Foundations

Favelas and informal settlements around the world

"Favela" is a Brazilian word, but self-built urban neighborhoods exist on every inhabited continent. What they share, what makes Brazil's distinctive, and the words other countries use.

One phenomenon, many names

Rapid urbanization in the twentieth century outpaced the capacity — or willingness — of states to plan, title, and service land for newcomers. Where that happened, migrants built their own housing on land that was available because it was steep, flood-prone, publicly owned, or contested. The result is recognizably similar from Rio to Nairobi to Karachi, and each language developed its own word for it, often a word that began as an insult or a joke.

Several of these terms, like favela itself, are now contested inside the communities they describe, and several states have introduced softer official alternatives — as Brazil's IBGE did in 2024, replacing aglomerado subnormal with favelas e comunidades urbanas. See Terminology.

Favela or slum?

In English, favelas are routinely called slums. UN-Habitat's working definition of a slum household is one lacking one or more of: durable housing, sufficient living space, access to improved water, access to improved sanitation, and security of tenure. Many favela households meet that definition on one or two criteria — tenure and sanitation most often — and many do not meet it at all. Most housing in established favelas is brick and reinforced concrete, multi-story, and decades old.

That is why many Brazilian researchers and residents resist "slum" as a translation. It implies uniform destitution and impermanence, where most favelas are consolidated neighborhoods with property markets, commerce, and civic institutions. "Informal settlement" is the more neutral term in international policy writing; "favela" is usually best left untranslated. See Common misconceptions.

What makes Brazil's favelas distinctive

• Location inside the city. Many informal settlements worldwide are on the urban periphery. In Rio especially, favelas occupy hillsides in the middle of the city, next to its wealthiest districts — Rocinha beside São Conrado, Vidigal above Leblon, Santa Marta above Botafogo. São Paulo's and Brasília's favelas are more peripheral, closer to the global pattern.
• Age and consolidation. The oldest favelas date from the 1890s. Several generations of incremental building have produced dense, vertical neighborhoods that bear little resemblance to new shack settlements.
• Armed-group governance. Territorial control by drug factions and militias in parts of Rio and other cities has few direct parallels in scale, though gang governance of informal neighborhoods is also documented in Central America, Venezuela, Jamaica, and South Africa. See The drug trade and Militias.
• Cultural reach. Samba, funk carioca, and Brazilian hip-hop made favelas central to national culture in a way few comparable neighborhoods elsewhere have been. See Funk carioca and Samba and favelas.

Well-known informal settlements elsewhere

• Dharavi, Mumbai, India — one of Asia's best-known informal neighborhoods, with a large manufacturing and recycling economy; subject of a long-running redevelopment plan.
• Kibera, Nairobi, Kenya — frequently described as one of Africa's largest informal settlements; population estimates vary enormously, a problem familiar from Brazil.
• Orangi Town, Karachi, Pakistan — known internationally for the Orangi Pilot Project, a resident-financed sanitation program begun in 1980.
• Ciudad Nezahualcóyotl, Mexico City metropolitan area — a vast settlement built on the dry bed of Lake Texcoco from the mid-twentieth century and later regularized into a municipality.
• Villa 31 (Barrio Padre Carlos Mugica), Buenos Aires, Argentina — a central villa next to Retiro station, the subject of a major urbanization program since the 2010s.
• Petare, Caracas, Venezuela — hillside barrios that, like Rio's favelas, overlook the formal city.
• Cañada Real Galiana, Madrid, Spain — a linear informal settlement along an old livestock route, often described as the largest informal settlement in Europe.

Do favelas exist in other countries?

The word is sometimes used outside Brazil — in Portugal, Mozambique, and Angola, and loosely in Spanish and English — but in careful usage it refers to Brazil. Portugal had its own self-built bairros de lata ("tin neighborhoods") around Lisbon until a national rehousing program cleared most of them from the 1990s. The comparison is useful for understanding what is general about informal urbanization and what is specifically Brazilian; the Brazilian case is set out in What is a favela and A history of favelas.