Author | Arantxa HerranzAlthough it is hard to measure or monitor the exact population living in shanty towns, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) calculates that approximately 11.4 million people (6% of the country’s population) live in one of the 6,329 favelas or slums, distributed across Brazil.The state of São Paulo is the richest in Brazil. The city is the economic and financial centre, but also the city in Latin America with the highest number of people living in shanty towns.NASA, using photographs taken with it satellites, illustrated the growth of this large city. The most notable change that can be observed from NASA’s photographs is the spread of the suburbs, where growth has been fastest. Over the last decade, the inhabitants living in shanty towns in São Paulo reached 1.7 million compared with the 800,000 living in the city centre during the same period.
The growth of favelas

The marginalisation problem
Favelas are shanty towns in Brazil. Many people in these places have basic-salary jobs and, therefore, low incomes. These jobs tend to have irregular shifts and various work locations. This makes it even more difficult to collect accurate data to help with town-planning.The problem with these slums is that their urban housing conditions tend to be so hard that they are declared “intolerable” by the United Nations itself. Insecurity, lack of basic services (particularly water and sewage), inadequate and unsafe construction structures, overcrowding, location in dangerous areas and high concentrations of poverty, as well as social and economic deprivation, broken families, unemployment, economic, physical and social exclusion are just some of the characteristics of these shanty towns.


