Policy

Land tenure and regularization

The legal framework for regularizing land tenure in Brazilian favelas combines constitutional usucapião especial urbano, the 2001 City Statute's ZEIS designation, and the 2017 REURB consolidated regularization framework. Implementation in practice remains uneven and slow.

The constitutional framework

The 1988 Constitution introduced the modern Brazilian framework for land tenure in informal urban settlements. Article 183 created usucapião especial urbano: residents of urban land up to 250 square meters used for habitation for at least five years of uninterrupted possession could acquire title, provided they did not own other property. This was the foundational change. The provision applies to private land only — public land cannot be acquired by adverse possession, even of the special urban variety.

The 2001 City Statute

Law 10.257/2001 (Estatuto da Cidade) operationalized the urban-policy chapter of the Constitution. It introduced Zonas Especiais de Interesse Social (ZEIS), a planning category that municipalities apply to favelas and other low-income areas to permit flexible building standards, prioritize public investment, and enable group regularization. ZEIS designation does not itself confer property title but creates the legal context in which titling can proceed under appropriate procedures.

The City Statute also introduced usucapião coletivo, allowing groups of residents to file jointly without the requirement of identifying exclusive possession of defined lots — addressing a recurring practical obstacle in favela regularization.

The 2017 REURB framework

Law 13.465/2017 (REURB — Regularização Fundiária Urbana) consolidated the regularization framework into a single statute. REURB created two tracks. REURB-S (Social) applies to low-income settlements, effectively to favelas. It provides for free or subsidized titling, accepts a wide range of evidence of possession, and allows the municipal government to drive collective regularization. REURB-E (Specific) applies to higher-income irregular settlements with different procedural rules.

REURB authorizes the municipality to issue a Certidão de Regularização Fundiária (CRF), an administrative act that, registered in the public real-estate registry, confers titled property on residents. The procedure is intended to be substantially faster than the case-by-case judicial usucapião route.

Implementation

Implementation of REURB-S has been uneven. Some municipalities, including parts of São Paulo and several Northeast cities, have organized substantial regularization programs. Others have not deployed the framework at scale. The federal Ministério das Cidades and state-level housing secretariats have developed support programs to assist municipal implementation, but resources have been limited.

The judicial route, particularly usucapião coletivo, continues to operate alongside REURB and has produced substantial titling in particular cases, including in São Paulo favelas with sustained legal assistance from public defenders' offices and the Pastoral de Favelas.

What the data say

Reliable national data on regularization progress are limited. The Ministério das Cidades and the Conselho Nacional de Justiça maintain partial datasets. Academic research has documented progress in particular cities and communities but the national picture remains incomplete.

What is contested

Three questions persist. The first is whether large-scale regularization functions as a tool for citizenship and security of tenure, or as a precondition for displacement through real-estate appreciation. Some housing-movement organizations argue that regularization without parallel anti-displacement protections (rent control, prohibition on transfer of newly regularized property for a period) accelerates gentrification. The second is the place of community-recognized property arrangements in the formal civil-law register; the 2017 framework substantially addresses this but practical accommodation remains uneven. The third is the appropriate distribution of responsibility — federal, state, municipal — for funding regularization at scale.