“Arquitetura na Periferia” Empowers Belo Horizonte Residents

Promote the democratization of architecture in the favelas. This is the main objective of the project whose name says it all! By training women to carry out renovations and even build their own homes, the Arquitetura na Periferia (ANP) project has taken technical assistance to residents historically with lack of access to goods and services, such as occupations on the favelas of Belo Horizonte, Minas Gerais. 

The creator is the architect Carina Guedes. She says that the project was created because she felt uncomfortable with the restricted scope of the profession. “Most people don’t even know what it’s for,” she says. To understand why this happened, it was necessary to research the reasons that made it difficult for marginalized groups to access architectural proposals and solutions. 

As a result, she developed a specific work method to meet the demands of very low-income residents. The focus on women is related to gender inequalities, inside and outside the profession. “From the beginning, the idea was never to deliver a ready-made project, as if it were a product, but to offer information and knowledge capable of offering some autonomy to these women”, recalls Carina. 

The project started with a group of three women in the Dandara community, in 2013. Currently, more than 100 women have received training using the ANP method in three different communities in the city, impacting around 1,300 people in total. The project was also in other cities in the country, promoting workshops and multiplying the scope of transformation.

Women and houses 

Women have a very particular relationship with housing. The house, for them, is not just a shelter, but a home. They are the ones who spend more time indoors, doing their maintenance or taking care of their family members. But even if they are the most affected by the way their homes are built, however, they participate little in their development. 

Structural problems, such as excessive humidity, lack of lighting and ventilation, poorly planned bathrooms and kitchens, for example, can interfere with women’s daily lives. To transform these conditions, the ANP proposes that women be protagonists in the design of their own homes. 

Adriana Silva, for example, was very uncomfortable with the way her house had been built. To get to her room, she needed to go inside her son’s room, a teenager. She had already called a mason to solve the problem, but he didn’t show up. 

It was while participating in the ANP workshops that Adriana realized that she needed to close one wall and open another. “She bought bricks, cement, broke one wall and closed the other, so it wasn’t even a question of lack of financial resources, but of seeing the solution to the problem”, says Carina.

Mobilization 

The ANP team is made up of architects, local agents, psychologists and a foreman. And to develop the project, they train small groups of women for free within their own territories. This year, they formed four groups in total, with an average of five participants each, in the Dandara, Paulo Freire, Eliana Silva and Vila Bispo communities, all on the favelas of the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte. 

Although there is a partnership with different local social movements, the work of the ANP is independent. “The exchanges with the movements are positive, many times they help us in the mobilization, they bring women who know they will want to participate, but we act in parallel”, explains Carina. 

The groups are mobilized every beginning of the year. In general, former participants indicate possible candidates for new groups. More recently, the ANP also opened an online form due to the interest of other communities in participating in this process. 

After the formation of the groups, the weekly meetings begin. These meetings are held in person throughout the year. First, the women learn to design projects and think about alternatives for production and planning of works. Then, in mid-August, the hands-on workshops begin. 

This is the moment when women define what they will learn in practice. They are the ones who agree with each other what they want to do, warns Carina. Therefore, they usually end up choosing what they want to replicate in their homes. 

At the end of the year, when the rainy season begins, the workshops are closed and the groups are considered formed. The women no longer receive training, however, they remain in contact through social networks. 

Female empowerment 

“I wanted to create an environment where women felt comfortable sharing their issues with the group,” says Carina when asked why the ANP’s work is exclusive to women. When there are male participants in construction courses, women often feel embarrassed to expose their doubts or even take a position because they know that their voices will not be heard with the same intensity as their male colleagues, she explains. 

“Even when making a decision about how the house will be built, it is common to see the mason imposing his opinion on the will of the resident herself, so it was important to offer the women resources that would help them to have more autonomy”, she says. she. Thinking about these gender inequalities, the ANP offers access to all the tools so that women can plan independently. It is part of the workshop schedule, for example, personal finance studies.

But in addition, when she started researching social housing projects, Carina also came across data that showed that women who receive benefits such as Minha Casa Minha Vida tend to be more supportive: “women, because they are responsible for the house and for the family, they are not only concerned with themselves, unlike men, who in general, centralize the decisions about the use of the benefit based on individual interests”, he says. 

Thus, part of the Architecture in the Periphery project is to offer microfinance so that women can carry out their works. Loans are made without charging interest and women can negotiate the best way to pay off debts, from the amount to the amount of installments.

Group therapy

The residents found in Arquitetura na Periferia’s workshops a space for exchanging their pains and expectations. “Since our meetings are always collective, it often becomes collective therapy”, says Carina. With that in mind, she invited professionals who could listen to women with wisdom and warmth to join the project team. 

Psychologists provide support to women with group dynamics and offer individual assistance, all free of charge throughout the training year. The overload of women, according to Carina, is an obvious problem. Responsibilities linked to care work, in addition to being issues addressed in group dynamics, often also hinder the full participation of women in the workshops. 

In this way, after the workshops are over, women can continue to have access to psychologists, based on a social value agreed between them. “Many went through a profound transformation with the therapy, starting from issues that they didn’t even imagine needed to be treated”, says Carina.

Housing is a right 

According to a report prepared by the João Pinheiro Foundation (FJP), in partnership with the Ministry of Regional Development, there is a housing deficit of 5.9 million homes in Brazil. In addition, around 14 million households are considered inadequate. The impact of this is huge, especially for women, points out Carina. “Access to housing allows other rights to be guaranteed, since it is necessary to have an address to place the child in day care or access the public health service”, she emphasizes. 

For her, the little importance given to the problem in the political debate is due to the capitalist system itself: the construction industry, allied to the real estate market, forms one of the great sources of capital extraction, she says. “So, it is clear that all rights are important to be guaranteed, but housing is perhaps one of the main ones, as it permeates many others”, she defends. 

Access to housing is a historic struggle in Brazil and many achievements are due to social movements, explains Carina. An example is Law no. 11,888/08, which guarantees that low-income people have free access to the services of architects and engineers for the preparation of projects to improve their homes. 

“This law is more than ten years old, but it has not been implemented in most municipalities until today”, she recalls. For Carina, the experience of the ANP shows that it is possible to offer architecture and construction services to very low-income people and that it could even become a public policy. However, there is a lack of political articulation for this to happen, she says.

Training for the market 

The success of the ANP’s work has been widely recognized and publicized through national awards and newspaper reports. Above all, this recognition is shared among the women who participate in the project: many realized that they would like to go deeper to work professionally in civil construction. 

Faced with this demand, the ANP began, in early 2023, a project aimed especially at insertion in the labor market. It is a course focused on practical workshops, which deepen techniques and knowledge of the work. 

Until then, the courses had been promoting the empowerment of women by offering ways for them to improve their well-being, whether building and renovating their own homes, or having the security to hire third-party services. 

The empowerment, however, went beyond expectations! Currently, five women are already working with the construction market. With the new project, the expectation is that this number will increase and that the project will finally have its own construction team.

Recurring support 

The Arquitetura na Periferia is a non-profit institution and has some strategies to ensure its effective realization. Over its ten years of operation, the project was only possible thanks to collective funding campaigns, participation in public notices, cash prizes received, individual supporters and partnerships with companies. 

“The support needs to be recurrent”, warns Carina. Therefore, the ANP has been diversifying the forms of collaboration. In recent years, the project has created the seal “Empresa Parceira”. Many architecture, accounting and communication offices have adhered to the seal through their social responsibility programs. 

In addition to cash donations, it is also possible to become a volunteer in the project: the ANP opens a public notice at the beginning of the year identifying all the necessary volunteer positions. Volunteers must commit to providing their services free of charge for one year.

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