Affordable Housing Institute : US

[Continued from yesterday's Part 1.]

 

Yesterday’s little adventure in my slum tourism looked at the first form of Sao Paulo’s slum upgrading: the Cingapura program of demolish-and-build-new walkup flats. 

 

A light switch, an ash tray, and a saint: the Brazilian office

 

But people don’t like flats as much as houses.  Walkup flats are incompatible with home-based businesses, which are a major element in bringing revenue into the slum rather than simply extracting it.  People would rather have their own front door, so they can sit and watch their neighbors and their kids.

 

Streetscape, Vila Nilo (Cingapura), the low-rise section

 

Enjoying the sunny morning

 

That thinking was an element in Sao Paulo’s second great urbanization effort, colloquially known as Guarapiranga after the enormous reservoir that supplies over a quarter of the city’s drinking water.

 

In connection with the economics of water, I’ve previously posted about how growing cities like New York and Boston, as they realize they need to expand their supply of drinking water, reach out far beyond their borders to annex or secure leases on lakes, or dam rivers to create reservoirs.  That’s what happened in south Sao Paulo, as the Guarapiranga and Billings Rivers were each dammed to form vast water supply.  Guarapiranga.

 

How Paulistanos like to imagine Guarapiranga

 

By the late 1980’s, the water supply was becoming badly polluted because of the enormous growth of southern favelas rising along the hillsides whose streams flowed into Guarapiranga. 

 

World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz visiting a Guarapiranga favela

 

In self-defense – not to improve the favelas, but rather simply to clean up the water supply, the water company, SABESP, in concert with the city, undertook a massive upgrading of the Guarapiranga reservoir:

 

The World Bank financed the project and the total amount invested reached US$ 336 million.  Sabesp, one of the project executers, invested US$ 94 million to carry out the following actions:

 

390 kilometers of collector, back-bone collector and outfall networks in the municipalities of the basin

26,700 new sewer domicile connections serving 125 thousand residents
8,050 domicile connections in existing networks, supplying a total of 37 thousand people two wastewater    treatment facilities in the city of Embu-Guacu

20 sewage pumping stations and automated and centralized control systems of the stations a nutrient removal system in the Guavirutuba Streamlet
Technological improvement and enhancement in water treatment for supply

 

How to urbanize an informal neighborhood: rebuild the streambed, reinforce the hillsides

 

The slum upgrading was purely incidental – it had to be done to stabilize the hillsides,  because it was the people whose effluent was polluting the water, and it was their houses that were risking mudslides.

 

Reinforcing the hillsides with cement retaining walls protects everybody: the water supply and the residents

 

The program also included:

 

264 kms of sewer network to serve 80% of the 580,000 inhabitants of the Guarapiranga Water-basin; 
Drainage construction and restoration of 13 sq. km. of urban areas which had deteriorated due to insufficient drainage

If you’re going to clean up the water, you also have to prevent it from once again being polluted, so the houses have to be hooked up to the sewer system, and the streambed has to be channeled:

 

The houses all have running water and sewer, and the rain runs off down a reinforced channel

 

Land-use planning and the resettlement of 4,000 families living in high-risk sites with construction of houses averaging 42 square meters.

 

Blue denotes new replacement housing, mostly cinder-block

 

Some residents were relocated elsewhere in the neighborhood; others, who’d been living in the worst conditions right alongside the creeks, got newly built houses:

 

Amazing what you can do with cement, good railings, improved facades, and bright paint

 

The big difference with Cingapura is that here, the houses are presumed to be acceptable, it’s the municipal infrastructure that’s at fault.  Having built homes on unstable dirt hillsides the residents, instead of having the city treat them as interlopers, have the city bring them the necessary infrastructure – soil and foundation reinforcement.

 

The homes go up and up the hillsides

 

As the site improves, people keep building:

 

Unlike Cingapura, where the houses were demolished, here they were left in place … and people keep building up

 

Most of the building is poured-in-place concrete framing, with terra-cotta bricks mortared together to make walls. 

 

As with Cingapura, there’s a commitment to creating play space and open space:

 

Kids want to play, and it’s better if they have a playground to play in

 

These neighborhoods are farther out, and ill-suited to additional invasions – they run linearly alongside the streambed, now the cement street, so unlike in Cingapura the playgrounds don’t have to be fenced off or locked. 

 

Improving people’s surroundings gives them more pride in their neighborhood and in themselves.  “The place really looks great,” said one fellow taking his garbage to the collection point as he talked with the resident social worker. 

 

The neighbors chip in to pay their groundskeeper, who’s also a neighbor

 

As in Cingapura, homes have a resale value:

 

As in Cingapura, homes can be resold

 

While you’re unlikely to be taken around the slums by the people who are dedicated to their upgrading,

 

Bete (pronounced Betty) Franca of the Municipality of Sao Paulo, who’s made most of this happen

 

If you’re ever in the global south and you can arrange it, visit a slum.  The visit’s guaranteed to make you think, and likely to reinforce your faith in people.

 

You all come visit us now, okay?

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