Posted: March 4th, 2010 | Author: livia | Filed under: Rio de Janeiro | No Comments »
This early morning an explosion of water and mud invaded part of the community of Santa Marta, causing fear and controversy between inhabitants.
One of the last apartment-block, built during the urbanization works promoted by local government in 2005, has been evacuated because the structure has been affected by the impressive mass of water and mud.
“This building has been built on top of a tunnel where a water source was passing”, is denouncing one of the 70 occupants.
This event sharpens a debate, already animated in the favela, about quality of interventions in the community: all the buildings realized in the last urbanization works are already degraded and present important infiltrations. Inhabitants denunciate they are obliged to move from houses they built (so they function) to small apartments with no qualified public space, that besides this have important structural defects.
Posted: December 8th, 2009 | Author: livia | Filed under: Rio de Janeiro | Tags: Brasil, favelas, Rio de Janeiro | No Comments »
About 1.3 million people live in more than 900 “favelas” in Rio de Janeiro.
Rich neighbourhoods co-exist next to the poorest slums, with a continuous visual relation, but without a social interaction. Favelas in the middle of the formal city are the best expression of the duality that is a peculiarity of Rio: heaven and hell, luxury and poverty. Rio is an emblematic example of a city that is the representation of spacial and social segregation inside the city itself.
Many social programs are promoted by local government (as Favela-Bairro Program, or PAC Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento) to improve the integration between this informal parts and the formal city, but a lot of critics and considerations to improve the reality of favelas can be done.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted: December 7th, 2009 | Author: livia | Filed under: Rio de Janeiro | No Comments »
My name is Livia Minoja and I arrived in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, three months ago, to make an internship about urban projects developing Rio de Janeiro’s communities. I got a scholarship – Poli-no-profit – from my school in Milan (Politecnico di Milano), where I study architecture at the Faculty of Architettura e Società, to come here. Thanks also the help of two tutors (Salvatore Porcaro > www.cityrom.it and Gennaro Postiglione > www.lablog.org.uk).
I took part to the urban design team directed by Jorge Mario Jauregui, that is involved in the projects promoted by local government (Prefeitura do Rio), in order to improve an integration between “favelas” and the rest of the city.
Read the rest of this entry »