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According to 2010 demographic census, the latest one conducted in Brazil, around 11.4 million people live in the 6.329 slums identified in 323 of the 5.567 existing municipalities in Brazil. This is how over 6% of the country’s urban population have historically found a place in the city in the wake of insufficient social housing provision for those unable to access the formal real estate market and also not eligible for governmental housing programs (IBGE, 2010). Being almost totally oriented to housing ownership through subsidized credit, a massive housing deficit that is concentrated below poverty levels has never been seriously tackled by national public policies, which have benefited mostly middle-class segments. Thus, favelas and illegal settlements cannot be considered just a planning problem but a matter of shelter provision, an expression of the right to the city, a housing solution for many. Not to mention the fact that many of them are very old and consolidated settlements, being very well located within the urban structure, with good access to services and job opportunities.
However, the recognition of slums as a solution to be upgraded and not as an unsolvable problem to be removed and replaced by social housing projects in the remote outskirts of the city is somehow recent. The first efforts to protect these communities as part of the urban fabric and to keep them where they are date from the late 1980’s (mostly from the 90’s) when a specific zoning category was created to somehow reduce real estate pressures over them and to assign upgrading and regularization governmental programs and projects to those settlements. This began through local planning policies and experimental housing programs in municipalities under progressive administrations such as Recife and Belo Horizonte and only in 2001 it became a national directive under The City Statute (i.e. Federal Law 10,257) that, among other obligations to municipal master plans, established the definition of Special Social Interest Zones, and the development of urban improvements and land regularization policies for favelas and illegal subdivisions corresponding to these zones.
Consequently, specific planning tools have been designed for each of these two kinds of informal settlements, which can be defined as the following. A favela is characterized by an illegal occupation of someone else’s vacant land (public or private), lacking, at the beginning, public essential services such as sewers, waste management, and public facilities. They usually show an organic morphology and densely built environment with little open space and green areas, being settled on improper sites, steep slopes, flood prone areas or even environmental protected areas where the formal real estate market cannot legally be present.
Illegal settlements may have very similar urban infrastructure and housing conditions as compared to slums, but they occupy land which has been previously divided into parcels (i.e. lots resulting from a given design), which have been sold in the informal market. This means families who occupy that land paid for it and feel they are owners, even though they don’t have legal ownership documents. Being implemented without going through regular planning permit procedures, they do not follow official design criteria (e.g. minimum lot area, minimum street width, maximum slope and so on), they do not obey environmental constraints (e.g. steep slopes, forested areas, springs and water bodies, flood hazard areas, etc.), nor do they have the basic urban infrastructure that, according to Brazilian urban legislation, is the duty of real estate developers to implement.
Differences between these two typologies of illegal settlements are summarized by the following chart (Table 1) and can be clearly perceived by the compared images in Figure 1, which shows the urban morphology, the density patterns and the insertion of each of these settlements in the city context.