Urban orientalism and the informal city in Rio de Janeiro,Brazil

Abstract

In this article, we scrutinize the concept of ‘urban informality’ in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. By unpacking key moments in Rio’s history when conceptualizations of informal housing (i.e., favelas) changed, we explain why favelas have been understood in different ways over the last century. Our argument is that the concept of informality, while signaling an important shift in how favelas were understood, also perpetuated orientalist epistemologies in theories of urban development. This helps to explain why the term gained traction when it did, as well as why it remains salient today. In Rio, this means that changing understandings of favelas over the last century reveal little about actual changes within favelas, and more about how different geographic imaginaries were projected onto them, reflecting specific ‘problems’ confronting the city at different moments in history. This is important for seeing how conceptualizations of favelas – including the ways we understand urban informality – tend to mirror a host of latent social and political anxieties connected to urban development, including attempts to govern and control informal space.

Introduction

Like most ‘things’, the concept of informality has an origin story traceable to a specific moment in history. According to Devlin (2010: 15), “the first time the term and concept ‘informality’ was used in its present-day context [was at] a conference entitled ‘Urban Unemployment in Africa’, held by University of Sussex’s Institute of Development Studies in September of 1971” (see also Bromley, 1978). The term came from a paper presented by Keith Hart (1973) called “Informal Income Opportunities and Urban Employment in Ghana”. Notes Devlin (2010), the concept quickly caught on with academic researchers, policy experts, and development workers, and over the next decade, informality became central to debates over poverty, marginality, and economic activity in developing cities. At first, informality was linked with underdevelopment and a culture of backwardness (in line with theories of urban marginality), but by the end of the 1970 s it had been critically adapted to account for broader processes of capitalist development and urban inequality. The term, of course, was most often used to describe cities in the global South, and over subsequent decades it became the focus of wide-ranging studies and debates, often from divergent ends of the political spectrum (Devlin, 2010).

Today, debates over informality are among the most significant in urban studies, and the term continues to engage a broad audience (Banks et al., 2020; De Antuñano, 2020; Hart, 2009; Mayne, 2017; Roy, 2009). From those who argue that urban informality is an untapped resource for (neoliberal) capitalist development (de Soto, 2000), to Marxists who explore the links between informality and processes of uneven growth (e.g., Portes et al., 1989), to postcolonial critics who note how informality reveals orientalist, Euro-American-centric epistemologies (c.f., Jazeel, 2019), informality is central to global debates over urban growth, inequality, and uneven development. As an issue of critical investigation, it is no longer confined to Southern cities, and researchers today are exploring urban informality in cities around the world (Banks et al., 2020; De Antuñano, 2020; Devlin, 2010; Mayne, 2017).

What remains overlooked, however, is what we might call the genealogy of the concept, tracing its lineage as an orientalist epistemology, and reasons for why the term continues to have such salience today. Though ideas of informality have increasingly drawn critical analysis (Banks et al., 2020) – with researchers exploring, for example, histories of urban informality (De Antuñano, 2020), its diversities and different scales (e.g., Harriss-White, 2020), and its material and discursive effects (e.g., de Souza Santos, 2021) – still lacking is historical perspective of the term, including the ways it helped change and preserve understandings of urban space in the late 20th century. We explore these processes in this article, focusing our analysis on informal housing (viz, favelas) in the city of Rio de Janeiro. To be clear, our goal is not to provide a critical history of informality, or to document how informality in Rio has been studied over time. These topics have been well covered by others ( Fischer, 2008 , 2014 , 2021; Valladares, 2019). Instead, we explain why understandings of favelas shifted at specific moments during the last century, and we show how these shifts – and the concepts that emerged from them (viz, urban informality) – were undergirded by orientalism.

Following Said (1978), our argument is a counterintuitive one. We show how critical analysis of informality reveals little, for example, about actual favelas in cities like Rio, and more about how favelas have been framed – and also managed – by the state, urban planners, public security officials, development economists, urban elites, and so on. More than anything, understandings of informality reflect a host of latent social and political anxieties connected to urban development, and attempts to govern and control informal spaces. To make this case, we explore how Rio’s favelas have been understood over the last century, focusing specifically on moments of conceptual change. Again, our aim is to explain why these shifts occurred when they did, and to show how, at each juncture, favelas continued to be conceptualized through an orientalist lens. Our analysis reveals how orientalist legacies remain embedded in theories of urban development, and to paraphrase Latour (1993), how informality represents a story the (formal) city tells itself about itself. ¹

This article begins, in the next section, with some clarificatory remarks on informality and why we focus on favelas in Rio, including discussion of orientalism and what it adds to urban theory. We then move on in the remaining sections to analyze how Rio’s favelas were understood over the last century, emphasizing when and why conceptualizations of these spaces shifted, and how this connects to contemporary understandings of informality. To pinpoint our analysis and provide structure, these sections are organized as follows: they begin at moments of historical change in how favelas were conceptualized, and then step back to situate those moments within broader international and regional debates over urban development. We then narrow in to examine how these debates touched down in Rio, reflecting ‘problems’ that confronted the city at different moments in history. This helps to explain changing conceptualizations of favelas over the last century, and to highlight orientalist legacies in urban theory. We examine the contemporary effects of this in the penultimate section, explaining why informality, as a concept, remains salient today, and how it perpetuates orientalist epistemologies in cities like Rio.

Informality and urban orientalism

In retrospect, it is sort of remarkable how informality became a hot topic of academic debate. For Hart, back in 1971, it was simply a way to describe the economic activities of rural-to-urban migrants in Ghana’s capital city of Accra. Reflecting on what became of the term several decades later, Hart wrote: “I had no ambition to coin a concept, [….] the main message of my paper on ‘informal income opportunities’ was that Accra’s poor were not ‘unemployed’” (2009: 5, 15–16). The notion of ‘informality,’ however, was wonderfully pliable, and it sparked debate in a variety of academic fields. “The idea has had brilliant success over more than three decades,” Hart observed in 2009 (19): “it is both positive and negative [and] lends the appearance of conceptual unity to whatever goes on outside the bureaucracy.”

Picking up on this in her historical analysis of informality, Fischer notes how, today, “‘informality’ has enveloped a dizzying array of urban phenomena, many of which have roots far deeper than the term itself” (2021: 205). “[It] is both an epistemology and a set of practices,” she writes, and “is heterogeneous in its geography, class composition, and politics” (Fischer, 2021: 206). Focusing specifically on 20th-century Brazil, Fischer shows how informality’s history is interwoven with processes of “racialized governance and inequality, the tense coexistence of private and public power, and the contradictory entwinement of social struggle and inequality” (Fischer, 2021: 207). Along with similar contributions from other scholars in recent years (De Antuñano 2020; Mayne, 2017), this work helps to historicize informality’s role in processes of uneven development in postcolonial contexts like Brazil.

Our aim here is to build on this research, focusing specifically on the lineage of the concept itself. Rather than scrutinizing informality per se – for example, histories of irregular city building, the workings of informality and what sustains it, or informality’s role in urban development – we focus instead on why favelas were understood in particular ways over the last century; why conceptual changes occurred when they did; how the concept of informality perpetuated orientalist visions of the city; and, why the term retains such traction today. This, we suggest, is important not only for understanding how informality functions epistemologically, but also for seeing the orientalist roles it plays in theories of urban planning and development.

To do this, we focus on irregular housing – specifically favelas – in Rio de Janeiro. While we acknowledge that ‘informality’ encompasses more than just favelas, we narrow our investigation to provide like-for-like comparisons, and to maintain consistency in our analysis. Likewise, our decision to ground our study in Rio is based on several factors. First, and crucially, Rio’s history of informality is one of the most significant in Latin America, being the city from where the term favela originates. Second, cities in Latin America have long been central to research on urban informality, particularly early studies in the 1970 s and 1980 s (Portes et al., 1989; Rakowski, 1994). And, third, Rio is one of the most thoroughly researched cities in Latin America, with a rich historiography to document the rise of urban informality (Abreu, 1994; Almeida, 2017; Fischer, 2008 , 2014 , 2021; Valladares, 2019). Again, our goal is not to provide an exhaustive account of informal housing in Rio. Instead, by unpacking key moments in Rio’s history when conceptualizations of favelas changed, we explain why favelas have been understood in different ways over the last century, and how this reveals orientalist roots in theories of urban development.

Our decision to examine informality through an orientalist lens is informed by recent work in postcolonial urban studies. New research has highlighted informality’s significance to processes of governance and development in contexts like Brazil (de Souza Santos, 2021; Fischer, 2021), including the state’s role in producing and maintaining the in/formal divide (Benmergui, 2012; Novaes, 2014). For those working in critical urban theory, what draws particular attention is the work that informality does: as a mode of capitalist urban development (Roy, 2009); as an aesthetic that enables urban displacement (Garmany and Richmond, 2020; Ghertner, 2015); and as an “imaginative geography” (Jazeel, 2019: 42) distinguishing Southern cities from Northern ones. What this research shows is how ideas of informality connect to legacies of what Angotti called urban orientalism: “a dualist vision of the urban world – a world divided into ideal, polar opposites” (Angotti, 2012: 27 – see also Varley, 2013). More than just a descriptive term for spaces like favelas, the concept of informality enables discourses, policies, and interventions that can marginalize certain groups and fortify asymmetric power relations. It reveals epistemologies embedded in colonialism, racism, and positivism, where “the formal, planned city is presented as the answer to the informal city [….] the good city must replace the bad one” (Angotti, 2012: 29). Following Said (1978: 5), this work examines informality through its relationship to the ‘formal’ city, and how this relationship is steeped in power, domination, and varying degrees of complex hegemony (see also Jazeel, 2019; Roy, 2011).

Still, to be fair, cities are rife with dualisms, from ones that characterize the urban landscape (e.g., center/periphery, public/private, business/residential), to ones that distinguish cities in the first instance (urban/rural, cosmopolitan/provincial, etc.). Why, then, are some dualisms, like formal/informal, orientalist in their relationship, while others are not? Here we draw additional insight from Said (1978). The geographic context of cities like Rio is important, where colonialist legacies are not only woven through the urban landscape, but also help to frame how the city is understood in the first instance (Garmany and Richmond, 2020; Jazeel, 2019). Similarly, like ‘the orient,’ geographies of informality reveal a certain kind of projection onto – and will to govern – particular spaces in the city (c.f., Said, 1978: 95). For this very reason, the conquest of informality in Rio – much like the conquest of underdevelopment in Brazil – is rarely viewed as conquest, but liberation (c.f., Said, 1978: 172). These histories and geographic relationships are what an urban orientalist lens helps to foreground. In mobilizing this framework, we explore shifting conceptualizations of favelas over the last century, showing how these shifts reveal deeply rooted and ongoing legacies of urban orientalism. This, we suggest, is important not only for better scrutinizing the concept of informality, but for recognizing orientalist epistemologies in theories of urban planning and development.

Yellow Fever, urban hygiene, and the discovery of favelas in Rio

Though informal housing has been part of Latin American cities since at least colonial times (Connolly, 2017), it was not until 1903 that the term ‘favela’ first appeared in print, linked to one such community in Rio. As Fischer notes (2021), the article appeared in the Gazeta de Notícias, written by an unnamed chronicler, and provided an account of Rio’s Morro da Providência (Providence Hill). The author called the settlement “Favela Hill” – or, more simply, “the favela” – conjuring an “otherworldly, atavistic settlement [….], both resisting civilisation and corroding it from within” (Fischer, 2021: 209). Crucially, writes Fischer, the chronicler “describes residents of all colours, but he racializes the settlement as Black – capoeira, pandegas, curandeiras – and marginalises Blackness as suspect, backward, and degenerate” (Fischer, 2021: 209). ‘The favela’, in this way, was conceived from the beginning as a space of Blackness, cut off, impoverished, and culturally distinct from the city surrounding it (see also Campos, 2004). “Above all,” writes Fischer, “[it was] a place in need of urgent remedy, an emergency, a symptom of calamity” (2021: 209). That the article was published in the same year Rio embarked on a series of urban reforms under Mayor Pereira Passos was, perhaps, not coincidental. The alarmist account of life on top ‘Favela Hill’ shows that middle and upper-class cariocas (residents of Rio) were well aware of these settlements, and knew to stay away from them (Abreu, 1994).

Curiously, however, it was not settlements like Favela Hill that concerned city officials and urban planners at that time. For example, the swath of reforms and engineering projects carried out in Rio during the early 1900 s made little attempt to target them. (In fact, these settlements multiplied during this time, due in no small part to the urban reforms – Abreu, 1987 , 1994; Benchimol, 1990.) What instead drew attention were cortiços, or tenement housing, particularly in the downtown area where population densities were highest (Vaz, 2002).Reasons for this were rooted 19th-century theories of medical science that linked infectious disease with miasmas, which were thought to come from unsanitary and overcrowded conditions (Benchimol, 1999; Chalhoub, 1996). To address this, physicians took leading roles in urban planning, and focused their attention on breaking up and eradicating the spaces where miasmas accumulated, like densely packed, low-income housing (Chalhoub, 1996).

This urban ‘sanitary’ movement originated in 19th-century Europe. Inspired by Auguste Comte and positivist philosophy, it emphasized ‘hygienic’ interventions in city planning and development. This included, in addition to eradicating miasmas, elements of moral and social hygiene, and the rational organization of cities to instill order and efficiency (Machado et al., 1978). In Brazil, hygienist thinking gained traction towards the end of the 19th century, as monarchial rule gave way to republicanism, and the country sought distance from its slaveholding past (Sevcenko, 2003). Hygienism also intertwined with theories of environmental determinism and eugenics in Brazil, justifying, for example, immigration and public policies intended to ‘whiten’ the population (Garmany and Pereira, 2019; Stepan, 2005).

These ideas found a particularly receptive environment in Rio. As Brazil’s national capital and largest city at the turn of the century, Rio sought to transform itself into a bastion of urban modernity in South America (Sevcenko, 2003). Standing in its path, however, were a host of colonial-era problems, not least of which was Yellow Fever (Chalhoub, 1996). Without containing the tropical disease, elites fretted Rio would never take its place alongside European capitals and other modern cities in the world. It was in this context that hygienism offered workable solutions. Medical experts advised on urban planning and public policy, focusing their attention on dispersing miasmas in highly agglomerated inner-city housing (Hochman, 1998). In the first decade of the 20th century, thousands of residents in central Rio lost their homes as tenements were destroyed in the fight against Yellow Fever.

This began to change in subsequent decades, however, following discoveries in microbiology that linked infectious disease with transmissible pathogens (i.e., germ theory – Hochman, 1998; Lima, 2013 ). With this, medical experts in Rio began to focus on preventing the transmission of germs, and identified parts of the city where transmission was thought prominent (Almeida, 2017). The houses along Rio’s hillsides, often called casebres, were singled out for being ‘unhygienic’, and by 1920 they were drawing more attention from public health experts than tenement housing. What stood out were their structure and spatial layouts, as it was believed that the internal architectures of casebres (often single-room dwellings with few or no windows), and the materials used for construction (clay, old wood, and other improvised materials), contributed to the reproduction and transmission of microorganisms and parasites (Almeida, 2017; Lima, 2013).

In this way, the criteria for unhygienic housing in Rio began to change in the early 20th century. No longer were urban planners concerned with the production and accumulation of miasmas, but all housing that could be permeated by microorganisms, parasites, and other viral hosts (Almeida, 2017). This, in essence, was the moment favelas were ‘discovered.’ Though they had dotted Rio’s swamps and hillsides for centuries, it was the uptake of germ theory by hygienist urban planners, officials, engineers, and so on that brought them to the state’s attention. As the 1920 s began, the term favela – which a few years beforehand referred only to Favela Hill – became a common moniker in Rio, signifying all similar housing agglomerations marked by poor sanitation, poverty, and criminality (Abreu, 1994). This allowed them not only to be singled out, but also pathologized. Over the next decade, favelas become a generalizable object in Rio, defined by these characteristics that reflected hygienist theories of urban development (Almeida, 2017; Valladares, 2019).

Coupled with this were issues of race and skin color, and the not-coincidental fact that favelas were understood as Afro-Brazilian spaces (Abreu, 1994; Fischer, 2021). Though urban officials were no longer chasing miasmas in the 1920 s, eugenics and environmental determinism continued to inform hygienist urban policy. This formed the scientific context within which favelas emerged, casting them as aberrant to the broader city not just for their spatial and epidemiological traits, but also because of the populations that occupied them. Of particular debate was whether the environment or the population was the root of the problem, and what interventions were necessary. For example, according to Marcello Carneiro de Mendonça, a civil engineer and columnist for O Jornal, hygienic social housing would not solve Rio’s problems because the inhabitants were Black (“de raça preta”) and maintained the “atavistic customs of their race.” He argued these residents displayed characteristics that “originated in the villages on the coast of Africa […] with customs and habits that are opposed to normal and hygienic life.” Building housing for the poor would not work, he argued, because unlike Europe, “order and discipline are [not] innate” within favela populations (1927: 5).

These ideas, however, were challenged by the sanitarian movement and emergent theories in microbiology. Contrary to eugenicists, they argued that favela residents were lazy, indolent, and unproductive not because of their race or the tropical climate, but because they were physically ill and abandoned by the state (Stepan, 2005). To be redeemed, the city needed to be sanitized. This should be the role of government, claimed sanitarians, ‘curing’ (i.e., civilizing) Brazil through public policy and urban development (Lima and Hochman, 1998). Though still conceptualized through lenses of urban hygiene and environmental determinism, this led to new ideas for favela interventions during the 1930 s and 1940 s.

Most famously, this movement culminated in the production of Rio’s Provisional Proletarian Parks: a temporary housing solution intended to transition favela residents to permanent, hygienic housing. The parks themselves were highly organized with rigid codes of conduct, and to be eligible, a favela resident would have to prove employment, be duly registered at the local police station, and have no criminal record (Gonçalves, 2013; Leeds and Leeds, 1978). Between 1941 and 1947, four of these parks were built in Rio, and roughly 5000 people took up residence within them (Machado da Silva, 2010).

In many respects, the parks were meant to function like rehabilitation clinics, as intermediate spaces for healing and regeneration (Almeida, 2020). According to Victor Tavares de Moura (1940), a physician working for the Federal District government, it would be “reckless to move the families who lived in favelas directly to a completely different environment”. Instead, he argued, “these individuals should pass [beforehand] through a long period of supervised readaptation.” In this way, the parks were intended to be temporary, with the objective of socially preparing favela residents for life in the hygienic city. They were also supposed to be controlled spaces, highly securitized, and capable of blocking the transmission of deviance/disease (mental and physical) by maintaining vigilance over the individual and their family.

The experiment did not last long: already by 1950 the federal census labeled the first of these parks a favela (Almeida, 2020; Gonçalves, 2013). The initiative was shelved for lackluster results, signaling the end of Rio’s hygienist era. This is not to say, however, that hygienist influences disappeared altogether. The links between the built environment, living conditions, and the sociological ‘fitness’ of urban residents continue to inform urban policy in all sorts of ways (Garmany and Richmond, 2020). In fact, according to Roy (2004), environmental determinism remains a key technique for urban reforms around the world, as it helps to “spatialize a problem that is not at root geographical” (Mitchell, 1998: 103). It connects poverty and inequality to issues of health, order and civility. Still, as the 1940 s progressed, Rio was no longer besieged by Yellow Fever, and urban planning and development policy ceased to be chief concerns for medical experts. It was taken over instead by social scientists, as Rio’s attention shifted from disease to underdevelopment.

To briefly recap, the social and scientific context in which favelas were ‘discovered’ and first conceptualized was profoundly orientalist. From Rio’s postcolonial geography in the early 20th century, to the epidemiological threat (supposedly) posed by favelas, to the ways Blackness, criminality, and atavism were projected onto favela spaces, these examples show urban orientalism at work. Moreover, as we show in the next section, even as Yellow Fever came under control, these same orientalist epistemologies continued to inform how favelas were conceptualized. The key ‘problem’ facing Rio changed in the 1940 s, shifting how favelas were understood and what interventions were thought necessary, but the relationship between them and the broader city remained framed by orientalism.

Rural enclaves, modernization, and theories of marginality

The experiment (and failure) of the Provisional Proletarian Parks signaled a new chapter in Rio’s development history. Elites and city officials still aspired to modernize the city, but the ‘problem’ they faced was now different. Yellow Fever was no longer a threat; instead, it was underdevelopment and a culture of ‘backwardness.’ Unsurprisingly, favelas remained the locus of such problems, but they were now studied and conceptualized in different ways. Beginning in the 1940 s, they came to be viewed as rural enclaves within the city, thought to be underdeveloped and marginal to processes of urban development (Gonçalves, 2013; Valladares, 2019). That this corresponded with the end of the Second World War, the start of the Cold War, and the promotion of capitalist-led modernization in Latin America was, of course, not coincidental.

Beginning with The Structure of Social Action, published in 1937 by Talcott Parsons, North American and European theories of development changed tack. Positivism remained influential, but social scientists merged insights from theories of social evolution and the ways humans transitioned from traditional to modern societies. This began to culminate, by the start of the 1950 s, in modernization theory. These ideas, among several things, established a link between economic development and social and cultural values (Peet and Hartwick, 2015). For example, poverty, inequality, and underdevelopment were attributed to the persistence of traditional societies in the modern world, helping to explain why regions like Africa, Asia, and Latin America were less developed.

In Brazil, and Rio particularly, these ideas resonated in how they envisioned an evolutionary transition from traditional, rural societies to modern, industrialized ones. It seemed obvious that what held Rio back was the persistence of antiquated rural enclaves, clearly visible in favelas covering the city’s hillsides. An early example of this comes from 1941, when sociologist Fernanda Augusta Vieira Ferreira described favela residents as “more rural than urban, with a psychology that is not very receptive to innovations, especially to innovations that are reflected in law and regulations [….] who, if in the cities will constitute marginal populations” (Ferreira, 1941: 8). Ferreira’s use of the word “marginal” is significant in that it signaled a shift in theories of urban planning and development. No longer viewed as anathema to the city, favelas were recast as natural phenomena in urban centers throughout the world. Their disorganization was not pathological, but normal; a transitory stage of economic development resulting from rural-to-urban migration (Almeida and Gonçalves, 2022). These new perspectives were informed less by theories of hygienism and eugenics, and more by ecologies of migration and the formation of social classes (Fischer, 2014). Favelas were now attributed to a variety of social causes, including poverty, lack of sanitation, ignorance, rural-to-urban migration, and state abandonment.

In addition to global influences and the rise of modernization theory, what else explains this shift in the mid-20th century? As Rio transformed from a city besieged by Yellow Fever to one marked by underdevelopment, public officials and urban planners pivoted in how they viewed favelas. Rio’s ‘ailment’ – which is to say what prevented it from becoming more like European cities – was not urban hygiene, but underdevelopment. As Benmergui (2012) writes, it was during this time that favelas became targeted for integration rather than eradication. They were not pathogens to be expunged, but rather a phase to be overcome in Rio’s evolutionary trajectory towards higher development. This represented an important shift in how the city was understood and known to officials, where modernist influences overtook hygienism in theories of urban planning and development. By the start of the 1960 s, favelas were still stigmatized for many of the same reasons as in past decades, but the problem they posed to the city had changed. They were now viewed as marginal enclaves, detrimental to Rio’s urban evolution and development (Valladares, 2019).

Ideas of urban marginality overlapped with ‘culture of poverty’ theories, exemplified most famously in Oscar Lewis’ research from Mexico City (1959). The belief was that “residents of poor neighborhoods who were of rural origin had adopted a specific way of life” – i.e., a culture of poverty – “[that] would be passed from one generation to another, thus maintaining a vicious cycle” (Valladares, 2019: 119). In Rio, researchers emphasized two points in particular: first, that favela residents held tight to their rural culture, hindering their assimilation and helping to explain their economic and social exclusion (Bonilla, 1970), and second, that labor in these communities was pre-capitalist, meaning, for example, that residents thought only about their immediate needs and gave little consideration to capital accumulation and upward social mobility (Pearse, 1961). Noted sociologist Carlos Alberto de Medina (1964: 74), while favelas “help the rural man [sic] avoid a violent shock when he arrives in an industrialized urban center,” the economies of these spaces lacked rational consumer planning and budgeting, and businesses evidenced no logic of capital accumulation and investment. The problem with this, argued institutions like the UN Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLAC, 1961), was that it prevented capitalist growth in Latin American cities. Low-paid workers in unproductive or low-productivity occupations created enormous demand for urban equipment and services, and these workers produced little revenue to stimulate growth. As such, Rio’s favelas, like other poor neighborhoods in Latin America, became known not just for their marginal cultures and economies, but also for their marginal roles in urban development. They were obstacles in Rio’s path to urban modernity, with no place in the city’s future.

Still important to note, however, was that although understandings of favelas changed in the middle 20th century, and ideas of urban marginality gained precedence over urban hygiene, theories of urban development were still rooted in orientalism. For example, in the ways that favelas were conceptualized as being lesser evolved, less-urban enclaves within the city, and how their material conditions were attributed to traditional social and cultural values, favelas faced ongoing processes of orientalization. Moreover, even though calls for their eradication were replaced by ones for their assimilation, favelas were still viewed by elites and city officials as spaces in need of state intervention. Similar to previous decades, desire for Rio do be as modern, cosmopolitan, and Western as European and North American cities was foundational to this process. These anxieties framed the social, political, and scientific context in which favelas were (re)reconceptualized.

As we detail in the next section, however, theories of urban marginality soon fell out of favor. Like the shift from hygienism that preceded it, this new phase saw a different ‘problem’ confronting Rio. It was not so much underdevelopment that concerned experts and city officials, but inequality, and how to manage it. This change, of course, was a subtle one, and just like theories of urban hygiene, urban marginality theory has by no means disappeared (see, for example, Caldeira’s critique of Wacquant – Caldeira, 2009). Still, as researchers began to note the myriad ways favelas were integrated within the city, understandings of urban poverty and inequality changed. Favelas were no longer viewed as an evolutionary phase of underdevelopment, as marginality theory emphasized, but as inherently linked to processes of economic production and state governance. It was in this context, in the 1980 s, that the idea of informality caught on, providing an alternative concept for describing favela neighborhoods.

Developmentalism and the emergence of informality

Like the concept of marginality, the roots of urban informality can be traced back several years before 1971, when the term first appeared. In fact, according to Ballegooijen and Rocco, it was John F.C. Turner who, in 1963, “introduced the phenomenon of informal urbanisation in developing countries to a Western audience” (2013: 1974). Turner had worked for several years as a community planner and architect in the barriadas (auto-constructed, low-income neighborhoods) of Lima, Peru, and in 1963 he published an article in Architectural Design highlighting the innovative, resourceful, and autonomous character of these communities. Note Ballegooijen and Rocco (2013), Turner was especially critical of modernist planning interventions, which emphasized technical solutions like high-rise superblock apartments to address urban poverty. Turner argued that such interventions did little to help, and he praised the do-it-yourself ethos and community solidarity he saw in Lima’s barriadas. According to Ballegooijen and Rocco, Turner introduced these ideas to scholars in the global North through the concept of informal urbanization – which, in more recent years, “is often framed as a positive development by those who are in charge of planning and designing cities in the West” – and, nowadays, “[these] ideas are being transported back to the global South in a context of economic deregulation and the shrinking of the state” (2013: 1806).

On the one hand, Ballegooijen and Rocco are right to emphasize the significance of Turner’s ideas to English-speaking readers, particularly in the fields of urban planning and architecture. On the other hand, though, they give Turner a little more credit than he deserves, along with scholars in the global North, whom they suggest played a key role in steering debates over urban planning in Latin America. For example, while Turner’s work clearly focused on what would later be called urban informality, he never actually used this term in his 1963 article. His descriptions of Lima’s barriadas helped lay important conceptual groundwork for the idea, but nowhere in Turner’s article do the words informal or informality appear (Turner, 1963).

Likewise, Turner was not the first to emphasize how residents of such communities were resourceful, rational, and self-reliant, nor would it be fair to say that it was urban planners in the global North who were responsible for transporting these ideas back to Latin America. For example, in Rio, as early as 1953, Alberto Passos Guimarães, from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), argued that favelas were not a “problem” faced by the city, but rather “an emergency solution imposed on people without resources” (1953: 11). These sentiments were echoed by José Alípio Goulart of the IBGE in 1957, and then again, rather famously, by right-wing state governor Carlos Lacerda in 1964, who said that Rio’s favelas should be considered “a triumph of the private initiative of their residents” (Lacerda, 1964).

These ideas represented early critiques of urban marginality theory, a body of research that grew significantly during the 1960 s. Among those who contributed to these critiques were numerous foreign researchers, highlighted in the work of Anthony Leeds (1968) and William Mangin (1967). The publication of Janice Perlman’s The Myth of Marginality in 1976 marked a turning point in these debates, whereby understandings of urban marginality shifted, and favelas came to be understood as integral parts of the broader urban landscape. This is to say that while Turner’s 1963 article was no doubt significant (at least for English-speaking audiences), his voice was one among many writing against modernist urban planning interventions in Latin America, as well as theories of urban marginality. Moreover, it would be unfair to say that, years later, these ideas were (re)introduced by urban planners in the global North, as Latin American researchers continued to debate them throughout the second half of the 20th century (e.g., De Soto, 1989, 2000; Kowarick, 1980; Maricato, 1979; Santos, 1979; Valladares, 1980).

According to Valladares (2019), this period marked a watershed moment in which ‘the Favela’ emerged as a generalizable object of academic inquiry. With this, a whole field of social science research sprung up around Brazilian favelas. In the most general sense, this meant that favelas continued to be othered, just as they had in the past, but their position within the city, and the interventions they supposedly required, were understood differently. Just like when favelas were ‘discovered’ in the early 20th century, or when they were understood as rural enclaves in the 1940 s, this period in the 1970 s represented a decisive change in how favelas were conceptualized. According to Valladares, a “dogma” of Brazilian favelas began to materialize, casting them as “a singular, specific space” within the city, and “the locus of poverty, the land of the poor” (2019: 140–141). This dogma has informed research on favelas ever since, shaping debates in the social sciences.

Stepping back to contextualize this shift within broader, global debates over urban development, the 1970 s marked a period of radical change in Latin America. As ongoing economic crises brought issues of urban poverty to the fore, the ‘problem’ of inequality began to eclipse the ‘problem’ of underdevelopment in cities like Rio. With this, critical scholars began to favor developmentalist theories over modernist ones. This meant that capitalist growth was now identified as the cause of – rather than the solution to – poverty and inequality in cities. Similar to shifts in North America and Europe (e.g., Harvey, 1973), urban researchers drew insight from Marxist theory, and academic interest in inequality surged.

In the city of Rio itself, urban inequality had become especially acute, as the 1970 s energy crisis stalled economic growth and sent debt soaring. The city had grown enormously with rural-to-urban and inter-urban migration in the middle 20th century, and developmentalist theories helped to make sense of the highly uneven urban landscape (Benmergui, 2012). Favelas were seen less as rural enclaves within the city, and instead came to be viewed as working-class spaces of social reproduction, where residents were resourceful and rational, and wanted to raise their families and ascend socially. This meant that, in contrast to theories of marginality, the poor were understood as integrated and tightly connected to processes of capitalist development, albeit in perverse and exploitative ways (Almeida and Gonçalves, 2022). Researchers like Turner (1968) and Mangin (1967) helped cultivate this perspective, arguing that low-income neighborhoods were not ‘problems’ for urban development, but rather perverse solutions for capitalist growth in Latin America. This triggered a surge of new studies on favelas in the 1970 s, changing the ways favelas were understood and represented in social science debates (Valladares, 2019).

Simultaneous change was also underway in fields like development economics. The notion of underdevelopment was being scrutinized by dependency theorists, who argued that capitalist development was not an evolutionary trajectory, but rather a process that produced development and underdevelopment on multiple scales (Santos, 1979). This filtered into theories of urban poverty, too. The poor were no longer thought to be excluded from (and marginal to) processes of urban development, but rather perversely integrated and marginalized by capitalist growth (Kowarick, 1980; Maricato, 1979). Perceptions of favelas subsequently changed, from spaces that were excluded from capitalist development, to ones that expressed the highly unequal relationships between labor and capital at the global periphery. More to the point, by the end of the 1970 s, Marxist social scientists in Rio had rejected the notion that favela residents were ignorant and lacking in capacity, and instead came to emphasize their economic agency and strategies for social mobility (Almeida and Gonçalves, 2022).

It was in this context that the concept of informality caught on in Brazil. While difficult to say for sure when the word was first used, by the early 1980 s it had integrated urban studies debates in Rio (Santos, 1980: 32; Valladares and Figueiredo, 1981: 35). Perhaps most notably, in June 1980, Brazil’s Minister of the Interior, Mário Andreazza, argued that national policy for urban development was particularly concerned with “the so-called informal city, constituted by favelas, mocambos and malocas, which correspond to areas that have received few urban benefits” (1980: 8 – emphasis added). The solution, he argued, was to promote domestic economic development that focused on reducing regional inequalities, thereby alleviating urban poverty in Brazil’s largest cities.

To briefly summarize, reasons for why informality took root in Brazil at this historical moment relate to, on the one hand, Rio’s changing urban landscape – and how those changes were perceived (i.e., a greater emphasis on inequality) – and, on the other hand, changing academic debates, with researchers growing more critical of capitalist development, and turning away from urban marginality theory. In short, this meant favelas were viewed not as inhibitors of modern urbanization, but as symptoms of unequal development. For critical researchers, urban planners, architects, and so on, favelas were reconceptualized as spaces of proletarian struggle, in need of help and resources more so than social and cultural assimilation. This was the context in which urban informality, as a concept, began to flourish. The term was not only capable of describing favela housing, but also economic activity, political governance, urban infrastructure, and so on.

Related to this was informality’s ambiguous and nonderogatory conceptual nature. It was a term that could account for a wide variety of building types, economic practices, and urban geographies, and it was not so pejorative as other terms like slum or squatter settlement. Different from marginality, the notion of informality was nonessentialist and made no presumption that the urban poor exhibited intrinsic characteristics, or that their communities were sites of traditional or pre-capitalist labor. In short, informality was usefully vague and free of the baggage carried by other terms used to describe urban poverty and inequality (Machado da Silva, 2002).

It was not just Marxists, however, who gravitated towards the concept. Given the term’s broad applicability, it appealed to a broad swath of researchers working in different fields (AlSayyad, 2004; Rakowski, 1994). Crucially, it also preserved orientalist perceptions of the city. As we explore in the next section, this helps to explain why the concept has endured for so long. Significant here were social and political changes that became widespread in the 1980 s, where neoliberal ideas emphasizing deregulation, individual autonomy, reduced state investment, etc., began to inform urban development and planning research. These factors help to explain not only why informality caught on when it did, but also why it remains significant today.

The concept of informality endures

In this section, we explore why the concept of urban informality has stayed relevant for so many decades. Like in previous sections, we begin by considering broader debates over urban development, and then narrow in to focus specifically on Rio. This brings us to another transitional moment in Rio’s history, whereby public security overtook inequality as the key ‘problem’ for public officials, provoking new approaches and interventions in favelas. We explain why the concept of informality remained relevant during this period, looking at how it perpetuates orientalist legacies handed down through previous decades. This orientalist framing also helps to explain recent militarization efforts in Rio, and how fear and anxiety from city officials and the upper classes continue to be projected onto informal space.

As the concept of informality emerged and gained momentum in the 1970 s and 1980 s, it was used primarily to describe different forms of urban labor – in line with how Hart first used the term (1973) – and to distinguish different sectors of the economy. While much of this work focused on cities, the term ‘informality’ was not typically used to describe the communities, infrastructures, cultures, or architectures of the urban poor (AlSayyad, 2004). It was not until the 1980 s, with new research published out of Latin America, that it expanded to include many of these features (Rakowski, 1994).

In his brief overview of urban informality, AlSayyad (2004) notes how broader theorical perspectives of urban informality developed along two distinct lines during the 1980 s and 1990 s. This work emerged primarily from case studies in Latin America, and “examined the nature of the informal sector” in cities throughout the region (AlSayyad, 2004: 11). The first line of inquiry was informed by Marxist and developmentalist perspectives, and “considered [informality] to be closely connected to the formal sector – an essential, permanent component of the modern economy” (AlSayyad, 2004: 11). These debates were driven largely by social scientists, who argued that informality was crucial to capitalist development in cities like Rio (e.g.,Kowarick, 1980; Maricato, 1979; Santos, 1979; Valladares, 1980). As noted in the previous section, these studies sought to break with theories of marginality, and to theorize how urban poverty contributed to capitalist growth in cities at the global periphery.

The second line of inquiry was driven by what Rakowski (1994) called the “legalist” perspective, emphasizing microenterprise and reduced state regulation in favelas and other informal communities. As AlSayyad notes, this perspective “considered informality to be a marginalized sector, a temporary manifestation of underdevelopment characterized by survival activities of the urban poor” (2004: 11). More to the point, the solution to informality was economic and political evolution, spearheaded by new policies and reduced legal protocol. Crucial here was the expanding context of neoliberalism, stressing privatization, deregulation, and austerity. These ideas rose to prominence during the 1980 s, changing how development economists – as well as politicians, city officials, urban planners, and so on – looked at the urban poor. For those who argued state intervention should be minimal, and that highly regulated markets were inefficient, favelas came to represent examples of dynamic entrepreneurship and individual autonomy.

In Latin America, these ideas were articulated most famously by Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto (1989, 2000). For de Soto, “extralegality” (viz, urban informality) represented a well-informed calculation on the part of the poor, whereby the costs of complying with the law outweighed the benefits (2000: 87). The problem was hyperregulation, he argued, and informality stemmed from excessive bureaucratic management. For him, the solution was simple: make it easier for the poor to formalize (viz, make fungible) their undervalued assets, thereby granting them access to capital and, importantly, collateral for future investment. In other words, the problem facing Southern cities was not really poverty or inequality, but excessive state regulation.

It was in this context that urban informality, as a concept used to describe and analyze different urban geographies, began to diversify and grow more significant (AlSayyad, 2004; Rakowski, 1994; Roy, 2005). Again, the flexibility of the concept, along with its break from marginality theory, proved useful to urban scholars. This conceptual elasticity, however, including the ways informality was defined and understood, also made it politically benign. Returning to Ballegooijen and Rocco (2013), this helps to explain why Turner’s work found such a broad audience, particularly among neoliberal urban planners and architects. Though Turner himself was drawn to Kropotkin and anarcho-socialism, his research (unintentionally) contributed to work that celebrated urban informality for resiliency and entrepreneurialism, rather than condemning it for state negligence and social inequality.

This disassociation between the forces that create urban informality, and the resourceful ways in which the urban poor survive, contributes to what Roy famously called the “aestheticization of poverty”: a depoliticized imagining of urban poverty that obscures the structural forces behind it (2004: 296). It fetishizes the architectures, landscapes, cultural practices, and infrastructural adaptations of the poor, inducing politically neutral visions that disavow class conflict, social injustice, and state violence. While the concept of informality is not solely to blame for this, it does enable the process by allowing inequality to be described in ways that are politically neutral. This helps to explain why a diverse range of scholars, from radical Marxists to neoliberal urban planners, have engaged the concept in recent decades, including why it has grown in significance since the 1980 s. It is a term well suited to different debates, including mainstream ones advocating neoliberal capitalist development.

This has been especially true in Rio over the past few decades. As the city descended into the 1980 s debt crisis, and concerns over inequality were overtaken by ones of public security, favelas were increasingly singled out as hotbeds for criminal activity. With this have come increasingly forceful police interventions, responding to fears from middle and upper-class cariocas. To be sure, militarized policing of the poor is not new in Rio (Machado da Silva, 2010), but what stands out in recent decades are a series of interventions that have accompanied the onset of neoliberalism. These changes are similar to ones that have happened globally, with new policies, technologies, and resources devoted to an escalating war on crime (Cavalcanti and Garmany, 2020). In Rio, this coincides with the rise of organized narcotrafficking and ongoing battles between police and traffickers throughout the city. Favela communities, rather (in)famously, became strongholds for these narcotrafficking groups in the late 20th century, and with this has come a deepening socio-spatial divide between formal and informal space. Notes McCann, what distinguishes them today is not “a clear set of physical characteristics” as it may have been in the 20th century, but, “rather, they are defined by their history” (2014: 26). In other words, neighborhoods informally settled by low-income occupiers remain forever stigmatized on account of how they were first established, and by whom.

So ingrained is this division that, since the 1990s, it has remained a key feature of academic research on Rio’s favelas (Valladares, 2019). Described as a “broken city” (Ventura, 1994), with “parallel polities” (Leeds, 1996) operating in formal and informal space, Rio, today, is well known as a city of stark contrasts. Very often the informal city is depicted as a different world altogether, characterized by different rules, customs, and urban geographies (Valladares, 2019). Similar to previous decades, this has spurred a host of state-led, technocratic interventions that reveal ongoing legacies of orientalism in urban planning and public policy. In much the same way that sanitarians in the 1940 s sought to rehabilitate favela residents by relocating them, the conquest of Rio’s favelas by military forces in the 21^st century is framed as ‘liberation’ (c.f., Novaes, 2014).

For example, according to Machado da Silva (2010), discourses of urban violence began to frame debates over everyday crime in Rio in the 1980 s and 1990 s, to the detriment of language that emphasized rights. He shows how issues of public security were framed in increasingly limited ways that demanded social control, and did not seek to address the relationships between people, groups and social categories. Instead, “what is asked for is the blocking of these relationships [between people, groups and social categories]” (2010: 294), which implies the criminalization of poverty and its territorial segregation. The glaring contradiction here is that at the same time favela residents were broadly recognized as fully integrated members of urban society – at least discursively – their communities faced escalating levels of violence and militarized state surveillance. The result, as has been witnessed over the past few decades, is the entrenchment of the dualist city framework (e.g., a city divided between formal and informal space), and the clamor for more militarized police to combat criminality.

All this, of course, is not to say that the concept of informality is somehow inherently linked to public security, or that research engaging the topic inevitably justifies police intervention. Very much to the contrary. What our analysis helps to reveal, however, is the context in which the concept of informality took root, at least in Rio, and how it helped to reframe questions of urban development, making new forms of state intervention possible. So vague and politically neutral was the concept that, even when Rio’s ‘problem’ shifted from inequality to public security, informality continued to serve as a useful signifier for favelas. Again, this is what an urban orientalist perspective helps to uncover: not just why the concept of informality emerged when it did, or how it perpetuates orientalist legacies in urban planning and public policy, but the broader processes, epistemologies, and geographic imaginaries that explain its salience.

Returning to where this article started, what does this say about the city and understandings of urban space more generally? More to the point, what does our analysis reveal about the ways the formal city understands itself? As we have argued in our historical analysis of Rio, understandings of favelas have consistently reflected the anxieties of middle and upper-class cariocas. Whether anxieties over race, hygiene, modernity, development, security, etc., conceptualizations of favelas have consistently been articulated around the insecurities of urban elites (viz, being white enough, hygienic enough, developed enough, secure enough, Western enough, etc.). By considering this history through an urban orientalist perspective, we can better understand why the concept of informality took root when it did, and why it continues to be relevant today. Even more significantly, it draws attention to the ways urban inequality has been understood over time, and how conceptual shifts connect to specific historical moments and different ‘problems’ confronting the city. We reflect on this legacy in the conclusions that follow, as well as what it could mean for the future of informality as a concept.

Conclusions

Throughout this article we have worked to explain shifting understandings of favelas in Rio over the past century, drawing attention to the social and scientific context in which these shifts occurred. Mobilizing Angotti’s notion of “urban orientalism” (2012: 27), our goal has been to highlight how orientalist legacies have consistently framed the different ways urban space is understood. Our argument is that the concept of informality endures not because it offers much insight, for example, into favela neighborhoods. Instead, just like concepts that preceded it, informality preserves orientalist perceptions of the city, helping to objectify and redefine favelas in familiar ways, and facilitating interventions that reflect deeply rooted orientalist epistemologies. In Rio, this means that changing understandings of favelas over the past century reveal little about actual changes within favelas, and more about how different geographic imaginaries have been projected onto them, and how this has corresponded with different ‘problems’ confronting the formal city.

What is significant about this is that it shows how concepts like informality mirror ongoing social anxieties in cities like Rio. Even more than how it describes processes of urban development, or specific characteristics that define poverty and inequality, the idea of informality reflects what the (formal) city aspires to be – or, more precisely, what it aspires to not be. It serves, on the one hand, as a concept the formal city uses to define itself, and on the other, as a narrative to distance and dehumanize spaces like favelas. As our analysis of the concept makes clear, what explains informality’s salience in contemporary Rio is not that the term is especially precise or expressive – it is most certainly not – but, instead, that it continues to frame the city in orientalist ways, allowing for specific types of state intervention. In this way, an urban orientalist perspective draws attention not just to the ways informality is understood, or to the work that it does as a concept, but also to the forces that produce and sustain it epistemologically.

In a broader sense, our argument pertains to more, of course, than just informality. Our analysis has implications for what Stoler calls “concept-work” (2016: 16), particularly in how concepts emerge and their effects, as well as the work that goes into sustaining them and making them meaningful. Returning to where this article began, this is what a genealogical investigation helps to uncover: how colonialist legacies are preserved and perpetuated through concepts, and how this process is part and parcel to the ways concepts appear natural and stable. Following Stoler, our hope is that our interrogation of informality sheds new light on “how [the] stability [of concepts] is achieved, how unequal things are abstracted into commensurabilities that fuel our confidence in those very concepts that then are relegated as common sense” (2016: 18). This work helps disrupt taken-for-granted assumptions, “warding off certainty” (Stoler, 2016: 22) and revealing important fault lines in what we think we know, along with forcing us in new directions not just analytically, but also methodologically.

Looking ahead, what this means for future research on urban informality is hard to say. On the one hand, it seems inevitable that urban development and state interventions in cities like Rio will continue to be informed by orientalist legacies. But on the other, shifting social anxieties will likely push debates in new directions, introducing alternative concepts better attuned to future urban contexts. As our analysis of informality makes clear, whether or not the concept continues to have traction has little to do with the ways poverty and inequality actually manifest in cities, and more to do with how these issues are framed by future urban development debates.