UC Berkeley

Place-based effects on health have been well-documented; however, narrow constructions of place, neighborhood and individual- as well as community-level identity hinder our ability to more fully understand the ways in which place affects health outcomes for diverse populations. Informal settlements in Rio de Janeiro (colloquially referred to as favelas) have been demarcated by local and federal government agencies with fixed boundaries for administrative purposes, including identifying areas for infrastructure improvements, renewal or removal. However, local and federal administrative boundaries often do not match each other, and the collective lived experience of residents of these favela communities tend not to be clearly bounded by those official designations.

This dissertation sets out to address the following questions:

1) How do administrative boundaries of informal settlements overlap, or not, with the terms and definitions used to describe these places by the people who live there?

2) How do residents of informal settlements in Rio de Janeiro operate to either reinforce or push back against these officially designated boundaries?

3) Do narrow constructions of place conceal demographic disparities in access to municipal infrastructure?

In my dissertation I first examine how informal settlements in Rio de Janeiro are places constructed by top-down institutional forces, such as administrative processes employed by the State through the national census and local government efforts to push marginalized residents into these areas, as well as removing these parts of the city entirely. Further, I examine how residents contest and reshape the boundaries of their communities, both in pushing back and challenging the official categorizations of the State, as well as embarking on their own boundary-setting practices by mapping and documenting their communities for themselves with the goal of improving community health and well-being. Through these processes of contested place-making, residents help to identify community needs and provide resources for themselves that the State has been unwilling or unable to provide. Running throughout this work is an understanding that place and identity are socially constructed and socially contested, both dynamically responding to pressure exerted by the State from the top-down and community members from the bottom-up