I'm not sure that's the right way to pose the question, but nevertheless, this article discusses municipal efforts being made for residents to obtain land titles (which is certainly crucial), and mentions briefly how one renowned Brazilian architect, Ruy Ohtake, has worked with residents in Heliopolis to design color schemes for their houses to help show the pride and inspiration that exists in the favelas. (Some pics)
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Chemi Rosado Seijo did a similar project but in my opinion with more powerful visual results and interesting conceptual flips on a hillside barriada in puerto rico:
![](http://www.miamiartguide.com/dimages/500055804050206.jpg)
![](http://www.mmproyectos.com/pr04/artistas/fotos%20artistas/chemi.jpg)
residents painted their houses in all sorts of shades of green, playing with ideas of the picturesque and about landscape/visibility/invisibility & community building. it turned out to be ahuge success, apparently, with residents.
that's quite beautiful.
Bryan-
with 1/2 the urban residents of the world living in favelas/informal settlements, this is one of the most pressing sustainability issues our species is facing. I'm interested in keeping the discussion going here on the 'megacities or?' thread.
thanks for the pics!
the solutions outlined in the articles- granting land titles and installing infrastructure are well proven to integrate and improve the settlements. the problem arises when the favelas are built on marginal/dangerous land (flood plains, geologically unstable, steep slopes, or polluted sites) that requires relocating the residents. The political will to deal with the hard fixes seems to be lacking in most cities. Heliopolis seems to be a lucky site that doesn't have any structural issues preventing bringing in the infrastructure. There are a few well known case studies of barrios in Caracas that have also been legitimized.
Sometimes there is nothing the bureaucrats/design professionals can do because of the site - then how do we house those people or provide them services?
in plenty of cases, these people are the ones who make these disaster scapes inhabitable. that is to say, that the government is not willing to pay for it knowing that if they push the people to these peripheral contexts they will be the ones to do the work and improvise infrastructure at no cost to the government. it's like using squatters to remediate the toxic dumps. the government should be following the residents lead more often and helping them to do in their own capacity, rather than getting caught up in the bureaucracy of formal infrastructural projects. but offer land titles at the very least for their work .
becasue the saddest reality is, once the squatters have made good use of the previously uninhabited landscape, they will then be evicted so the government can move in and build more upper scale housing, now that the land has been made attractive. see this in delhi right now.
the squatters are the innovators, and i think the government could best help by investing in smaller scale community based projects, where the impact is seen and the repurcussions of change riple positively - where the squatters get to have and keep their stake in the land, the pride in building their own community, and knowing that they will not be kicked off their land for doing so.
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