A new home in the city: From favela shacks to public housing

In the mid-1990s, urban planning officials in Belo Horizonte, Brazil's third largest city, approved an innovative slum-upgrading program that included -- for the first time in Brazilian urban planning history -- the construction of hundreds of public housing structures within favelas (slums). Vila Viva -- Brazil's longest running and most extensive slum-upgrading program -- relocates families from areas predisposed to landslides and flooding to four-story public housing structures. Through this urban renewal project, favela residents can exchange their self-built houses for two-bedroom apartments in public housing buildings and acquire land titles. Based on fourteen continuous months of ethnographic fieldwork in one of Belo Horizonte's oldest favelas (October 2007-November 2008), this dissertation examines how public housing reconfigures residents' subjectivities, social roles and sense of place. Through participant-observation and in-depth interviews with urban renewal experts (city architects, engineers and social workers) and public housing residents (both before and after they moved to their new homes), my ethnographic study provides one of the first glimpses of the way public housing transform what it means to live in favela settings. My findings suggest that the insertion of housing types previously found exclusively in middle-class neighborhoods disrupts long-standing dichotomies between favelas and state-recognized neighborhoods, prompting favela residents to question their place within the city. When favela residents are relocated from self-built houses to public housing buildings, they begin to think of their new homes as places separate and distinct from the favela -- a highly stigmatized place. Although public housing residents continue to live in the same location alongside the same people they interacted with before relocation (family, old friends and neighbors), their new homes allow them to leave the favela -- without actually leaving its geographic boundaries. Instead of living in the favela, residents are now living in "city buildings" or "closed condominiums" -- gated spaces with an entirely different set of rules, obligations and expectations. For them, the favela is a space they left behind. The urban renewal of favelas provides a unique window to observe, step-by-step, how informal settlements are integrated into the socio-geographic maps of cities through architectural and infrastructural interventions. By focusing on the ways urban renewal experts and favela residents negotiate and resolve often-conflicting notions of aesthetics, habitation and citizenship, this dissertation promises to shed light on how local governments and residents can work more effectively with each other to improve informal settlements. In so doing, this project hopes to contribute to anthropological studies of the state, space, informal settlements, and development.