Slum
Labour, work

Research in the latest years based on ethnographic studies, conducted since 2008 about slums, published initially in 2017, has found out the primary importance of labour as the main cause of emergence, rural-urban migration, consolidation and growth of informal settlements. It also showed that work has also a crucial role in the self-construction of houses, alleys and overall informal planning of slums, as well as constituting a central aspect by residents living in slums when their communities suffer upgrading schemes or when they are resettled to formal housing.

For example, it was recently proved that in a small favela in the northeast of Brazil (Favela Sururu de Capote), the migration of dismissed sugar cane factory workers to the city of Maceió (who initiated the self-construction of the favela), has been driven by the necessity to find a job in the city. The same observation was noticed on the new migrants who contribute to the consolidation and growth of the slum. Also, the choice of the terrain for the construction of the favela (the margins of a lagoon) followed the rationale that it could offer conditions to provide them means of work. Circa 80% of residents living in that community live from the fishery of a mussel which divides the community through gender and age. Alleys and houses were planned to facilitate the working activities, that provided subsistence and livelihood to the community. When resettled, the main reason of changes of formal housing units was due to the lack of possibilities to perform their work in the new houses designed according to formal architecture principles, or even by the distances they had to travel to work in the slum where they originally lived, which was in turn faced by residents by self-constructing spaces to shelter the work originally performed in the slum, in the formal housing units. Similar observations were made in other slums. Residents also reported that their work constitutes their dignity, citizenship, and self-esteem in the underprivileged settings in which they live. The reflection of this recent research was possible due to participatory observations and the fact that the author of the research has lived in a slum to verify the socioeconomic practices which were prone to shape, plan and govern space in slums.
keywords:existence, language:response_language[Portuguese]