Informal settlements are an increasing global phenomenon. Since the mid-century
Rio de Janeiro went through a series of paradigmatic changes, trying to cope with this
phenomenon. The scope of these interventions ranged from entire eradications of these
settlements in the 1960s to present in situ programmes of infrastructural upgrades. Up to
now favelas are seen as independent parts of the city, spatial manifestations of urban
poverty and intra-urban inequality in the need to be solved. Even recent attempts to integrate
favelas socially and spatially with the city failed to remove the physical and conceptual
boundaries between the formal and the informal. Underlying these approaches
is the perception of those areas as something different, rather than an integral element
of the complex urban system. Trying to overcome the fragmentation of the city this study
combines formal and informal parts into an integrated model of the whole city. Following
a syntactical analysis using GIS mapping and space syntax, this study explores the
morphology of favelas in the context of metropolitan Rio throughout different scales and
in relation to their topographic location. 60 different local areas are then selected and
compared against each other according to their configurational characteristics. The analytic
results highlight the affordances and constrains of informal and formal structures.
Understanding the particularities of those two differently perceived systems and the ways
in which they interact with each other can inform future analysis and policymaking
