The Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV – My

House, My Life) is a federal programme

Resurgence started in 2009 that provides low-interest

finance to construction companies in

of Public
an attempt to plug the housing crisis
and roll out millions of homes for low-
income families across Brazil. Architect
Space Nanda Eskes of Atelier 77 and photographer
André Vieira look at the impact that this
fast-track, hands-off approach has had
on the overall quality of housing provision
and the urban environment; they also
highlight some innovative initiatives that
have been conceived to ameliorate its impact.

Rethinking Minha

54
Nanda Eskes In 2009 the Brazilian government launched an ambitious programme to address one of
and André Vieira the country’s most serious and urgent social problems: its enormous housing deficit.
A study by Fundação Getúlio Vargas, one of the country's most prestigious think
tanks, found that Brazil needs 5.2 million new homes in order to properly shelter the
estimated 11.5 million Brazilians who currently live in favelas, which are often violent
places, neglected by the state and home to endemic poverty.1
The federal programme, called Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV – My House, My
Life), follows a model already pursued by countries like Venezuela, Mexico and Chile2
when confronted with the challenge of building homes for millions of people in the
shortest time possible. In this approach, the government acts primarily as a financier,
guaranteeing subsidised credit to low-income families and low-interest financing to
construction companies, which then have great freedom to plan and build housing
blocks that are sold at market prices. The government sets just a few guidelines
regarding size and configuration of the homes, but the construction companies have
almost total discretion over where and how to build. To date, 2.3 million homes have
been constructed under the MCMV programme and another two million units have
already been contracted.
In addition to fast-tracking housing delivery, another goal of Minha Casa Minha Vida
was to boost the country’s then already-sagging economy.

Casa Minha Vida

Minha Casa Minha Vida
(HR Engenharia),
Residencial Vila Nova,
Parauapebas,
Pará,
Brazil,
2014

Utilising prefabricated concrete

for its easy replicability,
Residencial Vila Nova has only
one unit type which is repeated
in series.

55
 A Neoliberal Approach to Housing Delivery
Brazil has 5,570 municipalities, of which 300 have populations that exceed 50,000.3
Most municipalities depend on federal grants to make ends meet, and fear that if
they erect too many barriers they risk losing the rare large boost of investment into
their economies that MCMV represents. For mayors and local politicians, MCMV’s
substantial promotional budget provides wonderful photo opportunities, with abundant
festive inaugurations attended by government ministers, governors and sometimes
even the president, particularly precious during campaign time. Few municipalities
have any prior urban planning for the areas where the projects are located. They often
agree to developments that they have few capabilities to supervise, despite the fact that
the MCMV’s charter clearly states that the responsibility to regulate and inspect these
projects for quality lies with the municipality.
That same charter removes from municipalities, and from the federal government,
any active role in the planning and design process. In order to keep prices low and
profits high, developers give no attention whatsoever to neighbourhood layouts or
to the provision of non-residential amenities. Construction quality is usually low. The
designs ignore the need to provide space for small shops, both formal and informal,
that are a key aspect of the economic life of favelas and an extra source of cash on
which many residents rely. These small shops are also necessary for convenience,
since most projects are built in fringe areas several kilometres away from the city's
economic heart, where most jobs and shops are located. The sites chosen for MCMV
developments also tend to be poorly served by public transportation.
Municipalities in general lack the professional expertise and capacity to exercise the
limited review role they have. This means they are poorly equipped to do business on
an equal footing with some of Brazil’s biggest corporations that are delivering MCMV
projects, not to mention their first-rate legal departments.
To address these shortcomings, other actors in the housing delivery arena are
proactively intervening and searching for alternative approaches that give future
residents a louder voice in the planning of their new homes. Aware of the problems
with MCMV, Brazil’s federal government is starting to partner with some of these
organisations. Additional projects in Rio de Janeiro and Salvador are being developed
by the architecture department of the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro and are
already giving greater consideration to sustainability and energy efficiency in their
designs.

Minha Casa Minha Vida house, Minha Casa Minha Vida illegal house extensions,
Parauapebas, Pará, Brazil, 2012 Parauapebas, Pará, Brazil, 2012

A typical MCMV house after occupation by Illegal house extensions to accommodate informal businesses are
its residents. common, particularly due to the project’s remote location on the
urban periphery.

56

Instituto CASA
(Convergências de
Arte Sociedade e
Arquitetura and
Fundação Vale,
Urban Quality Label
(UQL),
2014
The UQL is a tool to reward
projects that adopt good
urban design, architectural
and social practices. It
involves 15 guidelines that
are organised according to
the scales of the city.
An Urban Quality Label for Minha Casa Minha Vida
In Pará, the second largest state in the Amazon where the Brazilian mining giant Vale
operates Carajás, the world’s largest iron-ore mine, Rio de Janeiro-based Instituto
CASA (Convergências de Arte Sociedade e Arquitetura – Convergence of Art, Society
and Architecture) and the ETH Zurich Master of Advanced Studies in Urban Design
research and design laboratory made a technical cooperation agreement with Fundação
Vale, Vale’s non-profit subsidiary in October 2013. Together they developed an Urban
Quality Label (UQL), a set of urban design best-practice guidelines for social housing.
Fundação Vale guarantees the funding for the projects and commits to delivering
higher profit margins for builders on the condition that they follow the UQL guidelines,
which require that projects incorporate community participation within the design
process, for example in the layout of the neighbourhoods around public squares.
Streets must be connected with the existing grid of adjacent areas to prevent the
neighbourhoods from becoming gated communities, and squares must be carefully
planned so that their size and location relate to their anticipated use: civic square, small
shops or semi-private.
To ensure architectural diversity, unit designs may not be repeated more than
40 times within a given area. Streets layouts and housing must be configured to
create semi-public spaces inside the blocks. Main pedestrian streets must have active
frontages, with buildings opening to the street and wide landscaped pavements (and no
cars). Early rounds of MCMV revealed the problems resulting from a fixed set of design
guidelines for the entire country, where climates vary from equatorial to temperate,
so the priority now is to ensure that projects are adapted to the specific climate of the
places in which they are built. Revisions already made to the UQL guidelines have
resulted in significant improvements in ventilation and thermal efficiency.
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 Parauapebas: An Urban Quality Label Prototype
To test the implementation of the UQL, in February 2014 Fundação Vale invited the Rio-
based Fundação Bento Rubião (which has three decades of experience constructing
social housing all over Brazil) to collaborate on a pilot project for a new neighbourhood
with 500 houses following the UQL guidelines. With construction due to start mid-
2016, the pilot neighbourhood, which will be named by its future inhabitants, will be
built under the umbrella of the MCMV programme. The project is located in the city of
Parauapebas in the state of Pará, approximately 720 kilometres (450 miles) south of
Belém, in the heart of the Amazon, and will be financed by Caixa, a state bank. Lessons
learned at Parauapebas will inform Fundação Vale’s rollout of the UQL at a much larger
scale.
In July 2014, Fundação Bento Rubião commissioned two architecture studios from
Rio – Arche and Atelier 77 – to design the pilot for Parauapebas together with its future
residents. Initially divided into groups, the residents were invited to draw or write on
sheets of paper the answer to the question: ‘What do you want for your new house?’.
With those answers at hand, the architects compared the residents’ desires with
the UQL criteria and realised that, among other things, 70 per cent of the responses
mentioned a desire for outdoor space.
In another exercise called ‘Spoken Map’, residents were asked to indicate their
places of work, shopping and leisure on a city map. On a ‘map of utopias’, they were
then asked to locate in their own neighbourhood the services and facilities that did not
exist near their houses, but that they wished were nearby. Based on these exercises,
residents were then asked to plan their public space, locating squares, markets,
shops, services and entertainment spaces within the site area. With wooden blocks
representing their homes, they modelled their vision of their future neighbourhood.
Drilling down one step further, they were asked to place the furniture they currently
own in the new spaces they had just designed, which helped to determine the ideal
dimensions of their units.

‘What do you
want for your
new house?’
Fundação Bento Rubião,
Arche and Atelier 77,
Pilot neighbourhood,
Parauapebas,
Pará,
Brazil,
due for completion 2018

At the first community meeting,

residents were invited to draw
or write on sheets of paper the
answer to the question: ‘What do
you want for your new house?’.
In one workshop, residents used Residents were invited to locate their
The architects could then compare
wooden blocks representing existing furniture in the new space they had
their responses with the UQL
their homes to model their vision designed, to clarify their needs and establish
criteria.
of their future neighbourhood. the optimal dimensions of their units.

58
 The experiments concluded that residents wanted the areas around bus stops
to be hubs for commerce and civic activities, while schools should be hubs for
sports grounds and parks. Houses were to share a semi-private patio. The size of the
buildings was determined by the number of people that residents thought would be
the maximum possible for meetings of all householders in a block to function properly
in the future. Residents agreed that this number should be 40. The architects then
translated the residents’ aspirations into drawings, trying to be as faithful as possible to
the original concept.

The Future of MCMV

The economic and political crisis currently gripping Brazil makes the future of MCMV
uncertain. To help balance the budget and address runaway inflation, the government
cut the MCMV budget in 2015, and a hostile Congress is pushing for even deeper cuts.
The current President Dilma Rousseff responded by reaffirming her commitment to
MCMV.4
Compared to an average MCMV project, pilot schemes such as that in Parauapebas
demand more time and require the involvement of a much larger number of
stakeholders in the process. However, the results in terms of social cohesion and sense
of belonging in the new neighbourhoods that residents helped design more than justify
the extra investment. Drawing on the Parauapebas experience, a potential way forward
would be for municipalities to undertake community consultation and adopt policies
that reward the construction of more participatory and sustainable projects based on
UQL guidelines. 1

Notes
1. IBGE – Censo 2010/PNAD 2013: www.censo2010.ibge.gov.br/sinopse/.
2. Beatriz Mioto, ‘As políticas habitacionais no subdesenvolvimento: os
casos do Brasil, Colômbia, México e Venezuela (1980/2013)’, Instituto de
Economia: see www.unicamp.br/unicamp/ju/630/tese-compara-politicas-
de-habitacao-popular-na-al.
3. IBGE, op cit.
4. See ‘Dilma reafirma continuidade do Minha Casa Minha Vida’, Portail
Brasil, 11 October 2015: www.brasil.gov.br/infraestrutura/2015/11/dilma-
reafirma-continuidade-do-minha-casa-minha-vida.

Fundação Bento Rubião,

Arche and Atelier 77,
Pilot neighbourhood,
Parauapebas, Pará,
Brazil,
due for completion 2018

The three residential typologies

developed by the residents with
the architects provide an extra
area that can be adapted to
accommodate a third bedroom,
an office or a larger room.

Text © 2016 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Images © Nanda Eskes

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