Favelas no more? Some Brazilian slums mature

HELIOPOLIS, Brazil, Dec 12: Hundreds of houses painted in a kaleidoscope of vibrant colours line the main streets of Sao Paulo's largest slum -- turning what was once a grim, grey landscape into a source of community pride.

In the neighbourhood gym, an Olympic medal-winner teaches basketball and soccer to school children. Next door, other children surf the Internet for free in a room full of computers.

Since the first residents arrived in the 1970s, Heliopolis has been transformed from a slum filled with shacks separated by muddy paths to a neighbourhood with brick houses, paved roads, sewage, water and electricity for 120,000 people.

Thousands of favelas, or slums, dot Brazil's cities, and some are violent places where residents get caught in clashes between drug gangs or during police raids.

However, in Sao Paulo -- the world's third biggest metropolis -- some slums, like Heliopolis, are maturing, offering a different vision of the future.

People in more established favelas tend to suffer less violence and earn more than those living in newer ones. Older favelas are full of cars, televisions, satellite dishes and furniture stores.

Now some favela residents are working on the last phase of urbanisation: gaining formal title to their plots of land.

This requires residents to prove they have lived on their plots for a long time and to agree to start paying nominal property taxes. City governments help sort out legal tangles with people or companies that formally own occupied land.

''Titles give people access to construction loans and motivate them to invest in their houses,'' said Elton Santa Fe Zacarias, assistant housing secretary in Sao Paulo.

A FAVELA NO MORE?

In the Jardim Senice favela, 150 families have started upgrading their homes since the city installed infrastructure and granted them land tenure, Zacarias said.

In Sao Paulo and seaside Rio de Janeiro, mayors abandoned slum removal years ago. It was painful for families and expensive for cities. Now, authorities concentrate on providing basic infrastructure and working out title disputes.

But favelas like Heliopolis are still the exception.

City planners think it will take 20 years for land titles to be granted in all Sao Paulo's slums, and for public electricity and water supplies to replace clandestine ones. It is a daunting task. This month, Sao Paulo will finish updating a municipal housing census which will likely show favelas have grown in number and size since the last census in 1987, when there were 2,000 slums.

Obtaining land titles can also be a cumbersome bureaucratic process, but for many long-term residents, it's worth it.

''I consider myself a favela resident. I love where I live and I want to die here,'' said Manoel Otavian da Silva, 43, a director of the UNAS community group in Heliopolis.

Silva, who used to toil for pennies a day in diamond and gold mines in the Amazon, said the city needs to move faster to grant titles and build more schools and parks.

Still, he said his four children are already better off than he was growing up in Brazil's poor and arid outback.

Some people want to enshrine the nascent changes to some favelas in the language.

Sao Paulo city authorities plan to start calling dozens of shanty towns with basic infrastructure and sturdy houses ''nucleos urbanos'' rather than favelas.

''It's offensive to call somebody a favelado (slum dweller) for the rest of his life,'' said Elisabete Franca, Sao Paulo's head of low-income housing.

POTENTIAL

Beyond land titles and the provision of more schools, architects say people need to value the unique settlement patterns of favelas.

They point out similarities between favelas and Italian hill towns, features like meandering footpaths, organic street grids, informal plazas.

Ruy Ohtake, a renowned Brazilian architect who worked with Heliopolis residents to design colour schemes for their houses, says that painted favelas resemble colonial towns.

And behind the headlines about gang violence and bloody gunfights, there are hundreds of stories of ordinary people succeeding against the odds.

Erick Batista, a dreadlocked 24-year-old from the Brasilandia favela, grinds metal on a lathe in a factory by day before hurrying on his motorcycle to a music conservatory to practice classical bass at night.

He is halfway through the seven-year course, which is free of charge and part of the city's respected arts programme.

''Maybe some day I'll move somewhere else but before that I'd like to do something for the neighbourhood,'' Batista said.

''It's got lots of potential.''

REUTERS