Mundo Real
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Rocinha
The first urban slum community Mundo Real began working in is Rocinha, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Rocinha is widely considered to be one of Rio de Janeiro’s largest, most densely populated and urbanized slums. The community has a population estimated at anywhere between 100 and 200 thousand inhabitants, who live crammed into a steep and rugged landscape of only (0.80) square miles. Within this highly dense community the majority of residents subsist in conditions of abject or near abject poverty, residing in small shanties stacked one on top of another, sometimes as many as 8 stories high. Out of 126 official administrative regions within the municipality of Rio de Janeiro, Rocinha ranked 120th or, 6th worst on the city’s Human Development Index (HDI) in 2000. That same year an official government census (IBGE 2000) estimated that there are a minimum of 6,000 residents of Rocinha who suffer from at least one health related disability. More recently, in 2008 a government census measuring the HDI of 510 of Rio de Janeiro´s approximately 800 slums found that Rocinha ranked 316th from the top, significantly below the average HDI of the 510 slums considered in the census. This is despite the fact that…
Resources
Article in the St. John’s Humanitarian Review: Quilombos, Cortiços, Favelas: Moving from Historical Oppression to Social Transformation by André Sales Batista, Marcos Burgos, and Ricarte Echevarría Challenge of Slums The Origins of The Favelas (Portuguese). 2009 Community Census, from the Program for Accelerated Growth (Federal Government)
Favela Resistance. Fernandes, Bautes and Burgos. Revista Libertas
