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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A while back I spent 4½ days in Sao Paulo – my first time in Brazil – getting an immersion tour in why and where and how the municipality and state of Sao Paulo have tackled slum upgrading and urbanization. 

The biggest city in South America, with 10,000,000 people in the city limits and over 18,000,000 in the metro area,

it’s a fascinating place, with great people, but it’s almost enormous:

As you get driven around the city (completely lost, at least in my case), you pass through neighborhoods reminiscent of New York, Chicago, Miami, and San Francisco –

From downtown Sao Paulo, point your camera anywhere and you’ll see high-rise apartments.

– and then, half a mile later, through favelas reminiscent of Mumbai, Johannesburg, or Cairo. 

Sao Paulo’s been through two major slum upgrading programs – they call it ‘urbanization,’ a term I am coming to like because, as I’ve previously posted, one attribute of slums is where housing and private investment have far outstripped public investment in infrastructure.

Then World Bank president Paul Wolfowitz visiting a Sao Paulo favela

Sao Paulo has a two-decade-plus history of municipal involvement with slum upgrading.  As with most cities, the first response was complete neglect.  When that failed, the municipality evicted people, demolished the favela, and developed something high-end on the newly valuable property.  Meanwhile, the displaced residents were economically lubricated with modest relocation payments, and encouraged to move ’somewhere farther out,’ usually onto low-lying or poor quality public land.

That strategy works – at least in the sense of real estate, if not public policy – until the human tide becomes so overwhelming something has to be done.  About twenty years ago, the municipality developed a slum demolition-and-redevelopment program, nicknamed Cingapura (the Portuguese pronunciation of Singapore). 

Cingapura draws its architectural inspiration from the same thinking that spawned US public housing — a sense that what’s wrong with the neighborhood is the grotty houses people have built for themselves, and the solution is in new, proper, publicly constructed mid-rises and high-rises. 

Under Cingapura, the Municipality of Sao Paulo cleared out favelas abutting on channeled rivers, railway lines, and highways:

A Cingapura project as most Paulistanos see it: whizzing by the highway

The idea was new-construction walkups, with enclosed courtyards (and play areas), all brightly painted:

Vila Nilo, a Cingapura property in northeast Sao Paulo

Each building has its own gated entryway that closes and locks automatically:

Building entry, Vila Nilo

Inside, the apartments are large by southern-hemisphere slum redevelopment standards – a reflection of Sao Paulo’s relative wealth.  A two-bedroom is 48 square meters, or about 525 square feet.

She let us photo in her apartment, “even though it’s a mess”

Apartments have electricity – note television in the preceding photo – cooking gas (normally propane from individual tanks in the basements), water (metered and sewer).  Bathrooms are small but serviceable:

Bathroom: shower on the left, toilet on the right, all ceramic tile

Kitchens are small but functional:

Small stainless steel kitchen sink, and refrigerator with the ubiquitous magnets

But the high-rises are unpopular, compared with renovating people’s current informally built homes, so in the second phase of Vila Nilo, the existing homes were left in place, and the streets were urbanized with paving, drainage, secure street lighting, and metering.

High-rises in blocks on the left, low-rises in lettered clusters around urbanized streets

The result is a less institutional and more neighborhood street —

Streetscape in Vila Nilo, with informally built houses that are under continuous renovation and expansion

– where people can provide small-scale commerce.

The sign says, Popsicles for sale

The neighborhood is an insular community, where outsiders are unusual, and while little kids and the elderly are always happy to send most anyone, young men are more wary:

Street scene in Vila Nilo, with management staff in the background

As part of improving the community, the municipality sponsors extensive social programs (in a community center built into the new-construction high-rise part), with adult literacy

Notice for adult literacy class

… and family counseling programs …

The caption translates roughly as, when you hit a woman, you hurt a family.

No matter how quickly Sao Paulo builds or renovates its favelas, the people keep coming, and they gravitate to the outlying areas of existing favelas:

New self-build land invasion (as it is called down there), favelas under the power lines

Yet the desire to improve one’s home is universal.  These little boys, when questioned, told us they were off to build a house:

Builders three, Sao Paulo

[Continued tomorrow in Part 2.]

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