Rethinking the Future of Housing Favelas as a Sustainable Model

The development logic of favelas/homegrown settlements permits us to think outside top-down zoned planning: a tool for leap-frogging. Inaccessible resources, especially land, have encouraged people in homegrown settlements from Mumbai to Rio, Cali to Cape Town to combine living and working in a building typology, creating home-based livelihoods. These low-rise high-density settlements have many advantages. They develop incrementally, responding to evolving needs, unlike top-down, unadaptable megaprojects. Favelas residents use their agency to shape their neighborhoods: they are naturally participatory. These neighborhoods are a repository of ancestral/popular knowledge, skills and expertise that planners can learn from. This provocative event aims to critically question a dominant narrative that portrays informal settlements as synonyms of urban problems and slums to be eradicated. It seeks to highlight the qualities and the importance of community-based solutions to global challenges. In spite of all the known issues that cannot be ignored, homegrown settlements are the primary affordable housing option for low-income denizens, where cultural expression, economic creativity and solidarity networks flourish and residents develop solutions in a context of government neglect. They house over 24% of the world’s urban population. The event is being organized by Catalytic Communities (Rio de Janeiro/Brazil) and urbz (Mumbai/India) which have, combined, 42 years of work studying and realizing the potential of an asset-based approach to informal settlements. Following a moderator introduction, presenters from CatComm and urbz will realize provocative 12 minute presentations to incite reflection and reactions from attendees. A thoughtful, diverse group of practitioners engaged with informal settlements on 3 continents will share 8 minutes each on their experiences and insights not through a "problem-solving" lens, but through a recognition that homegrown communities are cities' natural solution and innovation factories. There will then be plenty of time for audience engagement, and we will follow the event on the final night of WUF with a social gathering. Very few know each other: this has been planned to maximize novel outcomes and understanding. The objective is to connect diverse actors to engage in a healthy, illuminating cross-cultural debate about the positive characteristics and role of informal settlements and our approaches to them, centering community perspectives. In disputing the narrative over favelas and questioning dominant views in planning, we aim to achieve a necessary change of perspective that will trigger a turning point in housing policy moving forward.