Favelas: neue Wege in der Slumsanierung

In 1988 the Brazilian constitution declared the right to a sustainable city for everyone, but huge informal settlements (favelas), from which most Brazilian cities increasingly suffer, do appear as a threat to this objective. Therefore local and national governments over the last decades adopted new strategies for fighting the ongoing fragmentation and segregation of today’s cities by actively upgrading squatter settlements in order to integrate them and their inhabitants in the city and bring full citizenship to a previously excluded part of the population. As public space both in its physical and in its virtual form of a platform for democratic relationships is a very rare good in the context of informal settlements, it is believed to be a key point in the upgrading process. This work analyses case studies of local and national approaches to making the city a more inclusive place for the urban poor. The accessibility and quality of public space has been used as an indicator to the degree of inclusion into the formal city. Results have shown that good legal bases for full citizenship and economic inclusion have been laid, whilst integration in sense of physical opening up to the city often depends on the specific geographical situation. Drug traffic activities nourished by poverty, social vulnerability and physical environment, though, do have the power to make civil and physical inclusion and full citizenship a precarious achievement.