Reading Summary

EIGHT Threshold Markets

THE PRODUCTION OP REAL-ESTATE VALUE BETWEEN

THE "FAVELA" AND THE "PAVEMENT"

Mariana Cavalcanti

In early twenty-first-century Rio de Janeiro, the opposition between fave- las and bairros (formal city neighborhoods), or favelas and the "pavement" (i.e., the "formal" city), can prove an elusive perspective for unpacking the relations between the so-called formal and informal cities. It is not just that even the most affluent bairros contain favelas within their territorial bound- aries. All part of the increasing formalization of the city's consolidated fave- las, a few large communities have been recognized by the state as bairros. Thus Rocinha (which is known as Latin America's largest shantytown) is classified in data published by Rio de Janeiro's city hall as the city's twenty- seventh administrative region that contains a single bairro - Rocinha. But Rocinha also figures as a favela in the city hall's Sistema de Allsentamentos de Babra Renda (System for Low Income Settlements, SABREN ), in which one finds data on the city's favelas and irregular loteamentos (allotments).1 Similar slippages occur in two of Rio's largest favela complexes (agglomera- tions of several favelas), such as the Complexo do Alemao (composed of thirteen distinct favelas) and the do Mare (composed of fifteen favelas and housing projects). Both constitute administrapve regions and are considered bairros, but the subunits composing them (the favelas) also figure in the SABREN.

Perhaps more important, no one in the city questions the fact that for practical purposes these so-called bairros are unequivocally favelas, for two reasons. The first has to do with the favelas' legal standing and property status. Rocinha, Mare, and the Complexo do Alemao are among the hun- dreds of favelas that have been declared "special social interest areas," the

legal device that places certain favelas under more flexible urbanistic rules than the formal city, thus creating the legal conditions for further infrastruc- tural upgrades and the concession oflegal property titles.2 The second rea- son why no one questions that these are favelas rather than bairros is the fact that daily life here unfolds under raging drug wars between rival drug gangs (factions) or between drug dealers and the police.3 These conflicts have endured since the late i97os and have become entrenched in the daily rou- tines of Rio de Janeiro's inhabitants, not only in the favelas but also in the pavement, in the form of stray bullets and the sound of constant shoot-outs.

Since December 2008, however, the push toward favela formalization has gained momentum with the beginning of the state government's favela Pacification program. The climax came in November 2010, when Rio de Janeiro's military police stormed the Complexo do Alemao in an unprece- dented war operation involving the army, navy, and the civil police. Armed with tanks, trucks, and helicopters, more than two thousand men took over what had been for more than thirty years the stronghold of the city's oldest criminal faction, the Comando Vermelho. More than a territorial gain, the occupation of the complex was heralded as a victory comparable to D-day in the media.

Yet there was something anticlimactic in the media coverage of the take- over: it lacked images of live conflict. Like the most recent alleged "pacifi- cation" efforts, the press coverage of the occupation of the complex mini- mized violent confrontations.4 The portrayal of the conquest highlighted, instead, the invasion of the drug lords' "castles," or, as the media called them their "mansions." Over the course of the next week, color pictures and mov- ing images of the interior of the mansions uncovered by the forces of law and order Wi!l'.e featured on every network and in newspaper, and then re- distributed online through biogs, social networks, and YouTube.

The "mansions" in question were three-story constructions that were fairly unremarkable in the general favela landscape from the outside, but comfortably equipped inside with flat-screen televisions, low-cast ceilings with expensive lighting schemes, and hot tubs in the bathrooms. The top floors of the houses, with swimming pools (with the golden initials of their owners on the bottom) and elaborate churrasqueiras (barbecue fixtures), were swiftly dubbed penthouses rather than being portrayed as a more luxu- rious version of the typical favela laje (itself a characteristic favela feature best known for its double valence as recreation area and space for a possible future conversion into an additional story).

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Though bizarre, the media field day with the alleged "mansions" of the drug lords is not entirely surprising. It could easily be attributed to decades of systematic decontextualization of the favela as an urban formation, in which the term favela has functioned more as shorthand for "drug-trade territory" than as a social form or mode of dwelling in the city. In short, the reporters saw "mansions" in the tackily decorated three-story brick con- structions because they expected to see wooden shacks with dirt floors and scarce furnishings. That is, the reporters saw the buildings through the lens of what is increasingly recognized in the scholarly literature as ideal (stereo) types associated with the favelas in Rio de Janeiro's public imaginary. In this stereotyped (but resilient) imaginary, favelas are defined by the illegal occupation ofland (most often on hillslopes), the poverty of their residents, and the lack of access to public services. Yet countless studies in the past ten years or so have countered such commonsensical knowledge, demonstrat- ing, beyond any question, that none of these features are exclusive to the city's favelas.5

Still, the pervasiveness of such stereotypes and the stubborn refusal to see permanent homes in the brick-and-mortar constructions is not entirely absurd. Much of the public discourse on the favelas - and it seems there has never been so much public discourse on the favelas, in particular by emerging favela subjects who claim the authority and legitimacy to speak for themselves - emphasizes their material distress and demands for urgent investments, denouncing an alleged absence of the state. But the undeni- able fact is that public investments and spending on favelas have steadily risen since the 1980s, and especially from the 1990s onward, and access to basic services, such as electricity, sewage systems, and water-distribution networks, has expanded considerably.6 While isolated favela-urbanization programs date back to the 1950s and the removal programs of the 1960s and 1970s coexisted with a few urbanization efforts, it was only in the 1980s that infrastructural upgrading a systematic policy. In the 1990s, under the aegis of the Favela-Bairro program, (a.vela urbanization be- came a hegemonic public policy with the aim of incorporating favelas into the formal city.' The 2000s witnessed the continuation of the Favela-Bairro program and new initiatives, such as the federal government's Programa de do Crescimento (Growth Acceleration Program). The pro- gram's favela-urbanization component sedimented favela urbanization with a normative aim. of granting legal land tenure to residents. That is, in the past decade, policy has retained the Favela-Bairro program's basic tenets,

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but now these tenets are applied in the context of increased investments in strategic planning for the city in order to prepare for the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016. In late 2010, the Rio de Janeiro's city hall announced its intention to conclude the full urbanization of all of the city's favelas by 2020, under the auspices of the Morar Carioca Program.8

Despite the endurance of stereotypical representations of the favelas as agglomerations of precarious shacks on hillsides, the fact is that decades of infrastructural upgrading have radically transformed the favela landscape. And that is only part of the story. As I have argued at length elsewhere, fa- vela consolidation is not just the work of state investments.9 The impres- sive changes in the materiality of the favela are also the product of count- less small interventions by residents themselves, in the public and private spaces of their communities and their homes. Perhaps their homes are not as ostentatious as the drug lords' alleged mansions, but they are occasion- ally decorated with elaborate finishes and carefully laid out adornments. All these processes have been unfolding since the mid 1980s; they were expe- dited many times over in the context of President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva's policies of economic growth and income distribution and an overall reduc- tion in inequality levels in Brazil.

Favela housing markets, even before so-called Pacification, had also be- come not only increasingly dynamic but also more regulated, institution- alized, and valued.10 Thus, favela consolidation has also brought about an increasing formalization of property, albeit under the special legislation regulating special social interest areas. Urbanistic interventions have set particular parameters and standards for calculating property values that take into account not only built structures but also the housing-market values of each favela. Transactions ;}l'!U11ediated by the residents' recognizes property ownership in each community. While not fully formal, these markets increasingly connect to their "pavement" counterparts (i.e., in the so-called formal city).

One such connection concerns me in this chapter: at the time this re- search was conducted, in certain areas of the city, particularly in middle- class neighborhoods closely bordering favelas, there was virtually no dif- ference in the market value of properties located in the favela and those on the "pavement." The devaluation of formal property as a function of its proximity to favelas, coupled with the unrelenting valuation of properties in consolidated favelas, produced a particular, and perhaps fleeting, socio- spatial arrangement that I provisionally refer to as a "threshold" effect upon

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real-estate markets. It is a zone of indeterminacy, where the constant sym- bolic rearrangements of the favela-pavement divide inevitably depend on one's perspective.

The idea of a threshold effect reminds us that the favela-pavement boundary in question is neither spatial nor physical but an essentially sym- bolic construction. It offers a privileged perspective for capturing how these areas are inhabited, as well as the intersection of physical and subjective spatialities that make the monetary equivalence of these two allegedly dis- tant social worlds possible. Recognizing this convergence of monetary value does not mean assuming that the historical, social, symbolic, or spa- tial boundaries between the "favela" and the "pavement" have been erased or even blurred; it merely inaugurates a connection (or, depending on one's perspective, a passage) between the "favela" and the "pavement" that would have seemed incongruous only twenty years ago. The emergence of this passage, in and of itself, is part of an ongoing reconfiguration of symbolic, spatial, and social boundaries of the city's favelas that preceded the "Pacifi- cation" program but was also severely altered by it. If I am right, the explo- ration of this threshold effect upon real-estate markets shows how socially productive the favela-pavement boundary is, and how it is experienced and constructed by different subjects.

This chapter is therefore an initial exploration and conceptualization of this (possibly transient) social phenomenon. It aims to explore the analyti- cal possibilities opened by the idea of a threshold effect upon real-estate markets as a means of illuminating the concrete, empirical connections be- tween the "favela" and the "pavement." I begin to unpack some of the chal- lenges involved in qualitatively describing this zone of indeterminacy be- tween the "formal" and "informal," then elaborate the conditions in which this research unfolded, and discuss the conceptual need to differentiate between property bordering favelas in general from property under the threshold effect. The latter, I argue, a more specific socio-spatial configuration than proximity to favelas. I examine the social construction of the threshold effect upon real-estate property through three distinct but complementary perspectives. I describe the trajectory of what can be read for my purposes here as an archetypical site under the favela threshold effect: a building directly facing the favela of Bela Vista, to which former favela residents have been moving in a steady trickle over the past decade. The second perspective I explore is that of a longtime favela resident who moved into the outer border of the threshold, at a moment when its effect

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was quite extended as a function of decades of shoot-outs and steady spill- overs of violent episodes. I look at how real-estate agents talk about, rep- resent, and attempt to sell such threshold real estate. In articulating these three complementary perspectives, I attempt to move the gaze away from the space itself and into the social relations that constitute, imagine, and in- habit it. Finally, I spin a few concluding remarks that draw on field research conducted more recently, with some exploratory remarks on the effects of the "Pacification" process in the city's favelas, and the consequent contrac- tion (but not erasure) of the threshold effect.

CONCEPTUALIZING THE THRESHOLD EFFECT Capturing the extent and implications of the dynamic I have been refer- ring to as a real-estate threshold effect is challenging. In many ways the processes at stake here are too fragmented in space and too subject to local singularities to be understood by the usual type of scholarly work on real- estate markets. While these studies constitute a consolidated field of in- quiry in urban studies, the way the field is structured tends to reproduce the formal-informal dichotomy. The so-called formal market constitutes a central source of information for quantitative studies of internal migration patterns in the cityand oflarge-scale social processes, such as the economic restructuring of the past decades, the emergence of strategic planning as a key feature of urban governance, real-estate speculation, and land-usage policies.11 There is also considerable knowledge accumulated on the internal workings of so-called informal cities, particularly in Latin America: studies of housing strategies and daily tactics that reproduce the favelas, villa mise- rias, colonias proletarias, and so forth, as well as quantitative and qualitative data on the urban crisis, housing deficits, and evaluations of iiltrastructural- upgrading programs. Yet the endeavor to construct a comprehensive picture of large-scale patterns does not capture the subtleties of the social rela- tions engendered by fear of crime and victimization, the impact of the favela upon the visual landscape, and daily conflicts over the use of space. More- qualitative case studies of real-estate values and valuations tend to conceive of real-estate markets as composed of two mutual sectors, the formal and the informal.12 The same is true of business-oriented studies that have al- ready attempted to construct models to systematize and describe the effect of favela vicinity upon property values.13

In this attempt to think through the spatial and subjective interstices of

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the "favela-pavement," or "formal-informal," divide, I draw on one of the most promising directions in urban studies - namely the attempt to theo- rize informality not in opposition to the formal city but as a way of life.14

These studies draw on settings and research objects as distinct processes wherein refugee camps metamorphose into city-camps: the new connec- tions between the illegal, the informal, and the irregular; the new intermedi- aries of the unskilled labor market; and the process of favela formation.ts The common thread in these studies is a shared assumption of urban infor- mality as an "organizing logic, a system of norms that governs the process of urban transformation itself," or as a "series of transactions that connect different economies and spaces to each other." 16

In this sense, conceiving the real-estate market as a social phenomenon makes it possible to venture a hypothesis: once the monetary equivalence between the "favela" and the "pavement" is produced, one can glimpse other registers of value production that shape the ways in which city dwell- ers imagine, use, and represent urban space, rendering legible the very com- plexities of value-producing mechanisms in cities marked by sharp inequali- ties and shaped by long-standing informalities.I' Thus the threshold effect as an analytical construct opens an ethnographic perspective that inquires into the practices and routines that continuously reproduce the spatio-social fig- ures of the "favela" and the "pavement," in space and in the imagination.

For this talk Qf threshold effects to make sense, it is necessary to clar- ify the conceptual need for this term. A threshold effect is not necessarily inscribed in physical space in any visual way, as a border region might be. Proximity to the favela constitutes a necessary condition for the constitu- tion of threshold real-estate markets, but these do not emerge, as a rule, on the outskirts of just any favela. The threshold requires a more particular social and spatial constellation for a connection between markets to form. Ideally, the threshold effect arises in a built environment designed before the drug trade and its association to the fa-y:elas became widespread, and in regions where the social contrast between the "favela" and the so called formal city may be marked but not necessarily sharp. That is, threshold real estate-rather predictably, one might add-tends to form more readily in middle- and lower-middle-class regions. The vicinity of the Complexo do Alemao is one case in point; entire apartment blocks and formerly mod- estly prosperous streets and well-built houses have come to suffer the same dynamics as the favelas surrounding them. Before the November occupa- tion, entire portions of neighborhoods in Ramos, Bonsucesso, and Penha,

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to name a few, had deliveries-from pizza to postal services to home utili- ties-refused because of their location in so-called risk areas. While legally considered "formal," considerable portions of the city have, in practice, be- come neither fully "favela" nor "pavement."

In contrast, in areas where the social gap between the favela and the formal city is overly sharp-that is, in upper-class neighborhoods-the threshold effect does not form. Even though one finds both conditions of possibility of the threshold effect here (that is, valuation in the favela and a decrease in property in the "formal" city), the convergence in property values is not enough to connect the "favela" and the "pavement" through real-estate transactions. An obvious example can be found in the neighbor- hood of Sao Conrado, the archetypical (and by now cliche) illustration of the city's sharp social contrasts. Sao Conrado, which was planned to pro- vide the city's elites with an idyllic neighborhood of gated condominiums, shining high-rise buildings, and plentiful recreation areas with breathtaking views, very swiftly became a visual aid in describing the city's inequities: the glass towers with large balconies against the backdrop of the favela of Ro- cinha spilling over the hill to one side, and the shining beach to the other.

The luxurious, four- or five-bedroom apartments that face Rocinha di- rectly have not become incorporated into the favela markets. Rather, prop- erties in the formal city tend to withdraw from a commodity state, to bor- row Igor Kopytoff' s provocative suggestion: no longer a source of economic value, nor of status, they are momentarily removed from the commodity sphere.is The maintenance fees and property taxes charged in these high- end buildings and condominiums render the formation of the threshold impossible: favela residents might somehow afford to buy these units, but they cannot afford to live in these buildings. Those who can afford the fees, taxes, and extra expenses have little desire to live with a view of a favela, though bulletproofing can provide an affordable solution. Thus, many of these apartments get boarded up or shut down, often accumulating debts with city taxes and maintenance fees.

Finally, a word regarding the ethnographic present of this chapter. I stumbled upon what I came to develop as the idea of this threshold effect on real estate while conducting ethnographic fieldwork in 2004 and 2005, in a favela I refer to here as Bela Vista. This chapter draws on data collected during that time, in which I undertook my doctoral fieldwork, but also on continued visits and observations of this and other favelas and their sur- roundings up until early 2011. Hence, many of the social situations explored

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here unfold in very different contexts. Since April 2010, the favelas of the region have been permanently occupied by the police, under the aegis of the state government's favela Pacification program, the Unidades de Poli- cia Pacificadora (Pacifying Police Units, UPPs). The UPPS spearhead the current public-security program implemented by the Sergio Cabral admin- istration of Rio de Janeiro state under the public-security secretary Jose Mariano Beltrame. In theory, the program draws on the ideal of community policing, but in the UPP version, the community is necessarily a favela and it must be permanently occupied.

In practice, the "Pacification" process works like this: the special police forces initially occupy the favela and undertake special operations of armed confrontation and tactical dismantling of the drug-trade networks, thus clearing the path for their replacement by specially trained and recently graduated military police who set up a station, usually at the hilltop.19 The police occupy the strategic areas of the favela and stand guard permanently. Along with the UPP comes the city government's choquedeordem (shock of order), in which pirate transportation systems, cable TV, and commerce are increasingly subjected to regulation and formalization.

Under the UPP regime, favela residents are still constantly exposed to the presence of men at surveillance spots bearing arms; the UPP police tend to keep watch in the same geographically strategic points. But there is one aspect of the process that transforms every single aspect of daily life, for the better: the end of shoot-outs. So while there is still plenty of criticism of the UPPs, voiced in the same quiet tones that once talked about the drug lords, everyone is mainly relieved about the end of the sound of shots ring- ing through the valley.

With these changes, many of the arguments and descriptions elaborated in the pages that follow no longer apply to these particular sites. But I am confident that they are reasonably accurate for many other regions in the city, in particular the parts of the northern suburbs where the drug trade - and control over the territories of poverty-remain up for grabs and con- stantly motivate armed confrontations between drug dealers and the police. Moreover, while the UPP shares many features of the previous community- policing attempts, the fact is that it remains a consensually approved policy (hence Cabral's easy reelection in 2010) that has only increased in breath and scope, and it has consolidated over time.20

This is an exercise in a historical anthropology of the present, with the potentialities and shortcomings that the effort entails. I must therefore re-

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BELA VISTA:

apartment building

former tobacco factory

favela of Vila Nova

Olympia Avenue

the traditional Catholic school

MAP 8.1 ·The Bela Vista favela.

construct some of the conditions that made the social processes I describe possible. In order to do so, I must contextualize the field in which this ethnography unfolds (see map 8.1).

ON THE THRESHOLD: THE RIVERSIDE BUILDING, GREATER TIJUCA, RIO DE JANEIRO

Bela Vista is one of twenty-nine favelas spread throughout seven formal city neighborhoods in the region of Rio's northern zone that I shall refer to as Greater Tijuca.21 The area is inhabited by 367,005 people, according to the National Census of 2000, of which 13 percent-nearly fifty thousand citi- zens-lived in favelas, roughly twelve thousand of them in Bela Vista.22 De- spite harboring considerable social and economic heterogeneity, the region shares a common history of urbanization, development, and recent socio- economic decline - a trajectory connected to the region's natural landscape. The area is overwhelmed by the Tijuca Massif, an awesome mountain ridge on the slopes of which the region's favelas are now located. Back at the end

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of the nineteenth century, this was one of the most exclusive neighborhoods in the city because of its cool temperatures and awesome green views. The first massive modernizing urbanistic intervention in the city-the Passos remodeling-signaled a turn to the coast, thus creating the conditions for the invention of the marvels of the south zone.23 But Greater Tijuca's views and shade still fared well, rivaling the southern zone in terms of services, infrastructure, and real-estate values for most of the century. The 1970s saw the emergence of the neomodernist urbanistic project that led to the urban development of Barra da Tijuca and the western zone. The juxtaposition of this new urbanistic model (and the ideology of safety) with rising appre- hensions about crime and criminality in the 1980s led to Greater Tijuca's sharp decline in socioeconomic status and property values.

Part of this decline derived from the very geographical features that dic- tated GreaterTijuca's rise in the first place: the sense ofbeing nestled against the forest that cooled the elites before air conditioning in a sweltering city was suddenly recast into a threat in the form of shots and stray bullets from drug-trade-infested hillside favelas. In several areas of Greater Tijuca, the favelas loom above the streets on horseshoe-shaped plains. Where streets run close to the mountain ridge, the rear of high-rise buildings face the fave- las directly, no farther apart than two buildings across a narrow street. While such spatial arrangements are common throughout the city, the south zone included, long-standing violent conflicts between Tijuca's neighboring fa- velas exacerbated the sense of insecurity.

Bela Vista is located at one such juncture. Within its sight- and hence within shooting distance-there are four other medium-sized favelas, split between three different drug factions. Until the establishment of a UPP in the region, these conflicts emerged in the form of nightly shoot-outs that fluctuated in intensity and violence but never fully subsided. As the bullets traveled across the valley, many left imprints on the favela dwellings and also on the formerly elite buildings that face. them directly.

It is thus not surprising that the 1990s and 2000s were times of an elite flight from the region, inaugurating a cycle of abandonment, divestment, and further population flight. According to Rio's city hall, Greater Tijuca began to lose residents in the mid-198os, and the trend extended well into the 1990s. Between 1991 and 1996 the region lost 7.16 percent of its popula- tion. According to the same study, 58 percent of Greater Tijuca's residents named violence as the region's main problem. Among those who consid-

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ered moving out of Greater Tijuca, once again violence was pointed out as the main repelling factor for 48 percent of interviewees.24

All these processes - though largely determined by a combination of geographical and social factors - have become inscribed in the forms and uses of space, and its reappropriations over time. In the late 1990s one found, fully functioning and in the vicinity of Bela Vista, a renowned pri- vate hospital; one of the top traditional, private Catholic schools in Rio and another large private school not so elitist nor traditional but also Catholic; and a large supermarket, owned by a multinational chain, that stood in the former site of a major tobacco factory. In the adjacencies there were also a film-dubbing studio and a large car-retail outlet. Since then, the car dealer- ship and the supermarket have shut down, the studio has limited its activi- ties, and there are constant rumors that the traditional school will move to a fortified space in Barra da Tijuca (in the wake of many of the region's wealthiest residents). The other Catholic school has experienced a con- siderable drop in its enrollment and a diversification of the activities within its grounds, with the charity work of a foundation linked to the school. Con- sequently, the proliferation oflarge, decayed spaces has precipitated further abandonment and unfolded the sense of insecurity associated to the favelas many times over.

Yet all this description of desolation and abandonment seems absurd to anyone standing at the entrance to any of the region's favelas. Ethnographi- cally and experientially, the vicinities of the favelas, by day at least and ex- cept in the case of a period of prolonged conflict or an ongoing police incur- sion, are anything but desolate or cold. Quite the contrary: one could argue that few places in Greater Tijuca are as vital as the entrance to the favelas of Bela Vista and Vila Nova, a space residents refer to as "the foot of the hill."

Though they are as variable as the favelas themselves, each and every community has its own "foot of the hill." Even in flat favelas, the mixture of commerce and local sociability that characterizes the foot of the hill tends to form wherever formal public transportation (the official city bus lines) and the favela' s internal transportation systems (the Kombi and motorcycle taxi) meet. The foot of the hill functions as the favela' s central plaza, market, and space for and of social encounters.

The main traffic corridor in Greater Tijuca is Olympia Avenue, and the passage to the main pedestrian access to the favela is on Santa Rita Street. The entire city block between these two roads has become a highly dynamic

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open-market space, with stalls lining any and every available sidewalk. Right in the middle of this open market, bus station, and sociability node is a large building. I shall refer to it as the Riverside building, which can be read, for my purposes here, as an archetypical threshold space. This value constel- lation becomes even more striking in the light of the fact that the River- side building was initially built to face Santa Rita Street. My pseudonym attempts to maintain something of the visual imagery evoked by the build- ing's actual name, which means, in one of the native Brazilian languages, "singing river." Indeed, back in the late 1960s when it was erected, the build- ing stood on a rather idyllic piece ofland, right by a clean river and also near the forest and the green Greater Tijuca views.

In the 1980s and early 1990s, with the development of the Kombi trans- portation system, the construction of a public school meant to cater to the favela children, and the growth of the favela of Vila Nova just next door, the market value of property in the building dropped considerably.25 As Gabriela, a schoolteacher I interviewed just months after her move to the Riverside building, recalls:

They say it was a mess back then, right? I witnessed it because I had a friend who lived here .... People would just come and go, there was no doorman. No, I guess there was a doorman but there were all these rumors that people from Vila Nova used to come and break into the apartments. They say! We don't know whether it's true. But yes, there were all these people coming and going with no control. That's why when the shoot-outs got more intense, the value of apartments here dropped so much. That's when people from the morro started to move here.

In the mid-199os, with nightly shoot-outs already established as part of the region's routine, tenants - a majority of whom were still working and middle-class people, "pavement" born bred-organized a major re- modeling with the intent of reversing the building's accesses: the rear be- came the front, and the former front turned into a service entrance. The makeover included fortification of the building's walls and the construction of a cabin with dark windows wherein a security guard could survey the images from several security cameras installed in the building's interior and accesses. "Like Big Brother!" as Gabriela put it.

I interviewed Gabriela just a few months after she moved to the River- side building, in 2005. There were still unpacked boxes in the corners, but

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her tone and demeanor already expressed a marked distance from - and a wistful nostalgia for-the morrao (big hill), as she now referred to Bela Vista.26 Her narrative about the move already crystallized a sense of a "re- turn to her origins" rather than an accomplishment:

I keep a good relationship with the morrao, with the people there, not the least because I taught there. But in the beginning, when we moved there, relations were not so tight and people didn't exactly welcome us, right? I guess they noticed that we came from a different background, were more educated, different. ... And when you live in a place like a favela, that causes an estrangement. [When we moved to Bela Vista from the neighboring favela of Ribeira] my sister was in high school and I was already going to the university, and fourteen years ago it was very rare for favelados [ favela dwellers] to go to uni- versity. Particularly a public one.27

The usage of the term morrao indexes how Gabriela constructed the move as the entry into a different world, unrelated to the favela. In crossing over to the "pavement" side of the threshold, she no longer hesitated to ask people over to her house because she did not feel the constraint of asking them to enter a favela. Living in the pavement is a coming home of sorts for a Rio de Janeiro State University graduate and public school history teacher.

Gabriela's home can be placed on the most expensive side of an apart- ment building in which market values vary considerably and accordingly provides an interesting glimpse into how property values are produced on the threshold.28 There are more than one hundred apartments in the River- side building, with two-bedroom units occupying the fa11ades that face both Santa Rita Street and Olympia Avenue; there are fewer three-bedroom units, which have a side view only of the favela. The apartments facing Santa Rita Street are composed of a small living room, two bedrooms, a comfort- able kitchen, and a view of the public school and Bela Vista. In 2004-5 the units were going for the same price as houses on the other side of the street, in Bela Vista, about 351000 reais. Now the homes on the Bela Vista side of the street are not houses in the sense of detached or single-occupancy homes. They rise up to six stories, often with distinct units occupying sepa- rate floors. In each case, space is scarce, and both the Riverside apartments and the houses in Bela Vista could be estimated at roughly sixty square meters. An apartment on the other side of the Riverside building, also a two bedroom with a similar layout but not facing the favela, was sold for

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45,000 reais at roughly the same time. The math is simple: avoiding the line of fire costs 101000 reais. It is worth noting that most of the transactions I observed over the course of the past years went swiftly. That is, none of these properties were on the market for very long. Quite the contrary- in all cases buyers were extremely aware of the competition, and ensuring a quick transaction was a central concern.

These dynamics arguably incorporated the Riverside building into the fa- vela housing market. This happened to such an extent that for many residents considering moving out of Bela Vista, the Riverside building has ceased to be a "pavement" option. They consider it an integral part of Bela Vista and therefore not distant enough to make the investment worthwhile. That is the case of the young manager of a Blockbuster video store, whose mother's residential trajectory is my next concern. And I have frequently heard simi- lar opinions in the last few years. In 20091 under the federal government's Programa de Acelera!JaO do Crescimento urbanization works, several fami- lies received financial compensation after being displaced from one of the favela's poorest regions. Most took the compensation to buy property in other parts of the favela; others made a down payment on houses in other parts of the city or in the vicinity of Bela Vista. All contemplated, no mat- ter how briefly, the possibility of finding housing in the Riverside building.

SACRIFICE AND WINNING The increasing valuation and formalization of favela properties has engen- dered in longtime favela residents a sense of upward social mobility. Many of those who now approach their retiring age marvel at the material im- provements of their surroundings, at the increased offer of all sorts of ser- vices in their communities. They recall the old days when stucco shacks and muddy alleys dominated the favela landscape and laughingly tell of the hassles they suffered every day in attemptip.g to make it downhill to work without being covered in mud, and they constantly remind their children that they have a comparatively easy life. Tania's residential trajectory tells one among many similar stories.

Tania left Barroso, a small town in the state of Minas Gerais, for Rio de Janeiro in 1974. She followed the lead of her elder sister, Telma, who had ar- rived in Rio two years earlier to work (and live) in a casa de familia, that is, as a live-in domestic worker. The address-Olympia Avenue, number 737

222 • Mariana Cavalcanti

spelled afiluence. Back then, property values in the Greater Tijuca region rivaled those of Ipanema; but while the latter's residents still had to resort to Copacabana for entertainment, leisure, and many services, Tijuca stood as a consumption and service hub, drawing the prosperous from all neigh- borhoods of the northern zone and the metropolitan region. So when Tania got off the bus from Barroso, her destination was Tijuca, where her sister had already secured her a job, also in a casa de famllia, just a few blocks away from Telma's workplace.

For two years Tania hardly left her employer's home. She stayed there on holidays and weekends to minimize expenses, but her mother's health back in Barroso deteriorated quickly, necessitating that Tania bring her mother to Rio where the sisters could care for her. In short: they needed a home of their own. They found a wooden shack for rent in a lower part of the favela of Bela Vista, one of the Greater Tijuca's largest. It cost more than they could readily afford, but living farther uphill was prohibitive given their mother's failing health. In order to have more free time than a regular live-in maid would, Tania quit her job after securing another one as a cleaner in the large, private, elite hospital just a couple of hundred meters away from Telma's workplace on Olympia Avenue, a less than ten-minute walk from home.

Like many employers oflive-in domestics in the 1960s and 1970s, Telma's bosses helped her to buy the little wooden shack by giving her a substantial portion of the shack's value. Added to the savings that Telma and Tania had accumulated since coming to Rio, they covered the full amount asked and left a little to be used in "improvements" to the rather precarious structure. The shack, according to Tania, was "real ugly," with a dirt floor, and required quite a bit of refurbishing and finishing, issues to which they tended over the course of the next decade (see figure 8.1).

In the meantime, their mother died, and Tania met her husband-to-be one rare afternoon taken off for leisure. They met in the Saens Pena Square, which was Tijuca's cultural, consumption, and entertainment core in the 1970s. By the time she married, in 19771 Tania had already quit her job at the hospital and gone back to working as a domestic in yet another upper- middle-class home, also walking distance from Bela Vista. But now she no longer slept on the job, unless her employers paid her overtime (which she gladly took, and saved) to service the many dinner parties they hosted. In her spare time she made a little extra cash by ironing clothes, usually in the late evenings, after her husband had retired to bed. Her husband, Jose, also

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FIG. 8.1 ·The Riverside building, viewed from Tania's former favela house on Santa Rita Street. The favela constructions are in the favela of Vila Nova.

Photo by Mariana Cavalcanti, 2010.

worked two jobs for all of his life. His routine was to leave for work at 4 a.m. to begin his first shift as a messenger at the Banco do Brasil, then move on to a second shift as a cleaner in different firms.

By saving the meager leftovers from these four jobs, they managed to buy another shack a few alley bends upward from the original house, where Telma now lived on her own. Their newly acquired house was considerably better than the first shack they had bought (which they had transformed into a modest masonry home). They continuously invested in and improved on the new home for the next twenty-three years. In the meantime their son was born in 1980. There was never any question that Renato would be an only child. As Tania put it: "Since I was a _very, very poor person, to the point that we had nothing to eat back in the rofa [hinterlands], I only had one child so I could give him the best I could."

In the late 1990s, with Renato past his teen years, Tania and Jose bought what they then perceived as their definitive home. This house was even more carefully finished over the years; Tania and Jose took their time re- modeling it one room at a time, spreading out payments over the years and carefully planning each new step of the process. Located a short flight of steps off the pavement of Santa Rita Street, the house occupied the first and

224 • Mariana Cavalcanti

second floors of a typical six-story favela building composed of four differ- ently laid-out housing units. Tania and Jose owned two of these: halfway up the steps leading to the main house there was a separate entrance to a room equipped with its own bathroom. This separate apartment belonged to Re- nato. Tania and Jose had figured that this arrangement would keep Renato dose to them for years to come.

But Renato saw things differently. Years of studying in private schools, of socializing in middle-class circles, had only fueled his lifelong wish to move out of the favela. He dreamed of an apartment where his Tijucana (from Ti- juca, meaning from the "pavement") girlfriend or colleagues at Blockbuster would not think twice about visiting for fear of the nightly shoot-outs and violent drug dealers. It is hardly surprising that Renato was the first person to call Tania's attention to the fact that they could afford to buy an apart- ment in the "street." He reasoned that-with his parents' impending retire- ments from two of their jobs and his own savings since his promotion to manager at the Blockbuster branch-they could well buy a two-bedroom apartment in the streets bordering Bela Vista. He simply did the math, knowing they could reasonably expect to collect 301000 reais on the sale of the house - it was, after all, located in the most valuable spot of the favela. His own separate room went for 81000 reais, paid for up front, with less than one week on the market. They needed to scrape together about 401000 reais. With both parents collecting the benefits of formal employment and his own savings added, the whole enterprise became feasible.

I met Tania during her last days living in the favela. She had just become the happy owner of an apartment located on Olympia Ave, number 735. The building was next door to the one Telma had first worked in when she ven- tured out to Rio de Janeiro so many years before. Wit}i its spacious closets and custom-made kitchen and bathrooms, the place very much resembled the homes that Tania had deaned for most of her life.

For Tania it is all a matter of collecting just dues; hard work and sacrifice have made her a winner- not in the sense of opposing winners to losers as Americans would have it, but in the sense of claiming a just reward for de- cades of lutas (struggles):

I married, got pregnant, and had my son. My mom stayed at home with him, until she got so sick she died, so what did I do? I left my job at the hospital; I asked them to fire me so I would get my compensation, took it, and saved it. Then I went to work in casas de familia because I could

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bring him along. But it was a big sacrifice because I brought him along with me, got things started, and then at about quarter of noon I had to stop whatever I was doing so I could take him to school. ... Then I went back, finished things off at work, then came home to take care of my own house, to take care of him, cook for the next day .... You know, it was a big struggle, but I have faith in God and all the faith I have in God, and I think I am winning. I have not won yet, but I am managing to win. My husband also works hard; he holds two jobs, he battles. For you to have an idea, he leaves the house every day at around quarter of four in the morning and he only comes back at 10 p.m.

For Tania and so many other favela residents, winning, or collecting just rewards, is a direct function of hard work, and specifically hard work in a context of general hardship; hence the constant references to battling and struggling. All these terms constitute and express the work ethic of the tra- balhadores pobres (poor workers) analyzed by Alba Zaluar in her classic study, and are reinforced in systematic efforts to differentiate themselves from the bandidos (banclits).29 Tania's transition from being a trabalhadora, as well as a batalhadora (battler) and lutadora (fighter), to a retired woman who works by her own choice, and from a resident of a favela community to the owner of an apartment indiscernible from the ones she cleaned for most of her working life, materializes the rewards of a life of "hard work." It also highlights how this work ethic hinges on a notion of subjective value grounded in sacrifice: as Georg Simmel noted long ago, "sacrifice not only increases the value of the desired object but actually brings it about." 30

The threshold effect allowed Tania to objectify this subjective sphere of value - in that all the sacrifice and postponed rewards of a lifetime were rendered visible, tangible, and materialized in the form of landed prop- erty in the formal city. It is striking that the different social worlds that Tania inhabited over the course of nearly thirty years-from live-in servant to stucco shack dweller to high-end favela ·house to legal owner of formal property in the city- occurred in less than one square kilometer.

THE VOID A careful reading of real-estate classifieds reveals a series of ways of address- ing the favela-proximity concern, particularly in neighborhoods where fave- las are nearly omnipresent:

226 • Mariana Cavalcanti

Um quarto aberto para sala. Sala 3 ambientes.Varandao vista para o mar. Pr6ximo ao Fashion Mall. Otimo condominio (S. Conrado Green). Local seguro. Proximo a praia e longe do tune!. Tratar com o porteiro do Ed.Torrigiani. (One bedroom converted into the living room. 3 living rooms. Large balcony with ocean view. Near the Fashion Mall. Excellent condo- minium [ S. Conrado Green]. Safe place. Near the beach and away from the tunnel. Inquiries to the doorman of the Torrigiani Building.)

TIJUCA R$1191999. Pr6ximo S. F. Xavier/ UBRJ ! Ja pensou morar co- bertura? Predio com infra clube!! panoramico s/comunidade c/ churrasqueira. (TIJUCA $1191999. Near S. F. Xavier/uBRJ [Rio de Janeiro State University J ! Have you considered living in a penthouse? Building with leisure club infrastructure! Panoramic roof, no community, bar- becue area.)

TIJUCA R$235.ooo Superlar Imobiliana (Largo 2aFeira) s/morro va- randao salao 3 dorms suite copa-coz c/armarios dependencias duas garagens 6tima Tel.2208-0625 RBF.3016.

(TIJUCA R$235.ooo Superlar [Lgo 2a feira] Real Estate no hill, large balcony, living room, 3 bedrooms en suite, kitchen and dining room furnished with cupboards, two parking spots, excellent location. Tel.2208-0625 RBF.3016.) 31

In order to vouch for the advantage of a "panoramic roof," it is necessary to attest that there is no "community" in view. Or, as in the first case, the prop- erty is so fabulous because it is close to the beach and far from the tunnel (which cuts across the very hill the Rocinha spills over). The repetition of similar expressions week after week naturalizes them as objective compo- nents in the production of real-estate value. The very standardization of the abbreviation s/morro for sem morro (without hill) (more common than its variants longe morro [away from hill] or livre morro [hill free]) indexes the centrality of this feature, particularly in neighborhoods such as Greater Ti- juca, Santa Teresa, Sao Conrado, and Rio Comprido, where the favelas are a marked presence in an otherwise middle-class landscape.

When I initially designed the field-research methods for this project, one of my goals was to inquire into how agents might present real estate in middle-class regions bordering favelas to potential clients. I suspected that

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I would find a complex repertoire of evasion on the subject of the favela, or that the very danger might be deconstructed so as to avoid the theme of risk areas or shoot-outs. I thus developed a strategy, loosely inspired by the housing audits conducted by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development in the 1960s and 1970s in order to verify whether the civil rights legislation, in particular the Fair Housing Act of 1968, was being duly observed. In the audits, researchers were paired up according to similar levels of income and family makeup, and they expressed the same prefer- ences to real-estate brokers. The only difference was that the auditing pair was composed of one white member and one member of a minority. These studies found that white potential buyers were systematically offered more and better housing options than members of the minorities in question. The ultimate goal of the audits was the production of quantitative data to track patterns of racial or ethnic discrimination. My appropriation of this method was limited to provoking a potential sale situation in order to assess how such propert}r was portrayed and objectified in practice. In short, I repli- cated the encounter between the agent and a fake potential buyer in order to assess how agents might attempt to present threshold real estate to pos- sible customers.32

My original intention was to confront data collected in the audit-inspired visits with both formal and informal interviews with agents in their own offices. Surprisingly enough, I found no significant difference in the form or content of these narratives. Indeed, in the view of agents, real estate border- ing favelas is a long-recognized problem. They do not avoid talking about it; they avoid dealing with it altogether.

When encumbered with the task of setting up apartment viewings with realtors, my assistant, Marcella Carvalho, wrote, with some exasperation:

The agent asked me four times whether I knew where the apartment was. First she asked if I knew where the building was. I said yes, Santa Rita Street, but I did not know the number. She asked if I knew where Santa Rita Street was. She asked me if I knew it was near Rua Branca. I said yes. Finally she asked if I knew it was right by Bela Vista. Once again, I said yes. Only then she said she would call the owner to find out whether the place was still on sale. She later called back to let me know the place had been sold.

That was not the first, or the last, time that real-estate agents attempted to avoid showing houses in threshold areas. Often realtors denied having

228 • Mariana Cavalcanti

placed the ad or discouraged the potential client from the outset by saying that the property in question is near this or that favela. When asked about real estate in the vicinity of favelas in informal interview settings, each and every agent replied with some version of "time is money": what is the point in wasting time, gas, and the effort to take customers to unsellable prop- erties? Yet another practice crystallized in advertisements: say it up front.

V. Isabel. R$55.ooo (Sta. Isabel), vista comunidade, sala, 2dorms, co- zinha, banheiro condominio barato, desocupado, born apartamento.

(Vila Isabel, R$55.ooo (Sta. Isabel), view to community, living room, two bedrooms, bath, cheap building fees, unoccupied, good apart- ment. )33

When agents actually agree to show threshold property to potential buyers, they simply admit to the fact that threshold properties are second-rate real estate that suffers a structural and unavoidable problem: there is absolutely no room for bargaining on the grounds of favela proximity, and the buyer is responsible for the choice of even considering the option. In this sense, the agents treat the property as if it were not even worth spinning.

This second-rate real estate is a hard social fact for agents, and they define it as being produced by any combination of three factors: views of favelas, proximity to favelas, and locations near pedestrian routes to favelas. View matters because these are "risk areas," and the risk is that a stray bul- let from the conflicts between police and rival drug gangs might end up in one's living room or bedroom. The line of fire and the reach of police offi- cers' and traffickers' weaponry are quite extensive, and this produces the threshold effect upon entire blocks and streets. In relation to proximity, the issue is the spillover effect of violent crime in the favela from hijackings and holdups to fake checkpoints and body dumpings, as well as the subjection of threshold dwellers to forced "mourning" periods when drug bosses are arrested or killed. Likewise, even in cases where the favela is neither visible nor that close, the fact of being in the path to the favela also produces lost value, as is made evident in the assessment of city property taxes.34

One particular apartment visit is quite illustrative of agents' resignation in the face of these threshold spaces. The apartment in question was an eighty-square-meter, two-bedroom apartment in a gated condominium composed of two high-rise buildings, equipped with playgrounds, a swim- ming pool, a gym, and plenty of communal spaces. The agent identified himself on the phone as a resident of nearby Branca Street, and since he

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was free at home, he agreed to see us at once. As we met him at one of the side entries to the condominium, he warned us that the apartment had a "slit" of favela view. He hardly mentioned the apartment's many advantages: well-kept hardwood floors, custom-made kitchen, wardrobes and shelves in the smaller bedroom, all tastefully designed. A thick glass provided an addi- tional barrier between the favela and the apartment, both on the balcony off the living room and on the bedroom window through which the slit was apparent. I asked whether the glass was bulletproof He promptly called the owner, who explained that it was soundproof glass, because of the noise of the bailesfunk (funk parties) in the favela. The agent said that the problem with the apartment was its "low liquidity"; he in no way pushed it, or even encouraged me to close the deal. As we were walking out, already on the corpmon grounds, he showed us a rather well-kept playground, with brand- new toys. There was no sign of recent usage, which is not surprising since it was located exactly in the no man's land that separated Bela Vista from Ri- beira - that is, in one of the neighboring areas most likely to be a target of stray bullets, flying from both sides of the conflict that raged between rival drug gangs on the two hills. The agent seemed to be at a loss for words. He opened his arms, as if to take in the breadth of the line of fire. With an ironic shrug, he finally suggested that we "might as well" take a ride up the elevator to see the swimming pool on the roof.

Entering the pool area was an impressive experience: the glare of the sun reflected many times over in the favela windows. The houses on the steep hill rose like a wall of haphazardly connected blocks and bricks. I was overwhelmed by the precise layout of alleys and bends on the streets, the detailed view of people's lajes and glimpses of the intimacy of individual homes through opened doors, all just across a two-lane street. Once again the agent opened his arms: "I would never bathe in this pool!"

It seems that no one does. Like the playground below, the overall impres- sion that these spaces convey is typical of unsuccessful planning- there is no senses of placeness. It was simply an utterly deserted swimming pool, with no chair or bench to sit, no sign of water on the borders or in the sur- rounding area. Just a sparkling swimming pool on a hot concrete roof, with- out the slightest resemblance to a place of leisure.

As we parted with the agent, he gently steered us to the bus station farther away from Bela Vista. I asked him how bad the shoot-outs were. He then inexplicably.lied for the first time: "No, I can barely hear them."

Yet another agent enacted a "graph" to describe real estate along Olym-

230 • Mariana Cavalcanti

pia Avenue, one of Greater Tijuca' s main traffic arteries. He began by point- ing to his shoulder, then dropped to his waist in what he called "the void" - the cluster of favelas around Bela Vista - then recovered some, but not fully- after all, he explained, those who lived beyond the "void" had to pass through it on a daily basis.

What the experiment with real-estate agents makes plainly visible is that entire portions of the city have all but withdrawn from the logic and cir- cuits of the formal real-estate market. Homemade "for sale" signs seem to be more effective in reaching their appropriate audience, and the profits and resources at stake are scarce, making hiring intermediaries futile. Thus, while powerful in relativizing the dichotomy between the "formal" and "in- formal" sectors, threshold real estate simultaneously bears witness to the centrality of the favela-pavement dichotomy as a symbolic construction in the daily life of Rio de Janeiro residents. It is, however, a symbolic con- struction that allows for different spatial referents: regions that are consid- ered too close to the favela to remain as pavement for longtime Tijucanos or real-estate brokers can instead be perceived as firmly anchored in the "pavement" for a longtime favela resident like Tania. The production of this zone of indeterminacy that I call the threshold effect shows that formal and informal real-estate markets are not mutually exclusive spheres. While one man's void is also one woman's opportunity for being a "winner" in life, the fact is that a qualitative reading of the logic of this real-estate market re- veals how the favela-pavement dichotomy powerfully organizes the inhab- ited and imagined worlds of city residents.

CLOSING REMARKS FROM POST-SHOOT-OUT GREATER TIJUCA One Tuesday afternoon in September 20101 a group of about fifty realtors, real-estate agents, and community and neighborhood leaders gathered at the traditional, elite tennis club in Tijuca for the "First Security and Real- Estate Forum," promoted by the Greater Tijuca section of the Regional Council of Real Estate Agents of Rio de Janeiro. At a glance, one might understandably infer that the purpose of the event was to discuss rising crime rates, alternative forms of policing, crime-mapping technologies, and tips for ensuring secure housing, or to provide an overview of the latest re- leases in surveillance gadgets for the home. But none of that was the case.

According to the chairman's introductory speech, the event's main goal was to provide an opportunity for agents to better understand the UPPs, so

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as to help them incorporate the forces' advantages to their sales pitches. He showed colorful graphs of the range of automatic rifles around the favelas' borders, emphasizing entire streets and city blocks that had ceased to con- tain risk areas. The UPPs, he said, reflected the impact of public security on the real-estate market, "promoting both the realtor's personal safety and the increase in real-estate values," consequently making what had seemed a "dif- ficult" increase in property prices now "easy." Approving nods everywhere. The highlight of the evening was a speech delivered by Captain Amaral, the commander of the first and largest UPP in the region.

The affair resembled a thanksgiving ritual, performed to express the overwhelming collective gratitude for the blessing recently bestowed on the Tijuca community in the guise of the Pacification program. From the open- ing statement acknowledging "the most important presence in the event" - that of God- to the collective prayer before the concluding coffee break, the event all but named the UPP a miracle.

This is not surprising: greater Tijuca was the city region that experienced the quickest real-estate valuation in 2010 in Rio, and this was in a context of massive increases across the city. According to the Sindicato de Habi- tai;ao (Union Housing), properties registered an increase of 51 percent in their market values and a 27 percent increase in rental agreements.35 The buildings in the area surrounding Bela Vista have experienced even higher spikes, in some cases more than 100 percent. The threshold effect is tempo- rarily suspended.

This threshold effect may well have been a brief moment in favela con- solidation, one that will not repeat itself and is not subject to generalization. If so, I can only marvel as to having witnessed the emergence and demise of a social phenomenon so decisive to the imagined and inhabited worlds of those who shared it. But there is another possibility in the making: with the increasing formalization of favela property and the steady increase not only in property values but also in the fixed costs of living that go with for- malization, perhaps a different type of threshold effect-from the pave- ment to the favela- may form. While it is too early to speculate on whatever contours such a context might assume, an ethnography of housing markets remains a vibrant source for thinking through the many transformations Rio de Janeiro is undergoing and will continue to endure in the light of the speculation, investments, and creative destruction that the Olympic Games of 2016 are bound to leave as their legacy.

232 • Mariana Cavalcanti

NOTES This chapter draws on fieldwork conducted in 2004-5 as part of my dissertation research, funded by the CAPES Foundation within the Ministry of Education, and by the Foundation for Urban and Regional Studies. The chapter also presents the initial results of research conducted in 2009-101 which was funded by the Con- selho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Cientffico e Tecnol6gico (National Council for Scientific and Technological Research) and by the Carlos Chagas de Amparo a Pesquisa no Rio de Janeiro (Carlos Chagas Foundation for Support of Research in Rio de Janeiro).

This chapter has benefited from the comments of Brodie Fischer; Bryan McCann; my colleagues at the Nucleo de Estudos em Cultura e Economia, in particular Federico Neiburg, Benoit de L'Estoile, and Fernando Rabossi; and my friends at the ANPOCS Cities Working Group, particularly Cristina Patriota. I am extremely grateful to all these people and collectives. I also thank the generous re- viewers at Duke University Press.

Names of people and places have been changed in order to protect the ano- nymity of my informants. I have translated their interview excerpts and the real- estate adds.

i. These data are available at http://portalgeo.rio.rj.gov.br/portalgeo/index.asp. According to the urbanist Luciana Correa do Lago, "two correlating criteria define a popular settlement as a 'loteamento,' independently of its legal situation: the [ini- tial] purchase of the plot and hence the existence of a market, and the presence of an economic agent (the 'loteador') who is responsible for the enterprise." She notes, however, a convergence in the settlement of new favelas and the production ofloteamentos in the periphery. See Luciana Correa do Lago, "Favela-loteamento: Re-conceituando os termos da ilegalidade e da urbana," paper pre- sented at the io Encontro Nacional da ANPUR, Belo Horiwnte, Brazil, May 2003, accessed May 13, 2006, http://www.observatoriodasmetropoles.ufrj.br/ download / anpur2003_lago.pdf.

2. Declaring low-income communities as special social interest areas is an instru- - __ __ment created by the city's Organic Law of 1990 and regulated by the Master Plan

of 1992. Special social interest areas allow the state to set special parameters for urbanization, zoning, and construction in the areas. This makes the full formaliza- tion of favelas, housing projects, and irregular loteamentos possible, even though their incorporation into the formal city remains differentiated because of the more flexible urbaninistic rules that apply to the areas.

3. These are not the only sources of armed conflict in the city. Particularly in the more-remote favelas of the western zone, but also in the north of the city, the past decade has witnessed the emergence of paramilitary armed groups composed of retired police officers and firefighters that first expel the drug trade from the favela in question and then reproduce their territorial routines and armed surveillance of boundaries while making a profit out of selling "protection" to residents and store- owners, overtaxing the sale of gas vessels, and providing pirated cable television.

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