Foundations

A history of favelas

A long arc from late-19th-century Rio hillsides through the rural-to-urban migrations of the twentieth century to a present in which favelas are an entrenched and contested part of every major Brazilian city.

The history of favelas is the history of how Brazil urbanized without housing most of the people who came to its cities. Across roughly twelve decades, a country that was overwhelmingly rural in 1900 became overwhelmingly urban by the 1980s. The formal city — planned, titled, serviced — never accommodated the scale of arrival. Favelas absorbed the difference. They are not an accident of Brazilian urbanization; they are one of its principal forms.

Origins: the 1890s and Rio de Janeiro

The earliest settlements that contemporaries called favelas appeared in central Rio de Janeiro in the last years of the nineteenth century. The standard account ties the founding moment to soldiers returning from the Canudos campaign of 1896–1897, who occupied hillsides near the city center while awaiting back pay and demobilization that did not come. The hill above the army's central command, Morro da Providência, became known as Morro da Favela, after a Bahian hill near the Canudos battlefield. From there the word generalized.

The deeper conditions that allowed favelas to form were three. Abolition in 1888 had freed roughly three-quarters of a million enslaved people without compensation or land grants, and many migrated toward coastal cities. The capital, Rio, was in the middle of a long program of sanitary reform and central-area demolitions — culminating in Pereira Passos's 1903–1906 remodeling of downtown — that destroyed working-class tenements (cortiços) without replacing the housing. And the city's mountainous topography meant that steep land near the center was available, technically belonging to the municipality or the army, with no infrastructure and no enforcement of property claims. Displaced central-city residents, recent migrants, and former soldiers built where they could.

1900–1940: a problem named, not addressed

By the 1920s the hillside settlements were a recurring subject in Rio's press, which treated them as picturesque, dangerous, or both. The Agache Plan of 1930, prepared by the French urbanist Alfred Agache for the city of Rio, envisioned the removal of favelas and their replacement by a planned working-class periphery. The plan was not implemented in its full form, but it established a recurring official frame: favelas as a temporary affliction to be eliminated.

The first Brazilian census to enumerate favelas as such was conducted by the city of Rio in 1948, which counted around 119 favelas in the city. By then the largest hillside communities — Mangueira, Salgueiro, the cluster around Morro da Providência — were several generations old and effectively permanent. The 1940 federal Building Code (Código de Obras) had already declared favela construction illegal in Rio without offering a path to regularization, a contradiction the state would inherit for decades.

1940–1970: mass migration and consolidation

The decisive decades for favela growth were the middle third of the twentieth century. Brazil's urban population grew from roughly 13 million in 1940 to over 52 million by 1970 (IBGE, historical census series). Migration came from the Northeast, the rural Southeast, and Minas Gerais; the destination was first Rio and São Paulo, then Belo Horizonte, Salvador, Recife, Porto Alegre, and the new federal capital, Brasília, after 1960. Industrial employment in São Paulo and the port and service economy of Rio pulled labor that the cities had no housing for. New favelas formed on hillsides, in floodplains, on land along rail lines and motorways, and on the outer urban fringes.

This is the period in which favelas became a national rather than a Rio phenomenon. São Paulo had favelas from the 1940s, but the largest growth came in the 1960s and 1970s as industrialization peaked. Belo Horizonte, planned in the 1890s as a capital without poor neighborhoods, developed its own favelas — including what became Aglomerado da Serra — from the 1920s onward, expanding rapidly after 1950. Recife's mocambos and Salvador's invasões developed under different names but on similar logics.

The military dictatorship and the politics of removal, 1964–1985

The 1964 military coup brought a sustained policy of favela removal in Rio de Janeiro. The state agency CHISAM (Coordenação de Habitação de Interesse Social da Área Metropolitana) and the Banco Nacional da Habitação, established in 1964, removed an estimated tens of thousands of residents from South Zone favelas — including Praia do Pinto, Catacumba, and others — and relocated them to peripheral housing projects such as Cidade de Deus, Vila Aliança, and Vila Kennedy in Rio's West Zone. The removals were violent and often involved fires of disputed origin.

The removal era ended in the late 1970s as it became clear the policy had not reduced the city's favela population, only displaced and added to it. Residents' associations organized against removals; the Catholic Church, through liberation-theology-influenced pastoral commissions, supported organizing in favelas. By the time of the abertura — the slow opening of the dictatorship after 1979 — the official position had shifted toward acceptance and, in principle, urbanization.

1985–2008: the urbanization era

The 1988 Constitution included a chapter on urban policy that, for the first time in Brazilian federal law, recognized a social function of property and a right to the city. Implementation came slowly. In Rio, the Favela-Bairro program, launched in 1994 with Inter-American Development Bank financing, became the most influential urban-upgrading initiative of the period: it funded paved streets, drainage, lighting, plazas, and community facilities in dozens of favelas, while explicitly committing the city to not removing residents. Similar programs followed in other cities, including Belo Horizonte's Vila Viva program and São Paulo's Urbanização de Favelas line.

Federal initiatives in the 2000s — the 2003 creation of the Ministry of Cities under the Lula government, the 2007 launch of the Growth Acceleration Program with a favela-investment line, and the 2009 launch of Minha Casa Minha Vida — directed substantial public spending toward informal settlements and toward new social housing meant in part to absorb favela demand. Outcomes were mixed and contested.

2008–2018: pacification and its unraveling

In late 2008, the state of Rio de Janeiro launched the first Pacifying Police Unit (UPP) in Santa Marta, a small favela in Botafogo. The model — preceded by a military or police "intervention" against armed groups, followed by the permanent installation of a community-policing unit — was expanded across dozens of Rio favelas during the run-up to the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. For several years homicide and lethal-violence indicators fell in the occupied communities (Instituto de Segurança Pública do Rio de Janeiro). Critics, including residents' associations and academic researchers, documented continuing abuses, missing-persons cases, and the program's geographic concentration in tourist-facing areas.

By 2014 the model was visibly under strain. Lethal incidents in pacified favelas rose; major drug-trafficking groups reorganized; militias expanded in areas the UPP did not cover. The 2017 fiscal crisis of the state of Rio effectively defunded the program. By the end of the decade, the UPP had been reduced to a residual force in a small number of favelas and the period of declared pacification had ended.

2018 to the present

The most recent period has been defined by three currents. First, the continued expansion of militias in Rio's West Zone, with several studies — including from the Grupo de Estudos dos Novos Ilegalismos at UFF and from journalism by Folha de S.Paulo, O Globo, and Agência Pública — documenting their territorial reach now rivaling or exceeding that of the older drug-trafficking groups. Second, a return to large-scale police operations in Rio favelas, including the May 2021 Jacarezinho operation with 28 deaths, which became the subject of federal court rulings on the limits of police lethality. Third, intensified policy attention from both federal and state governments on land titling, infrastructure deficits, and the application of the 2017 land regularization law (REURB) to favela territory.

The 2022 census, with substantially revised methodology, gave new figures for favela populations across the country. The IBGE's 2022 release identified roughly 12,348 settlements meeting its aglomerados subnormais criteria, with a population in the millions (IBGE Census 2022). The 2010-to-2022 change reflects both real growth and methodological revision, and the figures should be read with that in mind.

What this history is not

This is not a story of failure that ends in catastrophe, nor of resilience that ends in vindication. The communities that grew up on Rio's hillsides in the 1900s are now multigenerational neighborhoods with deep institutions: residents' associations, schools, churches, music traditions, family businesses, professional networks. They are also, in many cases, sites of acute violence and persistent service deficits. Both things are true simultaneously, and a history that loses sight of either misses what favelas actually are.