Introduction

On the iconic promenade of Copacabana beach, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, is an outdoor market selling clothing, artwork and various tchotchkes to tourists. Embodied in these wares is Rio's cultivated visual vocabulary in miniature: Christ the Redeemer shelf ornaments, Sugarloaf Mountain key chains, artwork inspired by the city's natural splendour, and other commodifications of the images that have long attracted Brazilians and foreign tourists to this city. However, contemporarily, a new image has joined the jumble: paintings of the haphazard favelas on Rio's hillsides are on offer next to those depicting the city's natural splendour and cultural iconography. The Brazilian favela – historically stigmatised as an urban slum and a national embarrassment of poverty and marginalisation incarnate – has begun to be admitted, at least on canvas, to the city's esteemed milieu.

Favelas themselves have come a long way over their 100 years of existence as an informal style of habitation. At one time, these scattered settlements comprised wood or wattle-and-daub shacks, housing economic migrants from other regions of Brazil. Now, no longer properly termed a ‘squatter settlement’ or a ‘slum’, favelas have evolved, through the organic process of accretion and collective community building, into consolidated urban villages built of masonry and reinforced concrete. Levels of income, investment and condition vary widely, but households with sufficient means have improved their homes with modern interiors and furnishings. Utilities and other services can be procured informally and recently, in some cases, through formalised relationships with suppliers. Tenurial security is codified in a patchwork of legislation and constitutional guarantees, and informal property markets are robust.

Social attitudes towards favelas in the Brazilian mainstream are also becoming less crudely formed. Political majorities in this class-stratified society are warming to the idea of the social inclusion of the marginalised and the dispossessed, and a set of ongoing policy initiatives at the municipal, state and federal levels, promoted under the theme of ‘social integration’, aim to introduce new regimes of security, connective infrastructure and/or urban services to some of these informal neighbourhoods. Piloted in the 1990s and intensified in anticipation of Brazil's hosting of two mega-events – the FIFA World Cup soccer tournament in 2014 and the Summer Olympic Games in 2016 – these programmes reassert state sovereignty over what was once generally assumed to be provisional but ultimately irredeemable typologies of habitation.