Brazil and her Favelas

Abstract

The paper describes the dynamics of Brazilian population change at the end of the Twentieth Century, a period
during which both mortality and fertility rates were on the decline and the volume, velocity and eventual
settling venue of migration drift undergoing change. Great importance is given here to the phenomenon
during the last decades of the period of a population decentralisation within the great metropoli of the
Southeast, Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo where the core of these cities exhibited a negative population flow.
It is here held that not only did Brazil undergo population changes in her population and job patterns and
this principally in the Southeast but that she furthermore suffered an overall loss in employment demand
due to technological substitution and a glut of labour with the established city centres losing out to emergent
production zones. It is the middle-sized cities that are here seen to have most benefited, especially in the State
of San Paulo and these have reproduced the same desperate model of urbanization that has plagued the capital
they too being ringed by poverty ridden outskirts with their undue share of squatter shanty towns. A change
in the sheer size of families is also commented upon and seen as opening the way towards new dwelling patterns
that could now include flats and even gated condominiums etc. The paper goes into the question of alternatives
in housing for the low-income population of urban Brazil. The problems inherent in casting up any estimate
of population size in the favelas based on census data are discussed and an attempt is made to give a rough
estimate of those living in these places in 1980 and 1991, this figure turning out to be at around 5 million
souls living as squatters in the metropolitan areas. The paper then gives a more detailed description of the
squatter population of Sao Paulo, going into its size, its placement as within the urban whole, its demographic
and social and economic characteristics and even an idea of the dwelling place as such as within the favela,
not only its morphology as such but also how it is commercialised and from what elements made.