In addition to the crime within the community, there is also a problem within the law enforcement divisions, with corruption and violence being inflicted by the police themselves. This discourages the community to report incidents of violence, as they have little fear of or respect for the police. Therefore, the Ministry of Justice created the National Public Security Force to handle major emergencies and crises instead of the local police force.

Brazilian Social Issues

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Close to a third of São Paulo’s 11 million people — in a metropolitan region of almost 20 million — live in slum-like conditions. There are some 1,600 favelas (private or public lands that began as squatter settlements), 1,100 “irregular” land subdivisions (developed without legally recognized land titles), and 1,900 cortiços (tenement houses, usually overcrowded and in precarious state of repair).

Government response has progressed light years from the brutal “eradication” — bulldozing of favelas — that began with Brazil’s military dictatorship of the 1960s and continued for years as millions of rural families poured into São Paulo seeking industrial jobs. Today policy makers recognize that upgrading is a far wiser course — socially, economically and politically.

Citiscope.  “Improving Slums: Stories from Sao Paulo.”  Sustainable Cities.  World Bank, June 29, 2011.

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Public relations goes only so far when it comes to someone else’s imprisonment in poverty.

In pro-am blogging — I’m qualified in myriad ways but unattached — it takes time to come up to speed on the background of any specific combination of geopolitical location and issue.  Along the way, so I’ve learned to ask with a quick but reasonable glance (even going so far as identifying and listing local politicians, which data is now lost somewhere on my computer) at Kibera Slum (Nairobi): what keeps accidental or incidental development suspended in place?  Why is land use planning and local to regional population channeling and transfer so difficult for governments to address?

Neglect is passive, which makes it the easiest option in governance.  Do nothing and old forts or itinerant camps (and refugee camps)  become built, dense-packed spaces.

The active alternative: public-private state-supervised, plan-based development, which might start with land use analysis and planning.  The same produces cost from long (long) before groundbreaking, as a host of professionals go to town on these challenges.

Of course, they (we / I) have their hands out from the very first moment of the appearance of a glimmer of an idea.

Still, with professional intellectual capital at hand, every element in planning, from physical feasibility — start with land identification and acquisition — to economic viability (development is not about merely moving bedrooms from one place to another) gets attention.

Even with so much energy applied, getting money to work in support of public cause benefiting individual interest proves tricky, so much so, for example, that for Kibera Slum, residents removed to subsidized apartment housing (developed to provide the same with improved basic services) resold their option at profit, returning themselves to their former dwellings but with a little more cash, freedom and personal financial ability proving more valuable than an impersonal quiet gray space served by municipal basic electricity and water.

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If I return to this subject — at the moment, I’m reading about the near and far histories of totalitarianism in eastern Europe — I may become a believer in the seeding of economic nodes (first) connected by physical channels — road, rail, air — capable of sustaining basic labor and professional development in productive corridors.  “Industrial site location” is the familiar complement to “land use planning” — I do laugh at my tyro tenderfoot self when I write these basic prescriptions as if I were discovering them (by golly, I think he’s got it!) — but every revenue-generating sector, from agriculture to travel and tourism, has indeed its ecological potential within the economic and political life of a place, and it is always better to look over how things work and get more things to work in a given space than to leave to God and luck alone so much human need, potential, and striving.

Restated: divine favor, fate, and luck may have their place, but they are not to excuse willful neglect.

Another Aspect: You May Not Know What You’ve Got ‘Til It’s Gone

As money draws population — why people move to cities — pulling and pushing the same back into rural economies may also help with the distribution of economic advantage sufficient to sustain improved qualities of living in a surrounding region.  Air, road, and rail transfer points may do that; defense bases, factories, hospitals, clean industrial campuses (for business services and research and development) work as well provided surrounding security.

For Kibera – if only I were as if a god 🙂 — I had thought one way of dispersing a million souls at a time into more economically enjoyable and spacious lives would be to build “New Towns” around Nairobi — planned developments connected by rail and sustaining naturally established social relationships every step of the way.

The idea may not be as kooky as it sounds: Wikipedia hosts a “List of planned cities” that covers in-state developments from Argentina to Yemen (Brazil is on it).However, any “Small Towns” (offhand definition: space for populations to 50,000) concept (anywhere) may want for land that is, doubtless, not held in public reserve — and there we are back with the “nobody cares” headache.

People do care, of course, but the ways ahead are to be littered with contracts — i.e., the money that talks — the research analysis, planning, architecture, and construction expertise that has ability to exert control across the development of space designed to serve general population needs with long-term ecological and economic viability.

Aside

Colonial and settlement period “land grants”, however distributed, once served to channel and control the invasive populating of continental space.

Although in contemporary dense zones, the challenge appears opposite and defined by the necessity of somehow better distributing population, it is not: the issue is still about developing space, with rural development becoming a crucial contributor to state economic and political equilibrium, the reversed emphasis encouraging migration-altering generational “next opportunity” for better, more complete, and less troubled living — or living with challenges of another order, basic spatial qualities having been addressed and the course of related crime, education, health, and other issues becoming themselves altered along the way.

Additional Reference

Aldrich, Lorna, Lorin Kusmin.  “Rural Economic Development: What Makes Rural Communities Grow?”  September 1997.  Ever blogging-on-the-fly, I cite this as sample rather than instruction, quintessentially American rather than global.  Still, it may suggest that the “hidden hand of the marketplace” is not capitalism alone but, frankly, communitarian-socialist research and planning hitched to capitalist drives.  Governments plant airports, defense bases, roads or “transportation corridors” designed to serve myriad interests in relation to a specific locale, thereby driving revenue through an agricultural, commercial, health, or industrial market or production nexus from which it may be dispersed into a surrounding economy.

Brazil Travel – Social Issues

Cities Alliance – Cities Without Slums

Embassy of Brazil in London – Social Issues

Higgins, Abby.  “Why residents of Kibera slum are rejecting new housing plans.”  Entry 4 of a 5-part series. One.  April 18, 2013.

Landesa Rural Development Institute: “Most of the poorest people on the planet share three traits: they live in rural areas, rely on agricultural labor to survive, and don’t own the land they till. Landlessness remains one of the best predictors of extreme poverty around the world.”

Wikipedia.  List of Planned Cities.

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