Favela

Rocinha

Location:

Rio de Janeiro is home to over 10 million people, of which nearly one third live in slums known as favelas. A favela which is called Ricotta is the first urban slum community where people began working in. Rocinha is located in the southern zone of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It is widely considered to be one of Rio de Janeiro’s largest, most densely populated and urbanised slums. Rocinha is built on a steep hillside overlooking the city, just one kilometre from the beach. It is a home to between 60,000 to 150,000 people or more. Rocinha varies slightly from most favelas because at its centre a main street runs through it, from the eastern town of San Cornered. Some favelas, especially those in Sao Paulo are free to expand quickly across more flat areas. However Rocinha is situated between two hills, which could makes life difficult for the residents.

History:

Rocinha’s history began in the 1920s when the first clusters of shacks were noticed. The worldwide economic depression of the late 1920s was partially responsible for the massive rural to urban migration, with many destitute migrants moving to Rio’s emerging favelas, such as Rocinha. Rocinha’s fastest growth occurred during the 1950s and 1960s; largely influenced by the destruction of several nearby favelas, the continuation of the rural to urban exodus, and the real-estate boom in the surrounding upper-class neighbourhoods. By the 1960s, Rocinha was considered Rio de Janeiro’s largest favela, and many claimed it to be the largest slum in all of Latin America. Today, brick and concrete houses have replaced wooden shanties as the most popular for of construction, with some buildings as tall as 7, 8, 9, and even 11 stories tall. Most houses in Rocinha have basic sanitation, plumbing, and electricity. Hundreds of residents died in 1988 during floods that ran down deforested hillsides into the favelas. Also in 1996, several Rocinha families were killed in a rock-fall. This is due to...