Background to Favela Programs
The favela, throughout its history in Rio de Janeiro, was primarily considered an undesirable component of the urban structure. This vision was present at the beginning of the century, from the programs of Mayor Pereira Passos (1903-1906) and with the Agache Plan in the 1930s. The favela's importance and participation in the context of the city were only recognized and taken into consideration in order to control public hygiene and epidemics. Even then, because of the slums were considered to disrupt urban order and their population was viewed as alien to the urban society, the government policy for favelas was simply to remove them from areas near the "formal" city.

When, in the 1940s, favelas began to show themselves to be an important center of political opposition, the government began to rethink its policies in relation to slums. Some projects came forward for the improvement of houses and hygienic conditions on the hills, thus preventing the occurrence of epidemics in the neighborhoods of the "formal" city. Meanwhile, the articulation of the formal city with the "informal" city (favelas) had not taken place. Attention had not been paid to improving, developing, and transforming the public spaces of the favelas, which continued as a discarded "ghettos" of the city.

In the 1960's and 1970's, government policies of creating new housing projects and eradicating the favelas were ineffectual. The Alliance for Progress, a U.S. government aid program, was restricted to the construction of a few housing complexes. The effort to eliminate the favelas from the South Zone of the city, occupied by upper-income social classes, as soon as the low-income population was of no more used as labor for constructing new buildings or as household servants, also failed. Thus, the presence of the favela residents prevailed near the "noble" neighborhoods like Copacabana, Ipanema and Leblon. Rocinha, one of the largest and most estable favelas of the city, reaches almost 100,000 inhabitants and Vidigal has 10,000 . The same applies to large low-income settlements of Rio's North Zone as is the case of the Complexo da Maré and Complexo do Alemão.

With the Favela-Bairro Program, the City intends to integrate the favela into the formal city, absorbing one million inhabitants - who are currently excluded from urban services - as full citizens. The program thus serves a poor population that has values, culture, and traditions that are urban and undifferentiated from those existing in the formal city.

The architecture and urban structures that identify social functions should not be different in the formal and informal city. The program is based on the premise that the interaction of the cultural and functional values in an urban area must be continuous and include the entire population. The symbolism and the formal and spatial significance created by contemporary architectural expertise cannot constitute a privilege of the minorities who live in a dense and wealthy zone of the city along the coast, from Flamengo to Barra da Tijuca. They are also a right of citizens who occupy 80 percent of the hinterland of Rio - anonymous, gray, the noir city defined by social critics.