Themes

Housing and self-construction

Favela housing is, almost by definition, housing the residents built themselves. The practice — incremental, owner-driven, masonry construction over decades — produced both the characteristic visual form of favelas and a distinct set of structural, legal, and economic questions.

The dominant building method in Brazilian favelas is incremental self-construction: a household acquires a piece of ground, builds a first room or floor with its own labor and the help of relatives, and adds rooms, floors, or full new dwellings above as money and family allow. The Portuguese term for the addition built atop an existing structure is puxadinho, literally "a little pull-out." Over decades this method has produced the dense, vertical, irregular built form characteristic of favelas in Rio, the lower-rise but extensive blanket of self-built houses on the peripheries of São Paulo, Belo Horizonte, and Brasília, and the variants in coastal Northeast cities.

Materials and techniques

The standard contemporary building material is ceramic-block masonry (tijolo cerâmico) with concrete columns and slab floors. The walls are erected by professional or semi-professional bricklayers (pedreiros), often residents themselves, working on weekends and across multiple phases. Reinforced concrete columns and beams are poured first; ceramic blocks fill between them; floor slabs are cast in place. Roofs may be ceramic tile, fibrocement, or a flat slab intended as the floor of a future addition.

The form is structurally adapted to incremental construction in two senses. First, the column-and-beam frame makes vertical addition straightforward: the upper floor's columns are simply built atop the existing ones. Second, electrical and plumbing systems are laid in surface-mounted conduits and pipes that can be extended as the building grows. The visual aesthetic of exposed conduit, unrendered facades, and reinforcing bar (vergalhão) projecting from the top of unfinished columns is not accidental: it preserves the option of building higher.

Verticality and density

The verticality of favela housing surprises observers who arrive expecting one-story shacks. In Rio's hillside favelas, four- to six-story buildings are common; structures of seven, eight, or more floors exist in Rocinha, the Complexo da Maré, and elsewhere. Vertical growth is partly topographic — building up is the alternative to spreading sideways into already-occupied lots — and partly economic, as adding a floor for adult children to live in is cheaper and more flexible than buying property elsewhere.

The result is some of the highest residential densities in Brazil, comparable to dense central districts in São Paulo or Rio. The trade-offs are reduced natural light and ventilation, structural risks (especially on the steep, occasionally unstable slopes characteristic of Rio), and pressure on infrastructure designed for lower density.

The labor of building

Self-construction is not a single person building their own house; it is a network of family labor, paid pedreiros, and reciprocal arrangements among neighbors. Ethnographic work, including by Janice Perlman, has documented the practice of mutirão — collective labor by neighbors to complete a phase of someone's construction, sometimes returned in kind. The cost of building is real: materials are bought from the formal market and represent a large share of household savings over years.

Property and inheritance

Self-built housing creates a property — economically and socially — that may exist without a corresponding entry in the public real-estate register. Properties change hands within favelas through private contracts (contratos de gaveta) that have force among residents but no formal legal effect. Multi-generational inheritance often produces complex arrangements, with parts of a building occupied by different branches of an extended family. Land regularization programs, including under the 2017 REURB framework, attempt to bring these arrangements into the formal register, but the work is slow and uneven.

State interventions in self-built housing

State programs targeting favela housing have followed several logics. Urban-upgrading programs such as Favela-Bairro focused on improving streets, drainage, and public space without rebuilding most housing. Targeted reconstruction programs, including parts of PAC Favelas and São Paulo's Vila Viva, have rebuilt individual buildings in particular blocks, often relocating residents within the same community. Minha Casa Minha Vida has offered new social housing to favela residents in peripheral developments, with mixed reception.

Where state programs have demolished and rebuilt within a favela, the result has often been formal multi-story apartment buildings replacing earlier self-built houses. Where state programs have offered relocation to peripheral developments, residents have frequently chosen to remain in the favela because of locational advantages — proximity to work, schools, and family — that the new housing cannot replicate.

What the data say

The IBGE Census 2010 and 2022 rounds, in their aglomerados subnormais modules, record housing characteristics including building material, number of rooms, number of stories, and tenancy status. Across the national sample, the dominant building material is masonry; the dominant tenancy status is owner-occupation, often without formal title; and a majority of housing units include incremental additions of one kind or another.

What is contested

Two questions persist. The first is whether large-scale formal-housing replacement should be preferred to in-situ upgrading of self-built housing; housing-movement organizations and academic researchers are divided. The second is the role of self-construction in the future of Brazilian urbanism: some scholars and architects have argued for institutional support of self-construction as a legitimate housing-production system, while others see it as a transitional condition that should give way to formally produced housing.