Foundations

Terminology

The vocabulary used for Brazil's informal urban settlements is large, regionally varied, and politically charged. Which word a speaker chooses signals something about who they are and what they think.

No single Portuguese word maps cleanly onto every informal urban settlement in Brazil, and the words have shifted in usage over time. The same neighborhood may be called favela by outside journalists, comunidade by its residents' association, aglomerado subnormal by the IBGE, and quebrada by a São Paulo rapper. None of these is wrong. They name overlapping but not identical things, and the choice between them is consequential.

Why terms matter

Vocabulary in this field is doing three jobs at once. It is classifying — fixing a neighborhood in an administrative or statistical category that triggers (or fails to trigger) particular state action. It is signaling — telling listeners which political and cultural tradition a speaker stands in. And it is making claims — the choice of comunidade over favela, or of território popular over either, is an argument about what the neighborhood is and how it should be addressed. None of the terms is neutral; each has a history.

Favela

The senior and most widely used term. As established under What is a favela, the word entered the Brazilian urban vocabulary at the end of the nineteenth century, via the hill in central Rio originally called Morro da Favela. In contemporary Brazilian Portuguese, favela denotes an informal urban settlement with the structural features set out elsewhere on this site: self-built housing, late or partial public infrastructure, and irregular tenure of origin.

The word is in active use across registers — in the press, in academic writing, in everyday speech in and outside favelas, in the names of organizations including the Central Única das Favelas (CUFA) and the Observatório de Favelas. It is also stigmatized in some contexts: a job application listing a favela address, or a credit application, has historically attracted discrimination, which is one reason some residents prefer alternatives in formal communication.

Comunidade

The most common alternative in residents' self-naming. Comunidade (community) is used by many residents' associations in their own communications and is widely adopted by municipal governments in their official documents — Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo both increasingly use comunidade in policy texts. The Catholic Church's pastoral work in favelas, since the 1970s, has consistently used comunidade, and the term carries some of the church's communitarian framing.

Critics of the shift to comunidade argue that it can soften and depoliticize what was at stake when favela was the standard word, and that any neighborhood is a community in some sense, which makes the term less precise. Advocates argue that the word recognizes the social bonds and institutions that favela residents have built and that favela tends to obscure.

Aglomerado subnormal

The IBGE's technical category for census enumeration of informal settlements. Used in the 1991, 2000, 2010, and 2022 censuses, with refined criteria each round. Aglomerado subnormal is broader than favela: it includes palafitas, peripheral irregular subdivisions, and other settlement types that local Portuguese speakers might not call favelas.

The term is bureaucratic. The subnormal element — meaning "below standard" relative to formal urbanization — has drawn criticism from housing-movement organizations as stigmatizing, and there have been recurring proposals to rename the category. The IBGE has retained it for continuity with the historical series.

Morro

Literally "hill." In Rio, where most early favelas were on hillsides, morro became a synonym for favela in everyday Rio Portuguese — "ele mora no morro" means he lives in a favela. The usage is most natural in Rio and travels less well to São Paulo or the Northeast. It is used by residents and outsiders alike, generally without the stigma of favela.

Quebrada

Used principally in São Paulo and increasingly in other cities, often by younger speakers and in hip-hop and funk lyrics. Quebrada originally meant a peripheral, unkempt place; in contemporary use it refers to a periphery neighborhood, which may or may not technically be a favela in the IBGE sense. The word carries cultural pride in much São Paulo rap (Racionais MC's, Criolo, Emicida) and is used in self-naming by residents of quebradas.

Periferia

"Periphery." A geographical and sociological term covering the outer working-class neighborhoods of major cities — peripheries in the literal sense in São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, and Brasília; in Rio, where the historical pattern placed favelas inside the city, periferia refers more often to the Baixada Fluminense and other municipalities of the metropolitan region rather than to favelas inside the city of Rio proper. The cultural movement literatura marginal, associated with the writer Ferréz, has framed periphery as a positive social identity.

Mocambo, invasão, vila

Regional variants. Mocambo historically referred to Recife's reed-and-wattle floodplain housing of the early-to-mid twentieth century; the term has largely been displaced by favela and comunidade but appears in older sources. Invasão is used in Salvador and parts of the Northeast for informal land occupations; the term is direct about the act of occupation. Vila, in Porto Alegre and parts of the South, refers to informal settlements roughly equivalent to favelas elsewhere.

Loteamento irregular and loteamento clandestino

"Irregular subdivision" and "clandestine subdivision." These refer specifically to informal urbanization that originated in unregistered or fraudulent subdivision by a private developer, rather than in resident self-organization on open ground. The legal status is somewhat different from a classic favela: there may have been a sale, a contract, and a paying buyer, but the subdivision itself was never registered with the city. Many large outer-fringe communities in São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, and Brasília are technically loteamentos irregulares, though the press and residents often call them favelas.

Slum

The English-language word most commonly used to translate favela in foreign coverage. The translation is approximate at best. The English slum carries Victorian associations of overcrowded tenement housing in narrow streets; UN-Habitat uses it as a global category for inadequate urban housing. Mapping it onto a Brazilian favela imports those connotations imperfectly: many favelas have masonry construction of acceptable physical quality, are not particularly overcrowded by Brazilian standards, and are not centers of unrelieved poverty in the way the English word implies. This site uses favela in English, on the grounds that the Portuguese word now travels well and that slum mistranslates more than it clarifies.

Território popular and other recent terms

Since the 2000s, a number of academic and activist initiatives have proposed alternatives intended to be both more analytically precise and less stigmatizing. Território popular (popular territory) frames the neighborhood in terms of political claims and territoriality rather than housing form. Bairro popular (popular neighborhood) makes a related move toward normalization. Periferia urbana emphasizes structural position rather than physical type. None of these has replaced favela, but each is in active use in particular intellectual and movement contexts.

What this site does

This site uses favela as its principal English-language term, with Portuguese italics for first usage of less familiar words and the explanations gathered in the glossary. Comunidade is used where it appears in source material or where the choice of word is itself the subject. Quoting a residents' association or a city government, the term it actually uses is preserved.