Quote:
Originally Posted by biguc
Interesting. Is it fair to say that favela residents have often been given some kind of rights to the contested land they occupy, or are they eventually forced out?
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Not
de jure, but
de facto totally. As most of those occupations are decades old, legal processes regarding those areas are "prescript" (that's the Roman-German Law expression, I don't know how do you say on Common Law), the legal owners often lost on inheritance/bankruptcy processes. The occupation is so firmly established that people rent or even "sell" their houses, but of course, all informal negotiations.
The main problem then is favelas will be there forever, as it's hard for the government to build infrastructure or legally formalize those areas. Favelas don't grow anymore but they won't shrink either. I guess far on the future they might be similar to those old districts in Naples.
According to the last Brazilian Census (2010), over 6% of population live in such informal environments, that's 11.4 million people, mostly on the largest cities. São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro metro areas have 2.2 million and 1.7 million people living in favelas respectively. And the highest share of people living on them are on the metro areas in Northeast and North Brazil, the poorest regions in the country.