Becoming Favela

The publication examines a large-scale urban development project in Salvador, Brazil that involuntarily resettled favela residents to precarious state-built social housing.

The ethnography portrays the negligence of the state, which together with the home improvement practices of the residents, and the labeling of the new social housing as favela — by the long-term neighbors and eventually the residents themselves— co-constituted a socio-spatial process of the housing project becoming favela as an urban form and lived experience.