![]() Over the next two decades, the state government undertook a large-scale slum removal program paired with a massive relocation effort in which displaced favelados were settled in public housing compounds located on the city’s periphery. As arch-conservative military generals usurped power from the progressive statesman João Goulart on a national level, state and city politics, led by the pugnacious former journalist Carlos Lacerda, became more draconian as well. Many favelas were located on precious inner city land in Rio’s most affluent neighborhoods, making them ripe territory for lucrative commercial and residential construction ventures. In addition to the reduction of poverty, the ostensible primary reason for the construction of public housing, it is clear that real estate interests pressured policy makers to pursue an aggressive course of favela eradication in the 1960s and ’70s. As they were not properly maintained and their management style was quite unpopular among their residents, the parks were abandoned within several years after their first occupation. These original settlements were intended as temporary housing for displaced favela residents until the city and state government could erect permanent housing projects. The “proletarian parks” of the 1940s, the brainchild of Mayor Henrique Dodsworth (1937–1945), set a precedent of favela removal for a series of full-scale eradication campaigns initiated in the 1960s and ’70s. A central part of their program was providing modern, sanitary, public housing units as an alternative to slums, which were thought to breed not only disease, illiteracy, and crime, but also moral corruption and political radicalism. ![]() During this period, populist politicians ascended to power on both the national and local stage championing a platform of poverty alleviation and national modernization. Largely ignored by city and state government for much of the first half of the twentieth century, the favelas began to attract political attention starting in the mid-1940s. Photograph by Meg Weeks.įavela Removal, Public Housing, and Popular Resistance: 1940s–1970s ![]() The community Cruzada de São Sebastião is a public housing compound within Leblon, one of the city’s most fashionable and expensive neighborhoods. Since the city and state governments failed to extend many public services to the favelas, community members, led by their local associations, banded together to provide sanitation, medical care, and transportation to their friends and neighbors. These organizations served as forums for deliberating matters of community governance, in addition to acting as liaisons between favelados (favela residents) and the prefeitura (city hall). As they became more numerous and increasingly populated by a burgeoning urban underclass, favela residents began to organize internally, forming associações de moradores, or residents’ associations. Initially, these communities were loosely incorporated squatter settlements that sprang up organically in order to house internal migrants and itinerant laborers. As the nation continued to undergo dramatic political changes throughout the course of the twentieth century, the slums of its second-largest city grew in size and number, in turn experiencing significant changes of their own. The history of the favelas of Rio de Janeiro begins in the final years of the nineteenth century as Brazil transitioned from an empire to a republic. The Origins of Rio’s Favelas and Early Activism
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