*I wonder how many people living in favelas can read and comprehend this kind of Ivy League archispeak. More than you might think, I reckon. Given that architects exist in legions and are hard-put to get any honest work in a real-estate crash, there must be rather a lot of architecture graduates haunting "informal housing" these days.
*The key to understanding favelas is not that there are poor people in there; it's that poor people are being *compressed* in there by the organizational means and methods of the non-poor people. If you were to pack all these slum scofflaws into boats and send them into exile in some remote new continent like Australia, they wouldn't be "favelados" any more; they'd immediately become Australians.
http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/research/publications/hdm/back/28_Fabricius.html
(...)
"While the favela is the stable icon of informality and of poverty, the less visible networks, relationships, economies, and social practices that take place outside favelas are just as pregnant with informal forces and protocols. This plays itself out in the realms of work and the economy, in street markets, the selling of pirated goods, the distribution of drugs throughout the city using anything from taxis to garbage-truck drivers, the playing of illegal lotteries, and other practices that occupy the terrain between the licit and the illicit.
"It plays itself out in the small favors and bribes used to facilitate bureaucratic processes, in the corruption on the level of the political and juridical, in the proliferation of privatized and sometimes illegal services and systems that make the city work but that fall outside the realm of regulation. These make not only Rio but also most cities in the world work. (((Yup. However, when a rat bites the baby in the cradle, you're a little hard put to say, "check out those social forces pregnant with informal forces and protocols.")))
"A spatial representation of these practices is difficult if not impossible. They are not contained by the boundaries of islands and enclaves, nor do they appear in satellite imagery. If favelas are islands and the city is the sea, then that sea is filled with currents, routes, tides . . . and pirates.
GATOS
"Gatos, literally “cats,” is Rio's term for the unofficial and often illegal connections made to legal sources of water and electricity in favelas and other areas. (((This is how you get your music, p-2-p fans.))) Gatos, if understood as emblematic of the relationship between the formal and the informal, would represent the point of transition from a controlled and regulated network to an “invisible” and undocumented complex. One gato could potentially be the starting point from which an entire community would thrive. A gato is not a leak in the system so much as a planned assault on it.
"Control over urban space is exercised not only through the ownership of property but also through the monopolization infrastructures. These include physical networks like water, sewage, electricity, and telephone, and what flows through them. These networks, often even more than the physical spaces of architecture, form the vital system that holds the city together and are perhaps its most valuable asset.
"In Brazil, as in many countries, control of this monopoly has swung widely between private foreign investors and state agencies. One example is Grupo Light, Rio's first electric utility company, started in 1907 by a Canadian firm. It was eventually controlled by the government from the 1940s through the military regime, only to be privatized in 1996 and sold back to French and Canadian firms. Today the price per kilowatt for electricity in Rio is comparable to that in New York City, while the average income is many times lower, this partially explains why electricity is so often pirated. Nevertheless, only 15% of the city's residents (at least, according to Grupo Light) use pirated electricity.14
"Gatos are not constructed simply out of economic need. In many cases, the necessary infrastructures simply do not exist in newly occupied spaces. Gatos are technically illegal and often unreliable, but receiving services from an agency for a residence that is quasi or wholly illegal is sometimes impossible or just very slow. (((Something like American broadband, in other words.)))
"If formal utility accounts are established, it is after citizens have already provided themselves with service, or in favelas that are already largely urbanized. Gatos usually refer to electrical networks, but there are “gatos” for water, gas, sewage, telephone, cable TV, and even public roads. Streets and highways are often prime territory for roadside invasions and are extended or barricaded by favela residents according to their needs. In the far periphery, roads are sometimes illegally constructed to service an informal subdivision to come.
"The infrastructural connections in a favela are highly visible, unlike those in the formal city, where plumbing and other utilities are embedded in streets and architecture. While Rio has had electricity for as long as most European cities, favelas, which are now about 98% electrified, were not connected to the city's major utilities even twenty years ago.15
"While perhaps no more haphazard than the tangles of wires and tubes that run through the walls of any building, the lines that zigzag through a favela are remarkable in both their complexity and their fragility. Electrical wires and thin plastic tubes carrying fresh water drape over buildings, run along paths and stairs and up walls, bundling and splintering in often dangerous configurations, as when electrical wires are used to support water pipes. In some instances, electricity poles are co-opted and used as support pillars for houses. Most poles are heavy with hundreds of power lines.
"Power companies and public officials try to put a stop not only to the piracy but also to the level of consumption overtaxing the system. Fluctuations in the value of the currency, predatory credit systems, and the black market have made electrical commodities like televisions, microwaves, and air conditioners the norm as opposed to the exception in favela households.
"The result is a significant level of dependence on these gatos...
"A ubiquitous presence in the favela is the satellite dish. Satellite and cable TV is abundant in favelas, though cable companies have not wired these areas, knowing that most residents cannot afford the monthly costs, which can be one-third of the average monthly salary. Instead, local entrepreneurs make a business of hooking up cable and satellite televisions, charging a comparatively modest fee for their “subscribers.” There are organized consortia of informal cable TV providers in favelas, at times run by militias, with as many as 10,000 subscribers.16
"Infrastructures like electricity and plumbing were historically used by cities to establish their modernity. Circulation, through whatever network, is seen as a marker of the success of a city's connectivity not only within its borders but also to other cities and distribution networks. The image of circulation, whether it is of sewage or broadband, proposes an organic unity that is both machine- and body-like and is considered crucial to productivity in a capitalist city. The gato is both an extension of that system and a disruption of its fluidity. Through the colonization of its flows, the gato expands the network of the formal city into ever finer networks, invisibly growing to accommodate populations that can no longer be accounted for. (((One wonders how many privacy advocates would be willing to dump Google, or avoid British video surveillance, and go hide in favelas for the sake of the unaccountability.)))
"While communications and power companies have commodified these networks into individual parcels and accounts, favela residents treat them almost like natural resources, flows that can be extended ad infinitum. While there is some communal planning of these connections, it is for the most part a process that takes place one house at a time. In cities where one's rootedness and even citizenship is defined not only by an address but also by one's utility bills, account numbers, and listing in a phone book, being connected by gatos creates vast populations that are by official standards undefined and unaccounted for, but in truth already intensely linked with the city.
VANS
"Van is Brazilian slang for the small passenger vans that provides a system of informal transportation in Rio..."
via @adamgreenfield
