On Unstable Ground: Issues Involved in Greening Space in the Rocinha Favela of Rio De Janeiro

Abstract

This paper is based on fieldwork undertaken in conjunction with Green My Favela, a land use restoration project that works with informal and vulnerable income sector residents to reclaim chronically degraded public areas by creating gardens inside the urban favelas of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The paper reveals how government intervention policies employed in the lead up to the 2016 Olympics are destabilizing the fragile social fabric of the city's largest favela, Rocinha, through military occupation and urbanization activities that threaten an already low and unstable human security threshold.

Green Infrastructure in Relation to Informal Urban Settlements

“…For instance, while SUDS presents a promising drainage approach (Jiusto, Kenney 2016), "community involvement in both planning and implementing" is necessary in the low-income, informal setting (Button et al 2010: 16). As a Rio case shows, the same principle applies to other kinds of greening activities in settlements (Rekow 2016).…”

International Perspectives on the Belt and Road Initiative

“…Nevertheless, the common ground generated by the pursuit of sustainable organic farming has forged some unlikely alliances in Rio. The Rio Municipal government's Hortas Cariocas project, for instance, has brought together state subsidies, community activism and support from upper-middle-class consumers to transform living conditions in some of the city's most marginalised neighbourhoods (see case studies in O 'Reilly, 2014;Rekow, 2015Rekow, , 2016. The insights gained from this experience reveal how localised food production can accompany industrial agriculture, inviting reflection on the capacity of foreign investment, including through BRI, to support such initiatives.…”

Rio De Janeiro’s Olympic Legacy: Public Security for Whom?

“…As informal settlements grew, urbanized, and became more heavily populated, residents organized internally to form associations and create the basic infrastructure that the government had failed to extend to their communities, such as channels for sewerage, transportation systems, roads, informal real estate title exchanges, and commercial enterprises. State [12] abandonment, sporadic government-led military police incursions, forced population removals, and the slow takeover of territory by drug trafficking gangs, however, has progressively limited residents' access to public security, spatial mobility, social infrastructure, and earning capacity beyond any kind of subsistence existence [13].…”

“…Many have been accused of supplementing their incomes by working with gangs to supply illegal weapons, to run drugs, or to provide protection [13]. Frequently referred to as state-sponsored killing, murder or death squads, pacification troops are estimated to take seven years off the average life expectancy of residents in Rio's favelas [37].…”