During my recent trip through Fortaleza, Recife, Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, and Porto Alegre, I was struck by the permanence of the informal settlements I saw. In Rio, favelas — sprawling, self-built communities — have existed for generations. Some, like Morro da Providência, trace roots to the late 19th century.
Today Brazil’s national statistics institute estimates that nearly 16 million people live in favelas and similar urban communities across the country — about 8 % of the national population of 240 million people. These are not transient summer encampments; they are enduring, multi-generational neighbourhoods with their own economies and social fabrics.
By contrast, when unhoused people in Canada and the United States build encampments under bridges or in parks, the state almost always responds with eviction and clearance. In Toronto, clearing an encampment can cost roughly $33,000 per person in public resources — money spent to dismantle, not to house. The default expectation is that these settlements are temporary hazards, to be removed rather than acknowledged as part of a chronic housing problem.
What explains this divergence?
Legal and political order vs. informal recognition
The first major distinction is legal recognition. Favelas, despite their informal origins, have in many cases come to be recognized as settlements with de facto permanence — even if land tenure is insecure or incomplete. In Rio de Janeiro, successive waves of internal migration and state neglect meant that people remained in place and built elaborate, sometimes multi-storey housing and infrastructure over decades. Many favelas are now acknowledged in municipal planning and census data, with efforts to upgrade infrastructure and connect them to the broader city rather than eliminate them. OpenEdition Journals
Encampments in North American cities are largely unofficial and episodic. They arise as expressions of a lack of affordable housing, insufficient shelter capacity, and intersecting crises (mental health, addiction, poverty). But because they are not seen as “places to live” — only as problems to be managed — law enforcement and city officials typically prioritize clearance over support. Parks bylaws in Toronto, for example, prohibit camping, and has been used to justify sweeps rather than long-term solutions. Yahoo News
Community formation and economic activity
In Brazil, many favelas emerged from economic displacement tied to industrialization and urban growth. Residents created housing not because they preferred slums, but because there were no alternatives.
Over time these areas developed their own informal economies, social networks, cultural institutions, and everyday governance mechanisms. In many cases, large proportions of residents are employed and embedded in the broader economic life of the city — a dynamic that gives favelas a kind of functional legitimacy even when access to formal services is uneven. Eine Einstellung zur Arbeit
Encampments in Canada are not structured that way. They are often atomized, lacking formal or even informal community governance, and without a sustained economic ecosystem supporting them. That makes it easier for officials and the public to treat them as non-places — temporary rather than permanent — even though the underlying housing precarity is chronic.
Policy and state response: Eradication vs. integration
Historically, Brazilian authorities repeatedly tried to eradicate favelas, leading to mass removals with little success. Between the 1960s and 1970s, tens of thousands of shacks were destroyed and inhabitants displaced. Over time, the state shifted toward upgrading and integration approaches — most famously the Favela-Bairro and later Morar Carioca programs — which sought to improve infrastructure and connect favelas to formal city systems.
By contrast, many Canadian municipal responses remain stuck in a cycle of eviction, shelter referral, and subsequent re-encampment. Toronto’s homelessness crisis has been described by advocates as “completely out of control,” with encampments growing because of insufficient housing supply and supportive services. The perception — explicitly or implicitly — is that encampments are aberrations to be removed, rather than settlements to be stabilized, serviced, and uplifted.
A hybrid model between encampments and housing?
Yes — and learning from favelas helps illuminate it.
What favelas and other informal settlements demonstrate is that people self-settle as a response to chronic housing shortages and economic exclusion. The physical structures may be informal, but the desire for permanence, safety, and community is not. Urban planners in Latin America have increasingly recognized that the best long-term strategy is not demolition but upgrading, where basic services (water, sanitation, electricity), land tenure security, and community involvement are prioritized while retaining the social fabric.
This suggests a potential hybrid model in Canada:
- Legal recognition of long-term encampment sites as temporary housing neighbourhoods, not nuisances.
- Incremental upgrading, where simple infrastructure is provided (sanitation, drainage, lighting), while pathways to permanent affordable housing are established.
- Community governance mechanisms, empowering residents to participate in planning rather than being passive recipients of services.
- Supportive social services embedded in place (healthcare, addiction support, employment training), not off-site referrals.
This approach avoids the false choice between “clear the camp” and “just give everyone a condo.” It accepts that stability and dignity come not from expulsion but from integration within the urban economy and housing system.
Toward a more inclusive housing policy
Canada already has some elements of this hybrid model in limited forms, such as:
- supportive housing projects that combine apartments with wrap-around services, advocated by groups calling for thousands of new units annually. Progress Toronto
- tiny home villages and non-traditional shelter models piloted during COVID-19 — though their reception has been mixed and often thwarted by municipal regulations. America Magazine
What is missing is the political and policy imagination to recognize that stability need not begin with traditional housing stock alone, and that settlements can be part of a pathway to housing rather than obstacles to be cleared.
Lessons from favelas
Favelas endure not because they are ideal, but because they became de facto homes in the face of systemic exclusion and chronic housing shortages. They evolved into communities with economic and social life, tolerated and eventually integrated into the cities around them — even as inequalities remain stark. Encampments in Canada are usually treated as temporary disruptions to be removed, obscuring the fact that they are symptoms of a deeper housing crisis. The Brazilian experience suggests that durable solutions require acknowledging permanence, investing in infrastructure and rights, and co-creating solutions with residents.
In contrast, if Canada is serious about addressing homelessness, it must stop acting as though encampments are aberrations and start acting as though housing and stability are human rights, not hazards. Only then can we imagine policies that are neither demolition nor displacement — but transformation.
Note: I received very helpful comments on this blog (draft) from Ricardo Tranjan . Please see this book.