Urbanization and Health: A Case Study of Rio de Janeiro

In the last century, cities have grown at an astonishing pace both in terms of infrastructure and population. Millions of people are moving from rural to urban areas, putting a strain on existing infrastructure and services. Latin America is now the most urbanized region in the world, with 80 percent of people living in cities, up from 40 percent in 1950 (Arsht, 2014). Cities provide great opportunities for technological innovation, commerce, and economic growth. However, the growth of cities also presents serious challenges for infrastructure suitability and public health. Rio de Janeiro, with a metro area population of over 12 million, exemplifies many of these issues. As the city has expanded and population has grown, it has been difficult to maintain infrastructure, in particular sanitation and waste management.

Two of the key Millennium Development Goals are access to safe water and sanitation services, and are crucial to health outcomes (Jairman, 2015). In Latin America, 60 percent of the poor and half of the extreme poor live in urban areas. Poor residents often occupy areas that are slums – such as Rio’s favelas – and face social, environmental, and health hazards living in these areas. With the historic pace of urbanization and in-migration to cities, the pre-existing public infrastructure, housing and public services faced challenges in an effort to keep up (Barbassa, 2015). While progress has been achieved in the last few decades, there is much work to be done. In urban areas in Latin America, 17 million households lack sanitation and 8 million households lack clean piped water (Jairman, 2015).

The lack of access to sanitation and clean water is known to increase rates of respiratory and infectious waterborne diseases such as tuberculosis, hepatitis, dengue, pneumonia, cholera, and malaria, especially among children. An increase in safe water is linked to a reduction in child mortality and positive economic development (Jairman, 2015). In Brazil as a whole, in 2011 almost 400,000 people, a third of them under the age of 5, were hospitalized for intestinal infections as a result of coming in contact with sewage, thus emphasizing the health consequences of insufficient sanitation infrastructure (Barbassa, 2015). The urban poor face disproportionate exposure to negative health effects as a result of rapid urbanization and lack of adequate infrastructure.

Since Europeans first landed in Rio de Janeiro, the city has been a hub for economic expansion. However, with the onset of industrialization in the 1930s there has been a rapid increase in urbanization and this has had an effect on the environmental conditions. In the lead up to the 2016 Olympics, the city’s Guanabara Bay received much international attention for its high levels of pollution and toxicity (Branch, 2016). In truth, the high levels of contamination and sewage in the Bay is just one manifestation of the broader challenge of ensuring adequate sanitation infrastructure (Roberts and Thanos, 2003).

In the mid-twentieth century, the city government’s priorities were more focused on urban expansion rather than public works projects (Rio on Watch, 2016). However, after 1992 when the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED) was held in Rio de Janeiro there was a shift to increased environmental awareness and sanitation systems to ensure this (Fistarol, 2015). In 1994, the Program for Remediation of Guanabara Bay began in cooperation with the city government, the Inter-American Development Bank and, the Japan Bank for International Cooperation. They hoped to open a large set of sewage treatment plants within the broader Guanabara Bay basin, yet this plan never reached its full capacity as today many of these plants are still unfinished and others have yet to be connected to the proper collection and disposal systems (Fistarol, 2015). During this same time period the private company Águas de Niterói, created in 1997, took over all sewage treatment services in Niterói, a municipality across the Bay from Rio. Between 2000 and 2005 the Alegria Wastewater treatment plant was constructed, serving many high-density neighborhoods including the City Center (Fries, 2018). While these plants were marked improvements in the overall sanitation and water treatment facilities, they were also secondary measures and not a direct way to ensure all residents have access to clean water and sanitation.

Among the people most disadvantaged due to lack of sewage services and clean water are the 1.5 million residents who live in favelas. These informal housing areas were not built with sanitation and to this day most of them remain unconnected to a broader system, with no trash collection or water services (Sedrez, 2014). Many residents are dependent on plastic containers for drinking water, the containers are easily contaminated and not well maintained (Lesser and Kitron, 2016). Sanitation and wastewater treatment services are provided on a municipal level and these areas, often not even recognized on official maps, are not a municipal priority (O'Hare, 2002). During the Lula administration there was a federal emphasis on water policy and accessibility. In January of 2007, President Lula signed a law that aimed to provide universal access to water and sanitation. Later that month, the President announced a Program for Acceleration of Growth aimed to invest in infrastructure, water and sanitation for poor Brazilians (Maiello, 2018). However, because the federal government is not in charge of municipal projects, this policy was not turned into infrastructure (Barbassa, 2015). In 2010, the government of the State of Rio de Janeiro enacted the “Sanitation Pact” that established guidelines to ensure access to sanitation for residents. This included ensuring a supply of potable water, wastewater treatment, urban cleaning services and solid waste management (Fistarol, 2015). With an influx of capital, there is great potential and hope that the implementation of this pact will create tangible improvements in infrastructure (Maiello, 2018).

While much of the news focused on Guanabara Bay in the lead up to the Olympics, the problems of the Bay is really a manifestation of the lack of sanitation facilities throughout the city. Much of what is not treated, filtered and removed from the system, especially in poor areas such as favelas leads into the bay. Residents of Rio de Janeiro, especially those living in favelas, face great public health risks due to the lack of sanitation services. There is a renewed interest in providing services stemming from both national and city governments, yet this remains a challenging process as the city’s population continues to grow. Many of the projects that began in the 1990s were never completed and today money is scarce. However, with the implementation of the Sanitation Pact there is great potential for Rio de Janeiro to make progress in sanitation and water treatment infrastructure.

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Additional Resources

Comarú, A. (2004). Housing, urban development and health in Latin America: contrasts, inequalities and challenges, Review on Environmental Health, 3(4): 329-345.

Hochstetler, K. (2007). Greening Brazil: Environmental Activism in State and Society. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press.

O’Hare, G. (2001). Urban renaissance: New horizons for Rio’s favelas, Geography, 86 (1): 61-75.

Pan American Health Organization. (2011). Water and sanitation: Evidence for public policies focused on human rights and public health results. Retrieved From https://www.paho.org/hq/dmdocuments/2012/Water-Sanitation-final-eng.pdf

Roberts, J.T. and Thanos, N.D. (2003). Hazards of an Urban Continent. Chapter 5 in Trouble in Paradise: Globalization and Environmental Crises in Latin America. New York: Routledge.

Soares-Gomes, A. (2016). An environmental overview of Guanabara Bay, Rio de Janeiro, Regional Studies in Marine Science, 8(2): 319-330.

Soluri, J. (2018). A living past: environmental histories of modern Latin America. New York: New York: Berghahn.

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Fistarol, G. (2015). Environmental and Sanitary Conditions of Guanabara Bay, Rio de Janeiro. Frontiers in Microbiology, 6 (1232): 1-17.

Fries, A. (2019). Guanabara Bay ecosystem health report card: Science, management, and governance implications. Regional Studies in Marine Science, 25: 1-17.

Jaitman, L. (2015). Urban infrastructure in Latin America and the Caribbean: public policy priorities. Latin American Economic Review, 24(13): 1-57.

Lesser, J., & Kitron, U. (2016). The Social Geography of Zika in Brazil. NACLA Report on the Americas, 48(2): 123-129.

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Nolen, S. (2016). Dirty Water. The Globe and Mail. Retrieved From https://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/dirty-water-why-rio-hasnt-kept-its- promise-to-cleanup/article30752991/

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