
How visiting the favelas changes perceptions
A survey completed in five North American downtowns reveals a huge disparity regarding perceptions of Rio de Janeiro's favelas. Catalytic Communities' first-ever Favela Perceptions Survey interviewed 300 North Americans next to mass transit stops in downtown Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and Montreal in March 2012. Another 325 people were interviewed in Rio de Janeiro. All 300 North American respondents had heard of favelas prior to completing the survey. Of those who had never been to these communities, 79 percent viewed them unfavorably, whereas 72 percent of respondents who had visited favelas viewed them favorably. Learn more.
Mudando o preconceito das favelas cariocas
O Complexo da Maré é conhecido por ser uma das maiores favelas do Rio; esta composta por 16 comunidades onde moram mais de 130,000 pessoas. O bairro está localizado na zona norte da cidade, entre a Avenida Brasil e as Linhas Amarela e Vermelha. A Maré conta com poucos equipamentos sociais como escolas e postos de saúde, mas conta com um batalhão de Polícia Militar. Mais.
Community participation in urban upgrading programs in Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro has 6 million inhabitants, of whom an estimated 20 percent live in informal settlements. The number of favelas is still debated, as there are several ways of defining what constitutes a favela, but estimates range from 500 to 1000. Whatever the number, what Rio's favelas have in common is that the great majority of them still lack basic urban services. These settlements also lack or have very poor social service provision, especially in the areas of health, education, and social assistance. The Morar Carioca program — understood by many to be the social legacy of the Olympic Games to be hosted in the city in 2016 — aims to urbanize more than 500 slums and benefit more than 320,000 households. Learn more.
Landslide prevention, environmental risk management and reforestation in Rio
Rio's dramatic topography and rapid urbanization process have made the city more prone to certain types of environmental hazards, including landslides, erosion, and deforestation. When the Portuguese arrived in the city's Guanabara Bay in 1501, the mountains were covered with thick Atlantic rainforest. In the ensuing years, as this protective covering has been stripped away to make room for settlements, the thin soils have become susceptible to landslides and the rock layer has been left exposed to weathering, making it more prone to erosion. In addition, the lack of drainage in many of the city's poorest neighborhoods has contributed to excessive flooding during the summer rainy season. Learn more.
Community mapping: innovations and challenges in Rio
Community mapping is a process that involves communities in the production of diverse local information, knowledge, and resources. In neighborhoods around the globe, it has led to greater inclusion and empowerment of communities in their own development process, as local participants take part in planning, enumeration, and information gathering and processing exercises that were conducted previously only by experts. As the introduction of new technologies — including digital cameras, mobile phones, global positioning systems (GPS), and geographic information systems (GIS) — makes community mapping more sophisticated, it is also being used to identify risk areas or damaged urban infrastructure, with communities mobilizing to take appropriate action based on the data. Learn more.
Legado da Copa do Mundo e dos Olímpicos na redução da pobreza no Rio de Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro é uma das cidades sede da Copa do Mundo de Futebol 2014 e dos Jogos Olímpicos 2016, o que significa uma grande oportunidade de se posicionar ainda melhor na esfera internacional, além de seus já conhecidos atributos naturais e da qualidade humana de seus moradores. Este debate apresenta a necessidade de um aproveitamento maior da Copa e dos Olímpicos para contribuir na melhoria da qualidade de vida da cidade no longo prazo, principalmente focando-se na redução da pobreza e na promoção de maiores oportunidades para a população carente. Learn more.
Can the World Cup and Olympic Games in Rio contribute to lasting progress against poverty?
Rio de Janeiro is one of the host cities for the World Cup to be held in Brazil in 2014 and is the host city for the Summer Olympic Games of 2016. In the meantime, Rio has the opportunity to boost its international image, leveraging its already world-renowned sites and the warmth of its residents. But beyond this temporary PR buzz, can such events lead to something more? Can these two major sports events contribute to long-term improvements to the life of Rio de Janeiro, including poverty alleviation and the promotion of opportunities for the city's more disadvantaged populations? Learn more.
The favela elevators of Rio de Janeiro
The 10,000 inhabitants of the Cantagalo and Pavão / Pavãozinho informal settlements, situated in the southern part of Rio de Janeiro, have recently begun to appreciate what it means to be connected to the formal city. Since mid-2010, they can access two elevators that connect their communities — located on two facing sides of one of Rio's many hills — with the General Osorio metro station in Ipanema. The elevators also allow easy walking access to the commercial areas of Copacabana and Ipanema, Rio's most important touristic destinations, where many of the informal residents go for work. Before the opening of the elevators, these communities could only be reached by a steep stairway of more than 700 steps, which locals had to climb and descend several times a day. Learn more.
Rio de Janeiro: Elevadores nas favelas
Os 10,000 moradores das favelas Cantagalo e Pavão / Pavãozinho, localizadas nos morros da Zona Sul do Rio, têm iniciado recentemente a se sentir parte da cidade formal: desde junho 2010 eles tem aceso a dois elevadores que conectam suas comunidades com a estação do metrô General Osório em Ipanema. Os elevadores também facilitam o percurso da população das favelas nas áreas comerciais de Copacabana e Ipanema, umas das áreas turísticas mais importantes da cidade, onde muitas destas pessoas trabalham. Antes da construção dos elevadores, estas comunidades só podiam ser acessadas por escadas muito longas com mais de 700 degraus. Além de longas, o local estava em situação de completa degradação, com lixão a céu aberto, e total desordem urbana. Learn more.
Pages
Housing the poor: Mumbai's underground rental market
About 80 percent of low-income rental units in India exist in the informal market. These affordable units house Mumbai's working poor and are rented out by makeshift landlords, who are often poor themselves but who capitalize on any extra space they have at home. For migrant laborers, renting makes sense. Many migrants are short-term residents, earning enough during short spurts of work to then return to their home villages. While in the city, their circumstances are precarious, and work opportunities come and go quickly. Renting, as opposed to home ownership — which has dominated the government's policy focus for the urban poor — allows for flexibility and a fluidity that matches the migrants' life and experiences in the city. Chetan, for example, does not pay rent when he returns to his family in his home village for months at a time. While there is certainly a place for home ownership for the urban poor — some of whom have been the fabric of this city for generations — a mixed housing stock is essential for meeting their varying shelter needs. Learn more.
Giving the urban poor a taste of safe drinking water
Yearlong research by Monitor Inclusive Markets in the slums and other low-income neighborhoods of Chennai, Delhi, Hyderabad, and Mumbai showed that the water quality was problematic and highly seasonal — over half of all samples did not meet government standards. In addition, residents found water difficult to access, with limited hours of availability and multiple days without supply. To respond to this dire situation, MIM has launched a project to examine this need for safe drinking water and to develop a financially sustainable, pay-per-use water plant solution that provides water in an affordable, accessible, and reliable manner. Learn more.
A collaborative remapping of Dharavi's redevelopment plan
The Dharavi Redevelopment Project (DRP), accepted by the Government of Maharashtra in 2004, included a proposal that Dharavi be divided into five sectors, based on existing transport corridors and new roads envisioned by the master plan. It also included what was nominally a way to finance the building of free housing and infrastructure for Dharavi residents. This plan quickly came under attack. Learn more.
Tackling malnutrition with community linkage (Dasra Part 2)
After four months researching malnutrition among young children in the slums of Mumbai, Dasra, a leading strategic philanthropic organization in India, concluded that child malnutrition in Mumbai's informal settlements is, at its core, a political and behavioral issue among key stakeholders — specifically, caregivers and public health care providers. The resulting research report focused on children from birth to age three and surveyed 50 organizations working with marginalized communities in Mumbai, including SNEHA (Society for Nutrition, Education and Health Action), Mumbai Mobile Creches, and Apnalaya. In part two of a series on child malnutrition in Mumbai, Dasra offers insights into how caregivers' practices can be changed. Learn more.
Report from Mumbai: Who gets saved?
Much of the discussion around services to the urban poor revolves around such basic necessities as water, sanitation, land rights, and upgraded housing. The city's emergency services — woefully unavailable even to the wealthy — are much less present in the public debate. Yet infrastructure needs and emergency response are intimately intertwined. How can the fire department respond to a fire if water services in a given area are only available for an hour each day? If slums are undocumented and unmapped, do first responders know how to navigate the narrow alleyways? Is their equipment even capable of snaking through these tightly woven lanes? Learn more.
Dharavi: A settlement, not a slum
The picture unfortunately painted in most of our minds of Dharavi, which covers some 175 hectares in the heart of Mumbai, is that of an overcrowded, densely packed, filthy slum. The more time I spend in Dharavi, however, the more I realize what a misnomer it is to label Dharavi as a slum. Don't get me wrong: there is a significant lack of proper sanitation, ventilation, and light in Dharavi, and during the monsoon, the residents have to deal with flash floods entering their homes and are restricted in their activities. However, there's more to the story. Learn more.
Is Dharavi a symbol of Mumbai's failures?
While some Bombayites have adopted the Bandra-Worli Sea Link as a symbol of everything they believe is right with the city, I must confess that I'm quite astonished by how many others seem to believe that Dharavi is a shining example of the city's potential. New urban studies jargon now refers to Dharavi as "an informal city" that has been created by the boundless enterprise of its residents. In fact, when Barack Obama visited Bombay in 2011, he made it a point to praise the people living in the "winding alleys of Dharavi" for their optimism and determination. Learn more.
Nourishing our future: Tackling child malnutrition in Mumbai's slums
Perhaps the most shocking inequalities in growth and development between the elite and the marginalized play out in India's biggest metropolis — Mumbai, the country's economic and financial capital, where 36 percent of slum children are malnourished. Dasra, a Mumbai-based strategic philanthropic foundation, spent four months researching malnutrition amongst children aged 0-3 years in Mumbai's worst slums, such as Govandi and Dharavi. Almost counterintuitively, we found that malnutrition rates in urban India are often higher than in rural India and are, in fact, intricately linked with rapid urbanization, poverty, and illiteracy, requiring the urgent attention of policy makers, development practitioners, and philanthropists. Learn more.
Roads less traveled: Mumbai's misdirected transport initiatives
Mumbai is a city of many "mosts," so it's not surprising that the superlatives extend to the city's public transport system. The numbers there, though, are staggering: the city's two and only rail lines, for example — the Central and Western — carry more than 7.24 million commuters every day. In comparison, the New York City Subway system has 24 rail lines through five boroughs on 656 miles of track and carries an average of 4.8 million passengers each weekday; that's a mere 60 percent of Mumbai's 265 miles of lines. In other words, Mumbai's local trains are the most densely packed trains in the world. Learn more.
Mumbai: City of dreams?
While today's urban India has inspired such rhetorical ear candy as "outsourcing central" and worldwide renown as epicenter of the "Indian tiger," city life is not so promising to all of its citizens. In Mumbai, the population density is among the highest in the world at 20,000 people per square kilometer — a statistic that has nearly doubled since the 1991 census. The density is even higher in certain areas, including Dharavi — long known as Asia's largest slum — where an estimated 600,000 people are packed into one square kilometer. In fact, 62 percent of the city's residents live in slums — though the high profile of Bollywood stars and India's Stock Exchange often overshadows the lived reality of the city's majority. Read more.
