How have Housing Conditions in Rio de Janeiro improved in the last 25 years?
Rio de Janeiro is the 2nd largest city of Brazil and South America; it is surrounded by great mountain ranges, forests, and beautiful beaches. 1/3 of Rio de Janeiro’s population live in favelas which until now were a collection of ‘wooden shacks’. Rocinha is the largest favela in Brazil and is located within the South Zone of Rio de Janeiro and is within one kilometre from the beach. Since 1980, wooden favelas have been upgraded to brick favelas. They are now schools in the favela community, and normal households in favelas have at least 25 channels on satellite. In 1980, they didn’t have basic services such as electricity and clean. But now people in favelas they take for granted basic services like electricity which is used to power the television and satellite. People move rubbish out of the favelas by hand as they all help each other. A family that lives in the favelas consist of a wife, husband, and two children. Already since 1980, family sizes have gotten smaller from the usual seven children per household to two children. The wife works as a cleaner for wealthy people in Brazil as well as a part-time fortune teller reading people’s fortunes. The husband works part-time at a fruit and vegetable market selling fruit and vegetables. The family are much organised and on Saturday they spend all excess money after paying for school and food on improvements for their house. The children have spent their whole lives in favelas and have never experienced poor drought-like conditions in the country sides where their parents were from. The children also earn some money as they go down to the shopping centre at 7am and look after peoples’ cars for a few hours and earn £3 or £4. They spend some of the money on a pinball machine and the rest goes towards the family’s savings.