favela wander: rocinha, brazil

My wander through the Rocinha favela kicked up two observations about the relationship between permanence and impermanence.  First, the assumption that poverty is a permanent layer of city life; and the second, that the ancient, human replication of poverty has created this sense of permanence.

Rio’s favelas are world renowned.  There are documentaries, books and journalists that capture the “rich and raw lifestyle of favelas”.  Whole issues of National Geographic devoted to life in the favelas exist.  The violence, gangs, poverty, and black marketeering of favelas are the stuff of CNN Special reports and so forth.  Leading up to the 2014 World Cup, media spots featured favela communities trying (and succeeding) in renting homes to football fans as an affordable option to overpriced hotels in Rio, one of the Cup’s largest of the 13 cities hosting games. Favelas have become a fixture on the itinerary for visitors.  It is as if favelas are permanent and, in turn, that poverty is permanent.

The impermanence thread in my observation was Rocinha’s similarity to refugee camps in the Middle East, with its open wires, potholed roads, and homes in continual repair.  When the United Nations Relief Work Agency (UNRWA) developed in 1945, it had a commission of four years – as in, the UN established this as the working body to support Palestinian refugees for four years, thinking these individuals would be established outside Jerusalem and other conflicting cities within that timeframe.  In the year 2014, UNRWA still exists with a dwindling budget.  Millions of Palestinian refugees and about 1.5 generations of new refugees born since 1945 also exist in these camps.

Impermanence vision gives way to permanent way of living.

Open wires overhead in Rocinha.

As I wandered through Rocinha with a local guide, I wondered if the favela’s impermanence reflected more than just government regulations, as it did in Amman, Beirut and Ramallah.  I wondered if locals saw their own ecosystem as impermanent.  A stop along the way to some place else more prosperous.  Just like in the Middle East, the impermanence of infrastructure inspired the hope that local dwellers would someday “find home” in safer, cleaner and more established parts of Rio or wherever, and yet judging from the layers of poverty, this  was unlikely.  Whole generations are being born and raised in favelas and refugee camps, building the bedrock of these communities to be firmly planted with each cohort inhabiting its rutted streets and narrow corridors.

A quiet moment of reflection on inequity as I rolled myself into the open air jeep with my guide and returned to my hotel in Leblon.