A wall to protect the environment or to separate the rich from the poor?

The Brazilian journalist Zuenir Ventura once called Rio de Janeiro a shattered city. This is the name of one of his non-fiction books — Cidade Partida, in portuguese. According to what he writes, there are two cities: the visible city, where the upper and middle class live; and the invisible city, where the lower class stays, the favelas. Ventura says: "in those land where the frontiers are always fragile, the opposites

cohabit: joy and weeping, misery and pleasure, violence and solidarity, faith and crime, drug-dealing and honest lives, ephemeral glory and speechless resistance, the fear, cruelty and terror". He also writes: "In the end of the 19th century, there was one favela in Rio. Now, there are more than five hundred". This book was written on 1994. The city is reaching a thousand favelas nowadays. The news is the government is bulding walls around some of them. For ecological purposes.

The government calls them "eco-limits". In some cases, just a side of the favela will have a wall. Also, the access to them will not be blocked.

Alleging it would contain the expansion of the communities and protect the native forests over them, 11km of three meters wide walls will be built around 13 favelas. It’ll cost R$40 millions, and 550 families will be reallocated. It provoked divided opinions. Some agree with the governor of Rio de Janeiro, Sérgio Cabral, who said: "It’s a wall of inclusion, not segregation. It means the end of the State’s omission". Veja, the biggest Brazilian news magazine, praised it: "the government of Rio has shown courage to fight without demagogy the problem of favelas". On the other hand, some believe these walls shall not include and also won’t be relevant for the protection of the environment. Even the Portuguese writer, Nobel Prize in Literature, José Saramago, has opined on it. In his blog, he wrote:

"The idea, now, is to round the favelas with a concrete wall of three meters height. We had the walls of Berlim, we have the walls of Palestina, now Rio’s. However, organized crime is everywhere, the verticals and horizontals cumplicities penetrate in the mecanisms of the State and in the society in general. Corruption looks invincible. What to do?"

Even if Saramago doesn’t give us any real argument against the project, he delimitates its possibilities: building walls will not beat crime, drugs-dealing, corruption or poorness. This kind of problems emerge from the very structure of the society, he says. Also, he expresses a prejudice that easily comes to mind when we think about walls closing people inside. We think about Berlim and Palestina, as he said, and we can remember the ghettos too. So, we must analyze, keeping the past in perspective, how much these walls really separate people and what is their real capacity of protecting the native forest — which is the only factor that can legitimate this project, as we understood by reading Saramago.

These are the 13 favelas included in the project: Parque da Pedra Branca, Chacará do Céu, Pavão-Pavãozinho, Ladeira dos Tabajaras, Chapéu Mangueira, Rocinha, Babilônia, Cantagalo, Morro dos Cabritos, Vidigal, Parque da Cidade, Benjamin Constant and Dona Marta (one of the places Michael Jackson filmed for the video clip They don’t really care about us). They had a minimum of 12.000 square meters (Benjamin Constant) to 852,000 square meters (Rocinha). This last one, Rocinha, has a population of 100,818 habitants and 38,029 landed properties, according to a research made by the government. It’s a small city, with banks, day nursery for children, three schools, close to two high/middle class quarters: São Conrado and Gávea. From the window of a tenth floor apartment in Gávea, you shall see, at one side, the Christ — huge, made of rock — and, at the other, Rocinha, an immense group of houses rising on the mountains, rounded by a million trees of perfect dark green.

The research above was made by the state of Rio and divulged in July/09. In 2000, IBGE — the Brazilian federal institute for statistics — counted 56 thousand people in Rocinha. Of the people living there, according to IBGE, 22% is under poverty line. The percentage of analphabetism in the famous Ipanema is 6.5% — in Pavão-Pavãozinho, it’s 28,8% and in Cantagalo 23,7%. If we go on, we shall see there is already a social distance between those two cities — the walls won’t create the division, but they can be a symbol of it. Let me tell you a story. I heard it in the documentary Sou Feia, mas Tô na Moda (something as I’m ugly, but I’m in Fashion), about the Brazilian funk music. A singer was in a taxi coming back home, which was in a favela. When they were about to enter the community, the taxi driver said he wouldn’t enter. He was afraid of the drug-dealers and the thiefs. "But that was the place I live", said the singer for the film, "Where everyone I love lives". The taxi driver did not go forward and accepted receiving no money for the trip until that point.

That taxi driver was relieved for not going in there. So, what’s the need of a concrete wall to segregate people one from another? Anyone should be concerned even without it.

However, there’re some problems with the main argument for the building of walls. Two of those 13 favelas — Parque da Cidade and Benjamin Constant — didn’t grow from 99 to 08. Dona Marta has reduced its range in 0.78%. Others have grown from 0,33% (Vidigal) to 4,76% (Pavão-Pavãozinho), all this information is according to a municipal agency (IPP, of the city of Rio de Janeiro). Still as reported by the IPP, 69,7% of areas above 100 meters of altitude, on mounts with forests around, are occupied by high/middle class people. Favelas reaches 30% of these areas. "This measure is more pyrotechnical and segregationist than environmental", says the ambientalist Henrique Cortez, interviewed by Latismo. Cortez is the coordinator of Ecodebate, a site of ecological discussions.

"The expansion of favelas occurs too in the south zone [where the project is working], a place occupied by high/middle class population, but principally in the west zone, occupied by the poor and lower middle class population. Nevertheless, the walls are being built in the south zone. Why? The only possible explanation isn’t environmental, but segregationist."

Cortez admits that the expansion of the favelas over areas that must be preserved needs to be controlled. But "in a consistent and effective way, which isn’t the case of the walls". In his opinion, with this measure the administration assumes its own inneficacy in fiscalizing and containing the expansion, which would be its duties. "The problem will be solved only with a whole of measures focused on housing to the poor, increasing the number of job vacancies, guarantying income security, fiscalizing to contain expansion, and recuperation of degraded areas". Still as stated by him, "the walls evade the central issue, which is the lack of houses to the lower class people, who don’t have any other option to live in — except the favelas".

On May, Brazil was criticized by an ONU expert. Alvaro Tirado Mejiam called the walls a "geographic discrimination".Also on May, Cabral and representants of Rocinha made an agreement: in some points, there won’t be eco-limits, but eco-trails. At these points, the wall will be exchanged by ecological paths, parks and low walls. The company responsible by the building is studying the possibility of applying this measure in other favelas too. So, if we come back to Saramago’s speech now, we may say these walls are not really like those from Berlim or Palestina. But we also know there is already some kind of segregation. And we are well informed the walls themselves can’t solve the problem of expansion. I’m still in the same point the portuguese writer leave us: "what to do?". What do you think?

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