{"id":4799,"date":"2016-07-26T23:45:19","date_gmt":"2016-07-26T23:45:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/?p=4799"},"modified":"2019-04-06T09:03:05","modified_gmt":"2019-04-06T09:03:05","slug":"in-rios-bulldozed-_favelas_-echoes-of-americas-shantytowns","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/in-rios-bulldozed-_favelas_-echoes-of-americas-shantytowns\/","title":{"rendered":"In Rio’s bulldozed _favelas,_ echoes of America’s shantytowns"},"content":{"rendered":"

Lisa Goff<\/a>, University of Virginia<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

The 500,000 tourists expected to attend the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro will see a dazzling city, miles of sparkling beaches and an Olympic Park with nine venues, all presided over by the towering statue of Christ the Redeemer gazing down from Mount Corcovado.<\/p>\n

But another, equally famous feature of Rio \u2013 its miles and miles of vibrant, urban slums known as favelas<\/em> \u2013 won\u2019t be on display. That\u2019s because the Rio city government has spent months evicting<\/a> residents, demolishing their shacks and constructing miles of roadside walls to hide the shantytowns from view of arriving Olympic visitors.<\/p>\n

\n \"\"<\/a>
\n Rio de Janeiro\u2019s Rocinha favela.<\/span>
\n chensiyuan\/Wikimedia Commons<\/a>, CC BY-SA<\/a><\/span>
\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Rio isn\u2019t the only world-class city to hide or dismantle its shantytowns; poor people are considered unsightly wherever they go, and cities regularly exercise their power to expunge homemade shacks from the landscape. Demolitions of a shantytown<\/a> north of the South African capital, Pretoria, sparked riots earlier this year. Many bidonvilles<\/em> in France \u2013 most recently in Calais<\/a> \u2013 have been demolished in the name of public safety and order. In 2008, the Rwandan government bulldozed<\/a> the last remaining shantytown in its capital, Kigali.<\/p>\n

The United States is no exception. Many think of shantytowns as a problem of the developing world. But America has its own untold history of shantytowns, which I detail in my recent book, \u201cShantytown USA: Forgotten Landscapes of the Working Poor<\/a>.”<\/p>\n

While some persist today in the form of trailer parks and homeless encampments, their heyday was from the 1820s through the 1940s, when they peppered the nation, providing housing for the working poor, unemployed and destitute. But as in Rio, U.S. policymakers who claimed to be improving the lives of residents ended up dislodging most of these self-made, ramshackle communities that were, in many ways, havens for the poor.<\/p>\n

Vast, thriving communities<\/h2>\n

In my book, I define shantytowns as communities of single-family dwellings built by poor working people for themselves from materials at hand. This separates them from housing built for poor people by others, like government-funded housing projects.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s hard to get a sense of what shantytown residents thought of themselves, but popular 19th-century songs and plays suggest that they saw shantytowns as symbols of hospitality, resourcefulness and self-determination.<\/p>\n

Take \u201cThe Irishman\u2019s Shanty,\u201d a popular song from 1859 that reflects feelings of freedom and independence:<\/p>\n

        Did you ever go into an Irishman's shanty?\r\n        Ah! there boys you\u2019ll find the whiskey so plenty,\r\n        With a pipe in his mouth there sits Paddy so free,\r\n        No King in his palace is prouder than he.\r\n<\/code><\/pre>\n<\/p>\n
Workers who built shantytowns often designed small single-family homes with yards, porches and picket fences. Roads and pathways in shantytowns meandered, dipped and climbed in accordance with the topography, making them difficult for outsiders to traverse. This unpredictable design \u2013 which I call \u201coppositional planning\u201d \u2013 made shantytowns areas of privacy and protection, places where dwellers could more easily move about freely and enjoy a measure of self-governance.<\/p>\n
Shantytowns were also places of work: dairies, laundries, market gardens and hauling services operated within the communities. Residents belonged to churches, voted and went to court to protect their property rights.<\/p>\n
The dwellings themselves varied considerably, from mud huts and teepee-like \u201cpole shanties\u201d in the 18th century to log and wood structures in the 19th, often (but not always) built by immigrants or African-Americans. They were usually located in low and swampy or high and rocky areas near owners\u2019 workplaces. Surprisingly, shanty dwellers were not necessarily squatters: Many if not most 19th-century shantytown dwellers paid ground rent for the land where their shanties sat.<\/p>\n
In the 20th century, the forces behind the development of shantytowns shifted a bit. The Great Depression rendered thousands jobless and homeless; left to their own devices, these people built shacks out of corrugated tin, linoleum, cardboard boxes and automobile parts. Called Hoovervilles<\/a> (after sitting President Herbert Hoover), these shantytowns were covered extensively by the media.<\/p>\n
\n            \"\"<\/a>
\n              During the Great Depression, shantytowns \u2013 dubbed Hoovervilles \u2013 began appearing in many urban areas.<\/span>
\n              Berenice Abbott\/Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/span>
\n            <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
The view from above<\/h2>\n
Initially, America\u2019s middle and upper classes viewed shantytowns as a necessary \u2013 albeit temporary \u2013 condition of rapid industrial growth in the 19th century.<\/p>\n
But poor laborers did not always move on. Those who remained, and the new arrivals who joined them, created shantytowns that lasted for decades in cities like New York, Chicago, Atlanta and Washington, D.C. These self-built communities covered large swaths of major cities, including a 20-block stretch of Eighth Avenue in New York City, much of the Brooklyn waterfront and what is now Dupont Circle in Washington, D.C.<\/p>\n
In a nation busily writing building codes and standardizing housing forms, shantytowns came to be considered civic embarrassments, impediments to progress and barriers to the beautification of America\u2019s great cities \u2013 the same cities shantytown inhabitants helped to build.<\/p>\n
Their dogged insistence on staying put annoyed and frightened their better-heeled neighbors. Middle-class observers often thought of shantytowns as slothful, depraved \u201cdens of vice and wretchedness.\u201d Newspapers and magazines depicted them as breeding grounds for crime and violence, places that were \u201cforeign,\u201d uncivilized, even bestial. There were bursts of nostalgia in the 1880s (an article in Scribner\u2019s praised their \u201cdisreputable freedom\u201d) and again in the 1930s, when movies like \u201cSullivan\u2019s Travels\u201d and \u201cMy Man Godfrey\u201d championed the common man. But in general, the middle class denigrated shantytowns and shanty dwellers as \u201cun-American.\u201d<\/p>\n
Clearing the slums<\/h2>\n
Shantytowns didn\u2019t disappear after the Great Depression, but tightening zoning and building codes, combined with public housing schemes that provided ostensibly better housing for the poor, drastically limited their growth.<\/p>\n
In these well-meaning policies, we see the rights and independence of the poor being suppressed. Before, the poor had been able to exercise a measure of control over where they lived; shanties, though modest, were single-family residences that were often located close to where inhabitants worked. Now they were told to navigate bureaucratic hurdles while being shepherded into multifamily apartments located in sections of cities that were often much further from workplaces.<\/p>\n
\n            \"\"<\/a>
\n              \u2018The Squatters of New York.\u2019<\/span>
\n              D. E. Wyand; wood engraving in Harper’s Weekly, June 26, 1869, p. 412. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division<\/a><\/span>
\n            <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Because Shantytown residents felt a sense of community as strong as their middle- and upper-class neighbors, they consistently \u2013 sometimes violently \u2013 resisted attempts to demolish their homes.<\/p>\n
The effect could be humorous. On one occasion in 1880, The New York Times reported that a deputy distributing eviction notices along Manhattan\u2019s 81st Street \u201cwas seized, and a milk-can, half-filled, was turned over his head like a hat.\u201d Other times the attacks were more serious, like when residents unleashed dogs \u201ckept for the purpose of harassing bailiffs.\u201d<\/p>\n
But police were responsible for most of the violence, such as the time a deputy \u201cbound a [resident], carried him to a distance and hitching horses to a cable thrown around the dwelling, dragged it to the ground.\u201d In another instance, a resident who refused to move out was literally dynamited out of his shack. According to The New York Times, \u201cthe workmen blasting rock finally approached so near that they were afraid of destroying the lives of the inmates.\u201d<\/p>\n
Same story, different city<\/h2>\n
These descriptions from 19th-century American newspapers are quite similar to media reports of forced evictions<\/a> in Rio in the run-up to this summer\u2019s Olympics. In both cases, poor people tightened their grips on their self-built homes as they squared off against a state that claimed to be committed to improving their lives.<\/p>\n
Rio resonates in yet another way with American shantytowns: Residents have repeatedly rejected government offers of \u201cbetter\u201d housing at sites far removed from their current neighborhoods.<\/p>\n
In 1931, residents of a Phoenix shantytown built with \u201cpieces of cartons, old tin, bits of carpet or gunny-sack \u2013 anything that can be had\u201d astonished Red Cross workers by refusing offers of better housing. That same year, residents of a Brooklyn shantytown known as Hoover City were asked to explain their preference for shantytown life; they cited a sense of personal freedom,\u201c independence, and the very practical advantage of living close to work.<\/p>\n
Those same values appear to have motivated 20 of the 600 original residents of the Vila Aut\u00f3dromo favela<\/em> to resist growing government pressure to leave their shantytown next to the site of the Olympic Park. After months of sometimes bloody resistance, they wrung a promise from the mayor of Rio to rebuild their houses on the same site<\/a>.<\/p>\n
\n            \"\"<\/a>
\n              A man sits on the debris of his demolished house in Rio de Janeiro\u2019s Vila Autodromo community.<\/span>
\n              Ricardo Moraes\/Reuters<\/a><\/span>
\n            <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
Like their American counterparts decades earlier, Brazilian government officials and private developers have disparaged the poor as a tactic to deny them their rights to the city. Last year, Carlos Carvalho, the Brazilian real estate tycoon who owned much of the land where the Olympic Park was built, touted the \u201cnew Rio\u201d that would emerge in advance of the Olympics<\/a> \u2013 a new Rio for \u201celite [people], of good taste\u201d full of \u201cnoble housing, not housing for the poor.\u201d<\/p>\n
Early in my research for \u201cShantytown USA,\u201d I came across the minutes from an 1830s meeting of the Manhattan Board of Assistant Aldermen. Members who had decided to demolish blocks and blocks of downtown shanties all of a sudden wondered: \u201cWhere are the poor to go?\u201d<\/p>\n
Where indeed, in 19th-century New York City or in 21st-century Rio. In 2016, more than 77,000 favela<\/em> residents were evicted from their homes to make way for the \u201cnew Rio\u201d built for Olympic visitors. Many were rehoused in government-built housing, but not all \u2013 and thousands decried the relocation<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Where can the poor go? Given a choice, many choose shantytowns over other available options. Shantytowns are proof of the inability of institutions to keep up with the demand for affordable housing for the poor. But they also express a working-poor vision of community that elevates values of resourcefulness and reinvention over the middle-class fixation on property and profit.<\/p>\n
Where should the poor go? If only the answer were up to them.<\/p>\n
\"The<\/p>\n
Lisa Goff<\/a>, Lecturer of English, University of Virginia<\/a><\/em><\/span><\/p>\n
This article was originally published on The Conversation<\/a>. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lisa Goff, University of Virginia The 500,000 tourists expected to attend the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro will see a dazzling city, miles of sparkling beaches and an Olympic Park with nine venues, all presided over by the towering statue of Christ the Redeemer gazing down from Mount Corcovado. But another, equally famous […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":40,"featured_media":4800,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[277,38],"tags":[804,801,807,143,803,805,810,808,809,802,811,806,420],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4799"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/40"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4799"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4799\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4801,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4799\/revisions\/4801"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4800"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4799"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4799"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lifeandnews.com\/articles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4799"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}