City Of God

1052 Words3 Pages

In Fernando Meirelles’ crime drama, City of God, we gain an insight into the hellish life that exists within the borders of the Cidade de Deus. In fact the neighborhood is so full of crime, poverty, and hopelessness that at times it feels as though it is being filmed in an active warzone. Perhaps the most shocking aspect of this film is the fact that all the horrors of this favela stemmed from government planning. The City of God was founded in 1960, under the plan of the Brazillian government to decentralize the slums from the center of Rio de Janeiro to suburbs on the city’s outskirts. The sprawling orderly neighborhood seen at the beginning of the film was a construct of government planning, and with a blank slate the City of God had an …show more content…

Despite almost 70 years of progress across the country the favela problem is still a very pressing issue for Brazil. Nearly 6% of the county’s population exist in “subnormal agglomerations” according to the Brazilian institute of Geography and Statistics (Carneiro). That means over 11 million people reside in the slums of Brazil in terrible conditions. One in three residents doesn’t have access to sanitation facilities, nutrition is very poor due to poverty, disease is rampant, and infant mortality rates are high (Carneiro). There have been several attempts to address the favelas since the 40s but most end up exacerbating the issue by simply deporting citizens to new locations to start the cycle again. Currently Brazil has adopted a policy of walling off the favelas to discourage population growth (Sever). Brazil has also began seriously fighting back against crime in favelas, spending 1.7 billion on the security improvement in Rio ("Brazil to Spend US$ 1.7 Billion to Help Over 1 Million in Rio's Slums."). Had the permanent housing been procured and properly planned to encourage a healthy community in the 40s, it can be argued that the favela problem in Brazil today would be much …show more content…

Vladivostok existed before the communist revolution in Russia but was lagging behind modern cities with many residents lacking running water, electricity, toilets and paved streets until 1955 (Richardson). Highlighting the goal of expansion the soviet planners re-graded and paved the streets of Vladivostok, created parks and bureaucratic buildings, encouraged economic development, and built apartment buildings to increase living space by a factor of two (Richardson). All these changes to the core city, and careful planning of further expansion allowed Vladivostok to become a powerhouse for the Soviet Union. Today Vladivostok houses the Russian Pacific fleet, is the largest Russian port on the Pacific Ocean, is the home to five universities, and home to many museums. This is a success story for government planning of cities and can be looked to as one of the Soviet Union’s gifts to the science of city

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