1
Heliópolis, city of the sun
(History, occupation and claims of the property)
Every year, since the end of the 1990s, the residents of Heliópolis make the Walk for Peace. Along four kilometers inside the favela, they remember the death of a 16-year-old girl, savagely murdered by her ex-boyfriend in the spring of 1999, at her school’s entrance during dismissal.
For many residents, rather than perpetuate the memory of the girl from a religious point of view, the event is an act of citizenship, of secular humanism, that manages to integrate the population around issues that are pertinent to everyone in the favela, whether political or community related.
According to the Union of Nuclei, Associations and Societies of Residents of Heliópolis and São João Clímaco (UNAS), politically close to the PT, which represents much of the residents, the walk is a great opportunity to lead a type of public demonstration of joint action and political articulation of the residents of Heliópolis. {3}
Considered one of the ten biggest favelas in Brazil, Heliópolis has 41,118 residents and 12,105 homes, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) 2010 census. Those numbers, however, do not match with the data of the Association of Residents, which estimates more than 120 thousand residents and 18 thousand homes in the favela distributed by area.
Located in the District of Sacomã, a neighborhood in the greater Ipiranga region, in the south of São Paulo, Heliópolis was developed along the Estrada das Lágrimas, one of the main avenues that pass through its perimeter area.
The occupation of the area known today as Heliópolis began in the 1970s, but its name originated in the beginning of the last century. In 1923, the Countess Álvares Penteado, then owner of the Old Mill site, after dividing some of the land and requesting their regularization called that area Vila Heliópolis. Modest brick homes were built there as part of a rental residential complex. At the time, all that area was part of an industrial pole where Industrias Reunidas Matarazzo S.A. and Ceramica Sacoman were being built.{4}
In 1942, the Industrials’ Retirement and Pensions Institute bought the area with the intention of building houses for its members. When in 1966 a federal decree unified several entities linked to the National Institute of Social Pensions, previously INPS, all the land went to be administered by the Institute of Financial Management of Pensions and Social Welfare (IAPAS) seeking to build an important medical complex to meet the growing demand of the southern region of São Paulo.
In 1969, the IAPAS had already built the Heliópolis Hospital and the Center for Medical Assistance (PAM), allowing the construction workers who had worked on the construction of the hospital to live in the same homes built temporarily on the land next to the site.
At the beginning of the 1970's, new families joined them. The first wood shacks or basic housing of Heliópolis only began to be built by the Municipal Prefecture of São Paulo three years later, between 1971 and 1972, during the administration of mayor José Carlos Figueiredo, who was seeking to relocate the 200 families who had been displaced from illegal occupations in central areas of the city, such as Vila Prudente and Vergueiro. The temporary shelters to where they were transferred in the area of close proximity to the commercial center of Sacomã were supposed to be "temporary", but the residents supported by social workers from the municipality remained in their homes and were promised to later move into brick homes in the same area.
Some historians have taken notice in the role played by social workers in the training of residents, {5} indicating that what these professionals actually did was to impose schedules to use bathrooms or wash clothes, and even controlled the agenda for parties or encourage the discipline of residents. Without a doubt, the help of the social workers drew certain proto-order of Stalinist discipline, as a phase of a first organizational stage that would have counted with the aid and the growing influence of young leaders emerging among the population, such as the legendary and iconic João Miranda, who later would play a highly relevant role in set up of the structure of organic and political complexity that was the UNAS, still in force today. {6}
According to a study conducted in 1992 by the Center for Popular Documentation of Heliópolis (CDPH), in 1972 70% of the area's first residents settled there after having lived in another neighborhood or city paying rent. Much of this population was made up of migrants who came from the northeast of Brazil, who had been brought there by intermediaries. In that year, only a few were born in Heliópolis. But gradually new residents arrived and integrate themselves to the place, building shacks near the first housing units.
Despite the emergence and explosive growth of Heliópolis, the first favelas of São Paulo had appeared thirty years earlier, in the 1940s, mainly in the neighborhoods of Mooca, Vila Prudente and Lapa. At the end of the 1950s, the city had around 140 favelas, however, the process of favelization gained power beginning in the 1970s driven also by a dynamic informal real estate market with years of operation and which was securely established. During that period there were already 540 favelas scattered throughout the city. {7}
At the beginning of the occupation, some of the informal real estate agents - called grileiros or facilitators-, used to cheat people falsifying property deeds and acting violently to ensure domain over lands in dispute. They controlled almost the entire area, dividing and commercializing lots without any control.
In Heliópolis, many of these grileiros were former residents of the neighborhood who auto-proclaimed themselves owners of the lands, demarcating and selling lots for the newcomers. Organized, they threatened residents who didn't pay or occupied the land spontaneously.
Grileira activity escalated in the area in 1977. Residents were divided between those who believed that the grileiros were true owners of the land and those who put into question this idea, but were threatened in the event that they offered resistance. The climate was of permanent violence, there were murders in the middle of closed disputes between invaders and grileiros. The actions of the grileiros in the early years was facilitated even more when migrants looked for houses and land on an individual basis.
It is likely that the excessive and violent attitude of some grileiros has gone down in history and created the myth that persists until today about them, but there is no doubt that they also acted as transforming real estate agents who encouraged the growth of a huge occupied area, when generating business transactions which in turn stimulated and invigorated household economies through the permanent auto-construction.
In the meantime, the true owner of the land, the IAPAS, began to seek in the judicial system a solution to the disordered occupation of the area, filing a series of requests for reintegration of ownership against grileiros and occupants. It was in this context of crisis that the first associations of residents were formed with the support of external entities, which according to Malaquías, was composed by "priests and seminarians of the Progressive Catholic Church, and lawyers from the Center of Studies and Social Activities of the PUC (CEATS) and the COR - Center Oscar Romero of Human Rights"{8}. With this momentum, the organized movements passed not only to claim ownership of the land, but services of basic infrastructure such as water, sewerage and electricity, which ended up transformed into symbols of fight.
Despite these achievements, the occupation of Heliópolis did not occurred collectively or at once, but gradually and more individually, following a certain hybrid pattern of supply and increased demand. In other words, the increasing demand and limited supply fit into a growing need for working-age migrants, and therefore, likely to "pay for their right". The large number of options for occupation that took place, are a sample of how the household economic system ended up becoming independent of any ideology that could co-opt it, although the resident would buy lots from grileiros, a sort of real estate speculator. Whatever the origin of the resident who, either by public instance or local association, would arrive after a relative already settled in the area provided him with a place to live, would take an empty peripheral area, or would buy or rent a room already built, the resident found an economic system of interactions that ignored formal definitions, to create and follow their own rules.
But independently from the type of occupation by which a family was established in Heliópolis, all of them were irregular by not being within the framework and the legal rules established for the growth and development of the city. An occupation occurs in a disorderly manner, and in general is done without planning, as it is the case of emblematic neighborhoods that once were disordered and unplanned occupations, then slums and finally neighborhoods (such as San Martín de Porres in Lima): new residents arrive and settle where there is space, no matter if that space is a small forest of Floresta Atlantica or a communal soccer field. The locality is growing in inexorable form with the construction of wooden shacks and then brick homes; with the emergence of passages, corridors and dead-end roads, "no asphalt, no sewer, no plan other than the one provided by the grileiros"{9}. That was what happened throughout the history of Heliópolis.
The soccer fields that existed in Heliópolis, for example, were built because of the absence of these spaces in surrounding neighborhoods, by owners of clubs in the area who took those buildings with the approval of the municipality. While occupation is happening, the boundaries between formal and informal stress and public spaces become gradually occupied by the settlers from the 1980’s. The last soccer field to disappear was the Copa Rio, in 1998.
The issue of proprietary regularization of the land is, from the beginning, a superlative guideline in the political and social movement of the residents of Heliópolis; during the decade of 1970, they would begin to meet under the name of Committee of Residents, in their fight for the legalization and urbanization of the locality. In 1981, the Central of Residents of Heliópolis emerged and the following year, informally organized the Union of Nuclei, Associations and Societies of Residents of Heliópolis and São João Clímaco (UNAS), just official in 1992.
The urgency in having a committee of residents became imminent beginning in the 1980’s, more specifically in 1983 when the IAPAS attained the reintegration of ownership of the area. In that moment, acting quickly upon the political opportunity that arose, the Committee of Residents manages for zone (gleba) A, the main area of the administrative subdivision of the favela and where the largest number of occupants until then was concentrated, to be donated by the Federal Government to the Municipality of São Paulo to regularize the situation of the families.
That was one of the most important political achievements of the organized settlers, causing that in the following year, in 1984, the area until then occupied by the favela of Heliópolis was transferred from the IAPAS no less than to the National Bank of Housing (BNH), enabling the State Housing Company of São Paulo (Cohab) to start work in the sector.
Despite that bursting entry in the constellation of federal housing policies, the leaders of Heliópolis did not see with good eyes that it came at the same time with the administration of the Mayor of São Paulo, Janio Cuadros, who had been long leading an intense policy of "desfavelization" in order to move the residents from "more valued areas to others farther away, and used those areas to build sophisticated buildings"{10}. It was in response to that removal policy, which had already put an end to the favela Cidade Jardim (a park was built in its place), that residents promoted a series of demonstrations against the Cohab, which tended to end up in riots and clashes with the police. The residents even invaded the headquarters of the company to try to come to an agreement on the lots.
At the beginning of the 1980’s, the organization of the residents was big and dynamic enough to promote busy meetings and assemblies in which demonstrations of great turnout were planned and organized. On one occasion, circulation of vehicles was blocked in the Estrada das Lágrimas in protest of the continuity of a housing project in the area.
In 1993, during the administration of Mayor Paulo Maluf in the municipality of São Paulo, the police and residents came into direct confrontation motivated by the attempt of the public authority to remove the residents from what was considered risk areas. Later, after the construction of the housing project with the prosaic name of Singapur, the issue of the removal of families for new residences was discussed in Assembly and despite differing views, the move from the old houses to new buildings was approved by residents. Today, life in that building complex of formalized small apartments, goes on for many in a coming and going that longs for the old life in Heliópolis.
All in all, 2006 should be considered the year of the fundamental breakthrough in Heliópolis as it is today, where the clearest manifestation of its existence is expressed in an almost unprecedented global development process. Worthy of study due to its character as an example of a possible process of self-management, which takes it from being an informal, precarious and marginal settlement, to want to become an urban ideal identified as a neighborhood, that year the residents of Heliópolis represented by the historical leaders of the UNAS and the municipality of São Paulo, decide to take over a social attribute and renamed the favela as Nova Heliópolis, assigning it almost by decree, but also by basis, the status of 'Educational Neighborhood'. Formally and politically, Heliópolis leaders launched the idea of it being a neighborhood in which priority is given to education, encourage investments in public schools and promote actions of integration among residents, such as the creation of community radio stations, blogs, newspapers, and an important educational epicenter with a great cultural center available to the local residents which is home to one of the most important youth symphony orchestras in Latin America.
Although favelas such as Heliópolis are in the process of evolution or transformation into real neighborhoods{11}, its urban structure continues to be strongly rooted in a state of transition favela-neighborhood, with features of both popular neighborhoods (formal) as well as favelas (informal), not limiting itself to any of the two categories.
If on one hand the area presents typical aspects of favelas, such as irregular occupation and high concentration of buildings and overcrowding, in regards to urban infrastructure Heliópolis has the characteristics of a neighborhood, with water, electricity, sewerage, telephone and internet services in almost its entire area. According to the UNAS, 75% of Heliópolis already has urban infrastructure and, as per the Basic Sanitation Company of São Paulo (Sabesp) dedicated to the treatment of water and sewerage systems, the area has 100% of water supply and 77% of waste water collection. Nearly 100% of Heliópolis has public lighting and most roads are paved. {12}