Slum Upgrading: a Challenge As Big As the City of São Paulo, Brazil

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Slum Upgrading: a Challenge As Big As the City of São Paulo, Brazil FOCUS 10 Essay Slum Upgrading: A Challenge as Big as the City of São Paulo, Brazil Elisabete França Architect; founding director of Studio2E-IdeiasUrbanas; former deputy-secretary, Municipal Social Housing Secretary, City of São Paulo (2005-2012). Eleven million people live in the city of São Paulo, Brazil, 50 percent of them in what is considered “sub­ normal” housing—squatter settlements, slums, and illegal land subdivisions. They suffer from overcrowding, unhealthy buildings, unsafe environments, lack of basic infrastructure and amenities, and costly public transportation. Elisabete França, São Paulo’s deputy secretary for social housing from 2005 to 2012, discusses the city’s successful new approaches in public housing and slum upgrading. hen I started my job as the city of São Paulo’s deputy urban design, as well as the best of engineering techniques, Wsecretary of public housing1 in 2005, I faced a major enabled SEHAB projects to have a bigger impact and become challenge: how to organize the city’s social housing policy. To well regarded by the public. Public architecture, in the housing address such a challenge I realized that we had to rely on the field, is a fundamental element in building the city. lessons from previous experiences from collaborations with international development agencies such as the World Bank, The second important decision was to recognize local cultures the Inter-American Development Bank, and UN-Habitat. These and pre-existences, particularly respecting the incremental experiences had mainly taught us the importance of training investments that families living in favelas (slums or squatter 2 the permanent technical staff of the public agencies. After all, settlements) had made over decades through self- or mutual- they are the ones who, over several successive government help processes. This led to projects for the upgrading of several administrations, keep the programs alive and, in the case of the favelas and transforming them into normal neighborhoods, city of São Paulo’s Social Housing Department (SEHAB), know integrating them into the formal city and generating great the city’s reality and its housing problems. gains in the quality of life for those communities. We had also learned that information management and the The successful public projects and the new housing units access to that information—in a simple and user-friendly way— built over the past eight years in São Paulo have proved the are what really ensure a democratic leadership of programs new housing policy to be a feasible alternative approach to and projects proposed by the government. Information common past practices: cheap cookie-cutter and bureaucratic transparency keeps away government’s patronage, and only public housing located in the city outskirts far from jobs and easy access to and transparency of information can allow amenities, and lacking environmental and design concerns society to participate responsibly in the various forums for besides cutting down costs. democratic debate and participation that our administration transformed into a fundamental part of the construction of the Social Housing in Brazil municipal housing policy. Because public policies presuppose Housing production in Brazil has always suffered from the lack choices that in a context of scarce resources can only be of a national housing policy that could reduce the effects of the made from clear criteria in order to prioritize investments, uneven development and rapid urbanization that started to information systematization is essential. leave deep marks in the country in the 1950s.3 Created in 1964, Two other important decisions adopted in 2005 also mark the National Housing Bank (BNH) and the Housing Financing the production of São Paulo’s current housing policy. The first System (SFH) proved to be unable to meet the ever-increasing decision was to invest in design quality. Good architecture and 2 In this article the words favela, slum, and squatter settlement are 1 The management structure of cities in Brazil includes secretarias used interchangeably to mean a community occupying land to which or secretaries that are the equivalent to city departments in the it has no legal title, in precarious homes (shacks or self-help built), and U.S. However, as the head of a city’s executive branch, once elected lacking basic infrastructure and public services. a mayor appoints all his secretarios (heads of the secretarias) and 3 For the formation of the contemporary city in Brazil, see Rio, V. and controls all management positions that, therefore, generally depend Siembieda, W. (eds) Contemporary Urbanism in Brazil: Beyond Brasilia on his political commitments and alliances. (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2010). FOCUS 10 ■ França: Slum Upgrading in São Paulo ■ 75 networks, better accessibility either by new roads or by providing pedestrian alleys, and public services. During the same period, international funding agencies, particularly the World Bank and the Inter-American Development Bank, started paying attention to examples of slum upgrading initiatives and to value them over those promoting the “bulldozer approach” and the eviction of the existing communities. In the 1980s the economic crisis, together with the re-democratization that ousted the military process, culminated with the extinction of the National Housing Bank (BNH) in 1986, interrupting its housing programs and further punishing the population that lacked the economic means to access the real-estate free market systems. In the city of São Paulo, urbanization became part of the housing policy’s agenda in the beginning of the 1980s, but always through isolated projects—although the number of slums and squatter settlements had increased significantly. By the end of the 1980s, the São Paulo State Government, with the support of the Municipal Government, applied for a World Bank loan for tackling the environmental degradation of Guarapiranga’s water basin. The basin covers 160,000 acres in seven municipalities, including São Paulo itself where 450,000 people lived at the start of the program. With 6,600 acres, the Guarapiranga reservoir is an important source of potable water for the metropolitan area, supplying 20 percent of its needs. One of the main components of Guarapiranga’s environmental program was the upgrading of slums and other precarious settlements located in the basin that housed 27,000 families, 90 percent of which were living within São Paulo’s municipal boundaries. Because of the severe environmental impacts caused by uncontrolled development in the slums and their Slums Tenements lack of proper infrastructure and sanitation, upgrading Illegal subdivisions Public housing projects made up a significant portion of the Guarapiranga Urbanized settlements basin recovery plan and resource allocation. Regarded as the first large-scale slum upgrading program in the city of São Figure 1: Sub-standard housing in the City of Sao Paulo. Paulo, the Guarapiranga Program served almost 100 slums and (source: Municipal Housing Plan 2009-2014; http://www.habisp. became an example to be followed, providing one of our most inf.br/doc/category/pmh) important lessons. needs of the lower-income population. The policy adopted by The positive results of Brazil’s first slum upgrading projects SFH/BNH focused mainly on the construction of large housing suggested a new direction for future interventions and projects, generally located in areas far from the consolidated city public policies. We learned the importance of respecting due to the cheaper cost of land. Disconnected from the job mar­ the social and economic investments that the communities ket, disconnected from decent public transportation and from and residents had made over the years, of restructuring their urban facilities, devoid of proper social infrastructure, and based physical space in a responsive and respectful manner, and of on the technocratic implementation of a handful of models, promoting the integration between the slum communities the majority of these programs were failures resulting in high and the city around them through design in a sustainable and vacancy rates and structures that deteriorated easily with time. environmentally responsible manner. In the 1980s and running parallel to the official governmental model, a few isolated slum upgrading projects were carried 4 In 2010, Rio had 763 favelas (squatter settlements) with around out in Rio de Janeiro, where slums are a much more prominent 1.3 million residents—22 percent of the city’s total population (2010 4 national census). That same year there were 1,020 favelas with at problem than in any other Brazilian city. These projects least 1.3 million residents in the city of São Paulo, representing 10 kept the families in their original housing, but provided percent of its population. Meanwhile, São Paulo metropolitan area’s the community with drinking water, sewage and drainage population was approximately 19 million people. 76 ■ Essays ■ FOCUS 10 Slum Upgrading—Main Concepts In slum upgrading, a paved road system is designed to allow vehicular access for public services (ambulances, police, mail, Slum upgrading is regarded as an important component of the waste collection) as well as for the installation of drinking water, strategies to fight poverty, because investments made in ba­ sewage, and drainage systems. Dwellings in environmentally sic infrastructure and services contribute significantly toward sensitive areas—such as flood zones and steep
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