Integrating shantytown to 'downtown'

Peace had to be imposed, but citizenship will be built on solid democratic foundations. After being pacified by the Military Police force, 10 territories in Rio de Janeiro previously under the command of illegal armed forces, are the scene of a social development and citizenship project involving 170 thousand residents and described as the result of three entities joining forces to cooperate with each other: government, private enterprise and civil society - in an innovative model of public administration.

This is the description of the UPP Social, the next step after installing the Pacifying Police Units , UPPs . The project was introduced on August 9th to an audience of 500 people, among them government authorities, UPP police officers, community leaders, NGOs as well as artists, journalists and local residents.

The event was hosted by actress Zezé Motta, Superintendent of Racial Integration and by the Subsecretary for Social Actions in the Territory, Sociologist Silvia Ramos (photo above).

An integrated city

Ricardo Henriques, State Secretary of Social Work and Human Rights, who conceived the UPP Social project, along with a multi-disciplinary team, explained that the project’s goal is to build a peaceful future. “We want an integrated city, one that breaks with the rationale of a city split in two,” he said, alluding to the title of the book Cidade Partida by journalist Zuenir Ventura, on the social borders that separate people who live in shantytowns “morros” from those who live ‘downtown’ in the “asfalto”, the rest of the city that is reached by services.

Henriques stressed the importance of moving from the world of ideas to the world of concrete action. He listed a few problems to be faced in implementing the current project, both by the government and society, problems he defined as fragmentation, superposition, discontinuities, lack of evaluation and the isolation of different sectors. “Social Services don’t talk to Education, Education does not talk to Sports and so on. The actions are not conceived to be cooperative and cross cutting. It is important to do away with adjectives and instill actions with substance,” he said.

Henriques (photo) stressed that among the many challenges posed, there is the need to determine what services are needed in each UPP location to better tailor the programs offered. According to the secretary, 90% of the economic activities taking place in the shantytowns are informal, meaning they are undocumented, and thus it is necessary to talk to local businessmen, to the public authorities and to community associations to determine the particular needs and traits of each community.

 “It is important to determine local offer and demand to make sure that actions are coordinated in a rational fashion, so that they combine initiatives from civil society, from the private sector, and from the government. The goal is to have an integrated city, to build a public space that is not strictly governmental, under the responsibility of the three spheres of government, but that it is also under the responsibility of local residents, of NGOs and of the private sector,” said Henriques. He also championed participative administration to be carried out through partnerships with the communities (shantytowns) and the adoption of monitoring and evaluation tools to make sure actions have the necessary flexibility.

The Secretary defined the four main guidelines: citizenship, democratic legality, a focus on youth and territorial and symbolic community integration. To foster citizenship, (citizenship in the sense of creating an active awareness of civil rights) communities should be given a number of different channels through which they can be heard and participate, making it possible to “take the Republic to the territories”.

Democratic legality will be accomplished, in his view, by bringing practices into the realm of normality, making local economic activity legal so that it enters the formal economy, by licensing businesses, by opening bank offices, by issuing property papers for plots or land and normalizing events such as the bailes funk, Brazilian funk parties.

As to youth violence, it must be addressed with positive role models and an integration that will come once the borders instated by the drug trade between shantytowns and the rest of the city come undone; which means restoring the right to freely come and go to all citizens of Rio.

 “Decades of [territorial] control through guns produced a monopoly over the right to come and go in the favelas shantytowns. We want the symbolic and territorial integration of these communities. Our goal is to have the city integrated by 2016, an iconic date. This is not wild utopia, but a pragmatic and empirical one,” said Henriques. In his view now is a historic time. “The police have become like brothers and sisters to movements of social struggle, such as has never happened before. They are in it all together in name of a new project of the city,” said Henriques.

The Public Security Secretary, José Mariano Beltrame stated today that society is offering a hand to the UPP project. According to Beltrame, the more present the State is, the less the police are necessary. “The impelling factor behind peace and security are social actions,” said Beltrame.
Eduardo Eugênio Gouvêa Vieira, president of the Federation of Industries of the State of Rio de Janeiro, Firjan, stressed the fact that businessmen are responsible for communities, by contributing with projects involving education, sports, senior citizens and libraries, to name a few.

The Rio de Janeiro state government has recently announced that five companies active in Rio will invest in a fund to be used in public works on infrastructure at the Pacifying Policy Units, UPPs. The money will be used in the construction and renovation of buildings that will be used by police officers of the UPPs. The fund currently has 24 million Reals.

The president of the Rio de Janeiro Commercial Association, José Luiz Alqueres, offered a few suggestions to boost social development in shantytown areas, such as creating tax shelters and cutting down on bureaucracy for local businesses. He said that evaluations of progress in integrating the shantytown to the rest of the city should be carried out by independent civil society organizations and not by the government, and said local associations in shantytowns should connect to ‘downtown’ neighborhood associations

Those responsible failed

Guti Fraga, who founded the Nós do Morro theater group said it was a historic event, and questioned the fact it was not held sooner. Percília da Silva Pereira (photo) President of the Association of Residents of the Babilônia Morro (community) had an answer: “It has not happened before because those responsible failed to live up to their responsibility!” And she was given a standing ovation.

Dona Percília stated that the most urgent task at hand is to educate and prepare youths for the job market, “otherwise you just take banditry from one place and put it somewhere else.” She believes that the project, even if put into practice, “will not solve the problem, but it will improve it in 50%,” she said.

The Dean of the State University of Rio de Janeiro, UERJ, Ricardo Vieralves said that the university can offer its labs for job training and its premises for shows. “I want to say that the university is committed. It has to be close to these [shantytown] communities, and they should come into the university so that we can get along with each other, in our spaces, with our students, our professors and our equipment”. According to Vieralves, the quota system has given UERJ the “multicolor” face of Brazil.

Translated by LHM

Read Further:

In Portuguese

UPP Social: unidades de gestão vão coordenar ações para o desenvolvimento e a cidadania