Inside Rio’s favelas, the city's neglected neighborhoods

If you go to a Google map of Rio de Janeiro and put it into 3D mode,

you can see what the city looks like as it

was designed by urban planners.

But you will also notice parts of the city that don’t look like the rest.

See the difference?

The people who live in these parts of the city,

with the clean lines and the well thought-out design,

are called “people of the asphalt.”

The people who live in these parts of the city are called “people of the hill.”

Even though the people of the asphalt and the people of the hill live closely intertwined

throughout the city, they live vastly different lives.

These informal communities that look like houses stacked on top of each other,

sprouting out of the jungle,

are called Favelas, home to both vicious drug gangs as well as some

of the most peaceful, creative, and resourceful people in Rio.

I want to show you want they looks like on the inside.

A favela is a community that was built without any oversight from a public authority--no

zoning, no building codes, no public services.

These places just grew out of the hills over time thanks to two main factors:

First was slavery.

Brazil imported 11 times more slaves than the United States and Rio alone was home to

more slaves than the entire American south.

Slavery ended in 1888, and free slaves, still denied many rights in society, built informal communities

on their own.