Why the favelas seem so scary?
In his apocalyptical Planet of Slums Mike Davis starts in the very first page with the assertion that the “earth has urbanized even faster than originally predicted by the Club of Rome in its notoriously Malthusian 1972 report”. He goes on to suggest that “since 1970, slum growth everywhere in the south has outpaced urbanization per se”. His main point is that “the cities of the future, rather than being made out of glass and steel as envisioned by earlier generations of urbanists, are instead largely constructed out of crude brick, straw, recycled plastic, cement blocks and scrap wood”. (Davis, 2006: 1,17,19) While the favelas house about 20% of the population in the Brazilian cities, they have very different levels of infra-structure and therefore display high variations of vulnerability. Common to all favelas is the lack of land tenure and the social stigma that associates favelados with marginality, although the large majority of its inhabitants are low-paid unskilled workers who a
