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Good practice Imported

Favela-Bairro — Rio de Janeiro's In-Situ Favela Upgrading Programme

Brazil · Rio de Janeiro · See the Brazil profile · See the Rio de Janeiro profile

Evidence: Quasi-experimental Top 72% 62/100 · Ask Evidence Copilot about this practice

Rio de Janeiro's flagship in-situ favela-upgrading programme (1994–2008) delivered streets, drainage and services without removing residents; a peer-reviewed evaluation found service-access gains of over 20 points but no average rise in property values absent land titling.

+21.6 percentage points
Increase in official water-service access (1994–2008)
+21 percentage points
Increase in sewerage access (1994–2008)
+3 percentage points
Increase in formal property ownership (Favela-Bairro II) (1994–2008)

Details

Maturity
Discontinued
Promoter
Prefeitura da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, with Inter-American Development Bank financing
Period
1994–2008
Keywords
urban upgrading, housing, informal settlements, municipal infrastructure

Context

Launched in 1994 with Inter-American Development Bank financing, Favela-Bairro delivered infrastructure — streets, drainage, lighting, sanitation and social facilities — directly within medium-sized favelas rather than relocating residents, eventually reaching several hundred settlements across two phases (Favela-Bairro I and II) before being absorbed into later Rio de Janeiro municipal programmes after 2008.

Activities

The programme delivered in-situ infrastructure works (streets, drainage, lighting, sanitation, social facilities) within existing favela footprints across two funded phases from 1994 to 2008.

Results

A peer-reviewed evaluation using household survey data (Atuesta & Soares, Urban Studies, 2018) found that official water-service access rose by 21.6 percentage points and sewerage access by 21 percentage points in treated neighbourhoods, alongside a small but statistically significant increase in school attendance among 5-20 year-olds and a 3-percentage-point rise in formal property ownership under Favela-Bairro II. The same study found no average increase in housing values across treated favelas, which the authors attribute to the absence of a land-titling component in most of the programme.

Conclusions

A later Inter-American Development Bank retrospective and an academic review conducted three decades on found that some service and safety gains eroded over time where municipal maintenance lapsed, underlining that in-situ upgrading needs sustained follow-through, not just one-off capital works, to hold its results.

Implementation
Indicative cost
High (€500k–€5M)
Time to results
Long (> 3 years)
Staffing & skills
Prefeitura da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro (municipal government), Inter-American Development Bank (financing)

Conditions for success

  • In-situ upgrading that avoided resident displacement, preserving community and livelihood networks
  • Multilateral development-bank financing (IDB) across two sequential phases

Common failure modes

  • No land-titling component in most of the programme meant no average increase in housing values despite service gains
  • Service and safety gains eroded over time in later years where municipal maintenance lapsed

Where it fits

Governance type
municipal government with multilateral development-bank financing
Scale
several hundred medium-sized favelas
Income level
upper-middle-income

Commonly funded by

Own resources / municipal budget

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Data sources

Where this practice's information was retrieved from, and when.

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