From Favela to Comunidade, and Beyond: The Taming of Rio de Janeiro

Since the end of the nineteenth century, favelas have been a striking feature of the city of Rio de Janeiro. Although the term subúrbio (suburb) has also been widely used since then to refer to poor neighbourhoods along the city’s railway lines, the term favela has gained greater infamy. Unlike subúrbio, which refers to outlying neighbourhoods, the term favela, as we will discuss below, is associated with settlements featuring irregular land ownership and buildings in locations that may be close to the urban centre. Valladares (2006) and Gonçalves (2013) have traced the history of the construction of the term favela, showing that a long, cumulative process systematically associated favelas with lawlessness, classifying them as informal land use where builders have ignored regulations. This negative connotation has had significant repercussions on the everyday lives of favela populations and attests to the power of law in assigning social realities and institutionalizing specific classifications of social structures. The law is an act of identification that, as argued by Anselm Strauss (1997), involves placing the object in a category. The fact that favelas are generally identified as informal, marginal, and illegal spaces has allowed them to be considered indiscriminately as uniform spaces whose dwellers are a risk to the city and to society. This chapter examines the different terms that are used to name favelas. First, it discusses the process by which an official conception of favela was constructed; it then examines the gradual spread of the term comunidade (community) used to designate favelas; and lastly, it considers current local efforts to promote the term comunidade urbanizada (urbanized community) to distinguish certain favelas from others