Why Are There So Many Favelas in Rio de Janeiro?

There is no single visual form that defines every favela. Some are on steep hillsides; others are on flat land. Some are more than a century old; others are recent. Some are highly dense and vertical; others are more spread out. Their buildings, infrastructure, legal status and access to public services vary enormously.

In 2024, the Brazilian statistical institute IBGE officially replaced its older technical term Aglomerados Subnormais with Favelas e Comunidades Urbanas. The change followed technical work and consultations involving public institutions, academics, organizations, social movements and community leaders.^[2]

IBGE’s current concept describes these places as popular territories created through diverse strategies used by the population to meet housing and related needs when public policy and private investment are insufficient or inadequate to guarantee the right to the city. It also emphasizes that incomplete public services should not be treated as an inherent defect of the residents or territory; the problem lies in the incomplete or precarious provision of those services.^[1]

By the second half of the nineteenth century, Rio de Janeiro already had a large population of low-income workers who needed housing near the central areas where employment and urban life were concentrated.

Many lived in cortiços: crowded collective housing divided into rooms or small units, usually rented. Authorities and reformers increasingly described these places through the language of disease, disorder and urban backwardness. Campaigns against collective housing intensified as elites tried to reshape Rio into a supposedly modern capital.^[3]

Cabeça de Porco

One of the most famous cortiços was Cabeça de Porco, demolished in 1893 during the administration of Barata Ribeiro. Research on Rio’s early favelas notes that the nearby Morro da Providência was already occupied by popular housing and that former Cabeça de Porco residents were allowed to reuse demolition materials to build on the hill.^[4]

This does not mean one demolished cortiço “created the first favela.” Recent historians specifically warn against reducing the origin of Rio’s favelas to one founding event. What Cabeça de Porco does show clearly is the connection between the destruction of low-income housing and the need for workers to find another place to live nearby.^[5]

The most famous origin story begins with the Guerra de Canudos, fought in Bahia in the 1890s.

In 1897, soldiers returning from Canudos received authorization to build provisional housing on Morro da Providência, close to Rio’s port and central area. The hill became known as Morro da Favela, a name connected to the Morro da Favela in the Canudos region.^[4]

But the hill was not empty before the soldiers arrived. Historical research shows working-class occupation there before 1897, including the effects of the Cabeça de Porco demolition. This is why historians increasingly treat the famous “soldiers created Brazil’s first favela” story as an important part of the history—but not the entire origin story.^[5]

From a place name to a common noun

At first, Favela with a capital F referred specifically to the Morro da Favela. During the first decades of the twentieth century, newspapers and public debate increasingly compared other popular hillside occupations to that one place. By the 1920s, favela was becoming a common noun used for multiple forms of popular settlement in Rio.^[4]

Slavery was abolished in Brazil in 1888, but abolition did not come with a comprehensive program of land redistribution, housing provision or economic reparation for the formerly enslaved population.

Black Brazilians entered the post-abolition city within an economy and property system that remained profoundly unequal. Research on Rio’s transition from a slaveholding city to a post-emancipation metropolis emphasizes the persistence of Black urban life alongside representations that increasingly racialized poverty and treated poor Black spaces as dangerous or uncivilized.^[6]

That history matters to the formation and stigmatization of favelas, but the causal relationship should be described carefully.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Mayor Pereira Passos oversaw a major urban transformation of Rio. Streets were widened, buildings were demolished and central areas were redesigned according to new ideals of circulation, hygiene and urban order.

Poor and collective housing was one of the main targets of reform. Historical research shows how the destruction and regulation of cortiços and other working-class housing helped shift public debate from the cortiço to the favela as the dominant image of urban poverty.^[4][7]

The important point is not simply that Rio wanted avenues that looked “European.” It is that the city transformed valuable central land without creating enough affordable, well-located replacement housing for the workers who depended on the central city.

Housing is not only a building. It is also a location.

For a low-income worker, a cheap house far from employment can become expensive once transport, travel time and unstable work schedules are considered. Rio’s geography made this especially important: port work, domestic service, commerce, construction and other jobs were concentrated in particular parts of the city.

Historical research on Morro da Favela emphasizes its location near the port area and the labor market of docks and stevedoring, where Black workers had a strong presence.^[4]

That helps explain an enduring feature of Rio’s urban history: informal or self-built housing could provide access not only to shelter, but to the city’s labor market itself.

During the twentieth century, Rio grew dramatically and attracted migrants from other parts of Brazil, including large numbers from the Northeast and other rural and urban regions.

Migration increased demand for housing, but saying “migrants created favelas” reverses the problem. People moved because cities offered work, family networks and opportunity. The structural question is why formal housing supply and public policy did not expand enough to provide affordable homes connected to those opportunities.

Self-construction, subdivision, rental and informal land markets became ways people solved a problem that neither the formal real-estate market nor public housing fully solved.

By the mid-twentieth century, favelas had become a major political question. One response was remoção: dismantling communities and relocating residents to public housing projects, often at considerable distance from the neighborhoods where they had lived and worked.

Families from favelas in valuable parts of the city—especially parts of the South Zone—were moved toward housing complexes in the West Zone and other peripheral areas. Ipea historical material specifically cites relocation to projects such as Cidade de Deus and Vila Kennedy and notes that policies often failed to account adequately for family ties and access to employment.^[8]

The central lesson is simple: removing a favela does not remove the forces that produced the need for affordable housing. If employment, transport, land prices and housing supply remain unequal, informal housing can reappear or expand elsewhere.

Over time, public policy increasingly moved away from the idea that every favela should simply be demolished.

Rio’s planning history records a gradual shift toward urbanização and regularização: improving infrastructure and recognizing existing communities as parts of the city. By the 1980s and 1990s, municipal policy explicitly included urbanization and land regularization, and the 1992 master plan excluded removal as the general housing-policy logic.^[9]

Favela-Bairro

Beginning in the 1990s, the Favela-Bairro program became one of Rio’s best-known approaches to in-place upgrading. Municipal documentation lists projects such as street paving, water and sewage networks, drainage, public spaces, slope stabilization, social facilities and formal recognition of streets and addresses.^[10]

The idea was not that infrastructure made a territory “stop being a favela” overnight. It represented a different policy premise: residents and neighborhoods already existed, so the challenge was to extend urban rights and infrastructure rather than treat the community itself as something to erase.

The 2022 Census identified 813 Favelas e Comunidades Urbanas in the municipality of Rio de Janeiro, with roughly 1.3 million residents. Rio therefore remains one of the Brazilian cities with the largest absolute favela populations.^[11]

The city is also home to Rocinha, which the 2022 Census identified as Brazil’s most populous favela or urban community, with 72,021 residents.^[12]

Not every favela looks like Rocinha

The same methodological discussion emphasizes the extraordinary diversity of places included in the category. They may be old or recent, horizontal or vertical, dense or relatively dispersed, self-built or—in exceptional cases—connected to housing projects. They can exist on hills, lowlands, wetlands, valleys, beaches, dunes, mangroves and other landscapes.^[13]

So the image most foreigners associate with Rio—a steep hillside covered with tightly packed brick houses—is real, but it is not a universal definition of what a favela is.

It would be misleading to discuss contemporary favelas in Rio as if public security did not matter. Some communities live with territorial control by armed groups, drug trafficking organizations or militias, as well as violent police operations and unequal access to public security.

But those realities should not be used backward as the explanation for why favelas exist.

The historical sequence is the opposite: favelas developed as housing territories long before today’s forms of organized territorial crime. Questions of policing, armed control and security became layered onto a much older history of urban inequality, land, labor and housing.

Casa vs. moradia vs. habitação

Morro does not mean favela

What does o asfalto mean?

Literally, asfalto means asphalt. But in some Rio conversations, especially when contrasted with favela or morro, o asfalto can refer to the formally urbanized parts of the city outside the favela.

Once the history is laid out, the answer becomes clearer.

Favelas are not a historical accident that the city simply forgot to eliminate. They are part of the way Rio urbanized.

Workers needed housing. Central low-income housing was repeatedly condemned, demolished or priced out. Formal land and housing remained inaccessible to many families. Racial inequality survived emancipation. The city grew quickly. Migrants arrived faster than affordable housing was produced. Self-building allowed people to remain connected to jobs and social networks. Later, removal policies often relocated people far from those networks without eliminating the structural shortage. Urbanization programs improved many communities but did not erase the broader inequalities of land, income, infrastructure and transport.

So the better question is not: