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.

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.
To develop my research I’ve chosen the community of Santa Marta as a case study: it is located in the “Zona Sul” of the city (the richest one), in a really visible position on Morro Dona Marta, just at the feet of Cristo Corcovado Mountain, it is safe from drugs dealers and it has a medium-small dimension with about 10.000 inhabitants.
Especially because of this high visibility in the “Zona Sul”, Santa Marta became a kind of model for Government’s programs, but most of the promoted projects had the purpose to improve more the image of the community from the formal city, than life and conditions of inhabitants.
One year ago, Santa Marta became the first community to have a police force specially assigned: the UPP (Unidade de Policia Pacificadora), so the favela has been freed from drug dealers, but as well it became the first community to be surrounded by a concrete wall to avoid a possible expansion. Being a model causes a lot of controversies: from one side the community received some improvement projects, but from the other, it is becoming a “lab experiment” where population is not questioned. This duality is always present: visiting the favela the feelings could be really contrasting; one day you can think the community is working in a harmonious way, that dimensions of spaces are human , and relations between people are proximate, but the day after you can see just desperation, poverty and degradation.
But in the end somebody will say to you “Seja bem-vindo, e volte sempre!” and the idea that it’s worth to go back.

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.

Basically the purpose of these interventions is to improve life of inhabitants thanks to the insertion, in the informal tissue, of community, educational, sport and work centres, as well as infrastructure to connect favelas with formal city and to improve mobility of inhabitants inside the complex of favelas itself. My work has been focused especially in the complex of “favelas” of Manguinhos and Alemão, situated in the “Zona Norde” of Rio: big masterplans (including new sustainable housing area, social services and equipment, cableway and train-stations) have been developed. This experience permitted me to understand the political programs that the city is promoting, and the answer that architecture and urbanism is offering to the numerous poor areas of the city.

My personal research is starting from the analysis of a case study, favela of Santa Marta, with the objective of understanding the present reality (with social, cultural, political, physical and infrastructural aspects), trying to comprehend why the community is at present strongly reacting against government programs of urbanization, and then propose a possible plan of intervention.