Becoming Favela: Forced Resettlement and Reverse Transitions of Urban Space in Brazil

This article examines the forced resettlement of favela residents to a new neighborhood and the life they tried to make for themselves in the new state‐built social housing. They experienced a sense of betrayal by their new neighbors and by the state; much of what they had been promised was not delivered, and in the aftermath of resettlement they were left by the state project to their own devices. In the new neighborhood, the “territorial stigma” (Wacquant 2008) of the favela lingered on, placing the newcomers at the bottom of the local social hierarchy in the impoverished periphery of the city. While battling this stigma, they were also pursuing their dreams for a better future by investing their scarce resources into the improvement of their new but poorly built homes. Their house‐building practices resemble the urban development processes of “peripheral urbanization” (Caldeira 2016), as the slow and uneven self‐built constructions encroach on the ordered state‐built housing. The gradual transition of the new urban space followed a similar development pattern as the favela where they used to live, but in a reverse order, producing an inverse transition of urban space. I treat the negligence of the state, the housing practices of the residents, and the discursive practices of labeling the social housing a favela—by the long‐term neighbors and eventually the residents themselves—as co‐constituting an urban form, lived experience, and socio‐spatial process in which the housing project becomes favela. This analysis provides new insights into the anthropological literature on urban development and illicit house‐building in peripheral neighborhoods in the Global South and the socio‐spatial dynamics of forced resettlement.