Favela urbanisation, the city and citizenship: Governing favelas in Sao Paulo, Brazil

Abstract

Brazil is a country of great contrasts that produces beauty and uniqueness, but that also faces persistent inequality and urban segregation. More than 1.2 million people in the city of São Paulo live in favelas, a local term that is closest to the concept of slums. Unprecedented levels of investment have been allocated to the Favela Urbanisation Programme that will ‘upgrade’ more than one thousand favelas by 2024. The programme can include a range of interventions in each favela area, such as infrastructure development; installation of public services; partial relocation of residents from risk areas to apartment buildings; and tenure regularisation. This research aims at better understanding how the Favela Urbanisation Programme is being shaped and deployed in the city of São Paulo. It looks at the influence of local and global frameworks, the effects of interventions and the connection between housing and citizenship. Written academic and policy material and semi-structured interviews with some of the main organisations involved in São Paulo housing policy were used as sources of data in a qualitative methodology. The thesis is informed by a poststructuralist perspective, which is conducive to a critical and ethical enquiry about practices that attempt to govern the conduct of others and the rationales guiding these interventions. I argue that the Favela Urbanisation Programme improves people’s access to much needed services which in turn have the potential to diminish the marginalisation of this population. However, it also contributes to the maintenance of the dominant power dynamics of social inequality. This thesis explores the ways in which the urbanisation programme not only acts on the physical space, but targets favelas as communities and models citizens’ behaviour. The programme is guided by a biopolitical concern with the administration and improvement of the lives of the favela population. Local and global framings of mega and global cities shape and legitimise these interventions. Alternative understandings of development, city and citizenship that have the potential to be more inclusive and socialjustice oriented are also explored. This thesis contributes to these discussions from a development studies perspective that is an alternative to the dominance of the architecture discipline in housing discussions in Brazil and advocates for a radical challenge of the structures that produce and reinforce inequalities, so that the city can be enjoyed by all of its citizens.