Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
Field Note
“February 1, 2003. A long-held hope came true today:
thanks to a Brazilian intermediary I was allowed to enter
and spend a day in two of Rio de Janeiro's hillslope
fave-
las
, an eight-hour walk through one into the other. Here
live millions of the city's poor, in areas often ruled by drug
lords and their gangs, with minimal or no public services,
amid squalor and stench, in discomfort and danger. And
yet life in the older
favelas
has become more comfort-
able as shacks are replaced by more permanent structures,
electricity is sometimes available, water supply, however
haphazard, is improved, and an informal economy brings
goods and services to the residents. I stood in the doorway
of a resident's single-room dwelling for this overview of
an urban landscape in transition: satellite-television disks
symbolize the change going on here. The often blue cis-
terns catch rainwater; walls are made of rough brick and
roofs of corrugated iron or asbestos sheeting. No roads or
automobile access, so people walk to the nearest road at the bottom of the hill. Locals told me of their hope that they will
some day have legal rights to the space they occupy. During his campaign for president of Brazil, former president Lula de
Silva suggested that long-term inhabitants should be awarded title, and in 2003 his government approved the notion. It will
be complicated: as the photo shows, people live quite literally on top of one another, and mapping the chaos will not be
simple (but will be made possible with geographic information systems). This would allow the government to tax residents,
but it would also allow residents to obtain loans based on the value of their
favela
properties, and bring millions of Brazil-
ians into the formal economy. The hardships I saw on this excursion were often dreadful, but you could sense the hope for
and anticipation of a better future. In 2007, Lula da Silva's government pledged $3.6 billion to bring water, sewage, roads, and
improved housing to the 20 percent of the city of Rio de Janeiro who live in the favelas.”
Figure 9.25
Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
© H. J. de Blij.
laid out prominent urban centers such as Kinshasa (The
Congo), Nairobi (Kenya), and Harare (Zimbabwe) in
the interior, and Dakar (Senegal), Abidjan (Ivory Coast),
Luanda (Angola), Maputo (Mozambique), and other ports
along the coast. Africa even has cities that are neither tra-
ditional nor colonial. The centers of South Africa's major
cities ( Johannesburg, Cape Town, and Durban) remain
essentially Western, with elements of European as well as
American models and a veneer of globalization including
high-rise CBDs and sprawling upper-income suburbs.
As a result of this diversity, it is diffi cult to formulate a
model African city. Studies of African cities indicate that the
central city often consists of not one but three CBDs (Fig.
9.26): a remnant of the colonial CBD, an informal and some-
times periodic market zone, and a transitional business cen-
ter where commerce is conducted from curbside, stalls, or
storefronts. Vertical development occurs mainly in the for-
mer colonial CBD; the traditional business center is usually
Figure 9.26
Model of the Subsaharan African City.
One model of the
African city includes a colonial CBD, traditional CBD, and mar-
ket zone.
© E. H. Fouberg, A. B. Murphy, H. J. de Blij, and John Wiley &
Sons, Inc.
