Later this month, about 900 of the 1,500 families who live in Vila União will start to move out to make way for the TransOlímpica rapid bus system (BRT) to be built for the 2016 Rio Olympics. It is one of the biggest favela resettlements since Rio was chosen to host the games, with some 500 families also resettled from 2010 to 2011 for the construction of the TransOeste BRT. — Al Jazeera

Skyscrapers and shanties, gleaming malls and rundown markets, palatial houses and the piss-poor guys who build them: Those are the divides in cities like Mumbai, Nairobi and Manila. Rich and poor do not much mingle.

But a movement is afoot to change that. It aims to integrate the poor into the urban bloodstream, instead of shunting them from sight. For this "inclusive cities" movement, urban renewal doesn't require razing slums and markets. — npr.org

A Milwaukee bar called Nomad World Pub wanted to create a special place for its customers to watch the World Cup, so it decided to set up a faux favela inspired by Rio de Janeiro’s poverty-stricken mountainside slums. The fact the space comes with a taco hut — a type of food not even served in Brazil — reveals the depth of ignorance out of which it was created. You have to wonder: is the menu in Spanish too? — hyperallergic.com

Police simulations such as these offer a peculiarly spatial insight into the ways humans attempt to make sense of the world. [...]

Someone builds a surrogate or a stand-in—a kind of stage-set on which to test their most viable theories—then they control that replicant world down to every curb height and door frame. Architecture then comes along simply as ornamentation, in order to give this virtual world a physical footprint — bldgblog.blogspot.com