-mail: \|/ Slack9.1
Canoas, RS, | renan.birck | FreeBSD
Brasil com S, | @ | Damn Small Linux
seus gringos! | ibestvip.com.br | Win 9x + VMware
LRU: 349031 /|\ Minha banda - /|\ www.thedus.cjb.net