Self-Built: The Architecture of the Morros

Self-built construction means that residents build their own house and expand it over the years — not as an exception, but as the usual way of obtaining housing. In Brazil, the term autoconstrução describes an entire sector: millions of homes in every major city in the country have come into being this way, in favelas as much as in peripheral, formally platted neighborhoods.

The most important feature of this kind of building is its time structure. A formal construction project begins with a plan, gets financed, built, and inspected; after that it is considered finished. A self-built house, by contrast, starts small and remains in a state of becoming for decades. Building happens when there is money to spare: after a raise, a job, a sale, a severance payment. Months or years can pass between two building stages. The construction site is inhabited, and the residents are the builders.

Financing usually happens without a bank loan, because without a registered property title, conventional construction financing is barely accessible. Instead, materials are paid for in installments: a thousand bricks today, cement next month, windows come summer. That's exactly why so many communities have a dense network of small building-supply shops that sell in small quantities and deliver right to the stairs.

Work is rarely done alone. At the center is the pedreiro, the mason — often a neighbor or relative who works full time on the city's formal construction sites and handles concrete, reinforcement, and masonry there. He brings the technical knowledge; the family provides labor, materials, and decisions. Relatives, friends and neighbors join in as well, for instance to pour a concrete slab, which has to be completed in a single day.

The difference from formal construction, then, lies not in a lack of expertise but in a different kind of organization: no overall budget, but many small budgets; no external site management, but owner-driven building; no completion date, but expandability as a core principle.

The answer is largely economic and topographic. Rio de Janeiro is a city between the sea, lagoons and steep granite hills. The formal real-estate market developed on the flat land: streets, plots, tenement buildings, later apartment towers. The hillsides, by contrast, were long considered unbuildable — too steep, too expensive to service, too risky for investors. They remained undeveloped, and therefore available.

Anyone working in the city in the 19th and early 20th centuries had to live close to their work: there was hardly any public transport, and routes were covered on foot. After the abolition of slavery in 1888, along with migration from the Northeast and the return of soldiers from the War of Canudos, the demand for cheap housing grew faster than the market or the state could supply it. At the same time, densely occupied tenement buildings downtown, the cortiços, were demolished for hygiene and urban- planning reasons.

That set the logic in motion: a central location at minimal land cost. Morro da Providência in the city center is considered the first settlement to bear the name favela. Later came the hillsides above Copacabana, Botafogo, Leme, Ipanema and Leblon — the same hills at whose feet lie today's most expensive addresses in Brazil. Someone who cleans, cooks, builds or waits tables in Leblon lives ten minutes away in Vidigal, rather than a two-hour commute away on the periphery.

Displacement processes add to this history. Over the decades, communities were resettled, some to distant housing projects, some cleared entirely. Some neighborhoods, by contrast, successfully organized resistance — the best-known case is Vidigal in 1977 — a story told in full in our article on Vidigal's 1977 resistance. Others regrew elsewhere after being cleared. Today's distribution of favelas is therefore also a map of political decisions.

This has direct consequences for the architecture. A plot on a hillside is never a rectangular, flat space. It has a slope, often thirty degrees or more, an access side, a rock edge, a direction of water flow. Every house first has to create a level surface — through terracing, retaining walls, foundations of varying heights. This basic operation explains many features of the morros: the staggered building volumes, the base stories, the staircases inside houses, one house's rooftop terrace serving as the forecourt of the next.

You can find the interactive map of all featured communities in the favela overview.

The key difference from formal architecture is time. A self-built house on the morro is not an object but a process with recognizable stages. The sequence below is a model, not a law: some families skip steps, others stop after the second phase, others take twenty years to build what neighbors managed in five. But the underlying logic — first secure the space, then build solidly, then build up — can be found in nearly all of Rio's communities.

This sequence explains many details that look puzzling from the outside. Why is there an external staircase on the façade? Because it is meant to provide independent access to a future story. Why does a house have a roll-down shutter on the ground floor and residential windows above? Because the ground floor is rented out or used as its own business. Why do door heights and ceiling heights vary between levels? Because they were built in different years with different budgets.

„Every story is a chapter of a family's history — built in whichever year it became possible."

Economically, this kind of building is a form of saving. Putting money into brick and concrete protects it against inflation, creates housing for children, and lays the foundation for rental income. In many families, the house is the only form of retirement provision. That explains why building continues even though the legal status is incomplete: de facto ownership is recognized locally, and houses are bought, sold, inherited and used as collateral — within the community.

The schematic cross-section below shows how the building phases can be read in the finished structure. It is deliberately simplified and does not represent any specific house. Characteristic features include: a base that compensates for the slope, a flexible-use ground floor facing the alley, living levels above, and the laje on top.

Structurally, it is almost always a skeleton of concrete columns and ring beams, infilled with hollow bricks — known in Brazil as alvenaria. This construction method has two advantages that are crucial for self-building: it can be executed in sections, and it allows for later additional stories, provided the columns and reinforcement were sized accordingly. It is exactly on that "provided" that the quality of a house depends.

The unplastered brick façade is the best-known visual feature of the morros — and the most often misunderstood. In this construction method, plaster serves three main functions: it protects the masonry from moisture, smooths the surface, and enables paint. It is not required for structural stability.

Since plaster and paint are the final step, they rank behind everything else on the priority list: behind the extra room, the indoor bathroom, the concrete slab, the windows, the electrical wiring. As long as an expansion is planned, plastering the affected wall would be wasted money anyway — it will be broken through or built over. Many houses are therefore fully plastered and tiled on the inside, while the exterior shows bare brick.

Visibility plays a role too: a plastered, painted façade is expensive and requires scaffolding on the hillside. In communities where programs have provided paint and materials — for instance in parts of Santa Marta — the streetscape changes immediately and dramatically. This shows that the brick look is not an aesthetic choice, but a matter of sequence and resources.

A second sign belongs here as well: the reinforcing bars protruding from slabs and columns. They are connection points for the next story and signal intent, not decay. In Brazilian architectural discourse, this image is seen as emblematic of the unfinished, always-expandable house.

In the morros, houses are rarely served by streets, but by stairs and alleys. The escadaria, the staircase complex, is often the true main axis of a neighborhood: it follows the fall line of the slope, connects the different path levels, passes house entrances, and often ends at the top at a plaza, a church, or a viewpoint.

Vielas branch off from this main axis — narrower connecting alleys — and from these, in turn, becos: passageways sometimes only a meter wide. This hierarchy wasn't drafted at a drawing board; it emerged as the leftover space between houses: buildings came first, and the path followed. Even so, nearly the same structure emerges in almost every community — a main route, secondary paths, private access ways, dead ends leading to individual house clusters.

These paths are more than circulation space. Stair landings become seating areas. Semi-public forecourts appear in front of bars and small shops, turning into neighborhood social spaces in the evening. Children play there because flat surfaces are scarce. Because the alleys are shaded and ventilated, they are also more pleasant on hot days than open plazas.

At the same time, the drawbacks are real and shouldn't be downplayed here: emergency vehicles can't get through, garbage collection only works up to certain points, and moves, furniture and building materials have to be carried by hand. For people with limited mobility, many areas are barely accessible at all. That's exactly why public access projects — stairs with handrails, ramps, elevators like the one in Cantagalo or the funicular in Santa Marta — matter so much.

The laje is the most important room in many houses — and at the same time one that appears in no floor plan. Because flat surfaces are scarce on a hillside, everything that needs space moves up there: clotheslines, water tanks, a barbecue, tables, plants in buckets, tools, occasionally a chicken coop or dovecote, and increasingly satellite dishes and, in some cases, solar panels.

Socially, the laje is a stage. Birthdays are celebrated there, football matches watched, neighbors received. It is the place with the view: in communities above Copacabana or Leme, you can look out over bay, beach and city from there — a panorama that costs millions in formal Rio. For children, the laje is often the only available play space.

Structurally, it remains an option for the future. As long as no further level is built, it's a terrace; as soon as a child marries or rental income is needed, it becomes a floor. This dual function shapes its appearance: low brick parapets instead of railings, protruding rebar at the corners, and often a makeshift corrugated-metal roof over part of it that disappears at the next building stage.

Infrastructure is the area where communities differ the most — and where sweeping statements fall apart the fastest. Historically, water and electricity supply in many favelas began improvised: through spring catchments, shared pipes, neighborhood connections, and self-laid cables. That phase still shapes today's image of tangled wire bundles above the alleys.

Since the 1980s, and especially the 1990s, this has changed fundamentally in many areas. Programs like Favela-Bairro brought streets, stairs, plazas, lighting, water and sewage lines, addresses, and public buildings. Utility companies introduced regular connections and meters. Many households today pay electricity and water bills like any other part of the city, and internet is often surprisingly well available through local providers.

Three issues remain largely unresolved. First, sewage disposal: where sewer systems are missing or not connected, wastewater flows into stormwater channels or open ditches — a health and environmental problem with effects reaching far beyond the communities. Second, stormwater drainage on steep slopes, which is crucial to hillside stability. Third, maintenance: networks were built, but not everywhere maintained consistently.

For the architecture, infrastructure has concrete consequences: where a water line runs, a bathroom can move indoors. Where electricity is stable, workshops, refrigerators, shops, and home offices appear. Where a public staircase has been built, entrances and ground-floor uses along that axis change within a few years. Access creates architecture.

There is no such thing as "favela architecture" in the singular. Between a small community at the forest edge above Leme and a densely built hillside with its own main street lie entire structural worlds. The table below therefore compares features without ranking them: slope, density, typical building height, access, and a distinctive structural feature.

Three factors best explain the differences. First, the slope: the steeper the hillside, the smaller the plots, the more stairs, and the more pronounced the staggering. Second, building age: where construction has been going on since the 1930s, finished houses that have been remodeled multiple times now stand; newer edges show earlier building phases. Third, public investment: where stairs, plazas, elevators or cable cars were built, construction along those axes has densified and upgraded.

Market pressure adds to this. In communities with panoramic views like Vidigal renovations feature large window fronts, guest rooftop terraces, and small pousadas. In Rocinha it is the ground-floor zone that dominates the picture: pharmacies, banks, bakeries, furniture stores. In Babilônia and Chapéu Mangueira the Mata Atlântica limits growth, while in Morro dos Tabajaras the buildings remain lower and more shaped by neighborly proximity.

Material choices in self-built construction follow four criteria: price, availability in small quantities, transportability up stairs, and durability in a hot, humid climate. These criteria almost inevitably lead to hollow brick, concrete, and rebar — materials that one person can carry, process without machinery, and buy in any quantity.

The order in which materials are put in place is typical too: first the structure and shell, then installations, then finishes. Tiles appear first wherever they are functional — in the bathroom, the kitchen, at the base of the façade against splashing water. Ornament is rare, but paint is common once plaster is in place.

Self-built construction is rarely a solo project. Pouring a concrete slab, which must be finished in a single day, often involves ten people: the pedreiro leads, relatives mix, neighbors pass buckets up, someone cooks. This form of collective work is called a mutirão and relies on reciprocity — whoever helps will get help when it's their turn to build.

This shouldn't be romanticized. Mutual aid substitutes for resources that are missing: paid skilled labor, machinery, credit, shorter construction times. It's exhausting, happens on weekends after six-day work weeks, and can create dependencies. At the same time, it produces something formal construction processes don't: extremely detailed knowledge of the neighborhood, where everyone knows where a pipe runs and which wall belongs to whom.

This creates unwritten agreements between neighbors: shared fire walls, rights of passage over a laje, rules about how high one can build without blocking someone else's light. These rules are local, oral, and respected because everyone remains dependent on one another. Conflicts still occur, though — over height, views, water, and access.

Organized structures also play a role: residents' associations, associações de moradores, represent interests to the city, coordinate connections, and document de facto ownership. In some communities they work together with universities and architecture initiatives.

Rio has a hot, humid climate with long stretches of heat and heavy rainfall. The architecture of the morros responds with tools that are more spatial than technical. The most important instrument is cross-ventilation: openings on two sides, open kitchens, doors with transom windows, ventilation bricks, and perforated concrete elements that let air through while blocking sightlines.

Shade is created by density itself. Narrow alleys stay cool during the day, awnings shelter entrances, and neighboring buildings shade façades. Massive brick and concrete elements buffer heat and release it at night — an advantage over sheet metal, which heats up within minutes and is therefore now mostly used only for secondary rooms.

Rain is where things get critical. On densely built hillsides, a huge amount of water hits very little permeable surface. What matters most, then, are roof drainage, gutters along the stairs, slope drainage, and retaining walls. Where these elements work, a hillside is stable; where they are missing or clogged, undercutting occurs. Vegetation plays a dual role: trees and root systems stabilize soil and provide shade, which is why reforestation projects are directly tied to construction safety in forest-edge communities like Babilônia.

Roof forms are mostly flat, because the laje is usable space. Where sloped roofs appear, they are often makeshift corrugated-metal structures over terraces, or roofs of the topmost houses where no further story is planned. A house's orientation rarely follows the compass, but the slope and the access — a compromise residents offset with awnings, curtains, and plants.

An honest account of the morros' architecture has to name its problems — without dramatizing or generalizing them. They are unevenly distributed: two houses on the same hillside can differ greatly in how safe they are.

• Landslides

  Steep slopes, saturated soil, missing drainage, and interventions on the hillside raise the risk, especially in the rainy season. The city operates warning systems, stabilization structures, and designates risk zones where building is prohibited.

• Heavy rain and drainage

  Large sealed surfaces and limited channel capacity lead to flooding at bottlenecks. Maintaining gutters and drains is crucial and often underfunded.

• Subsequent densification

  Added stories on structures not designed for the extra load are the most common structural risk. Construction advice and structural inspection are rarely available.

• Fire safety

  Narrow access, high density, makeshift wiring, and gas cylinders in kitchens raise the danger; fire truck access is often missing. Fire hydrant connections and escape routes are therefore important public tasks.

• Sewage and hygiene

  Missing or incomplete sewage systems burden waterways and health — a problem that affects the whole city, not just the communities.

• Property and legal issues

  Without full registration, credit access and legal certainty are missing. Regularization programs exist but progress varies widely.

• Accessibility

  Stairs, elevation changes, and narrow paths effectively exclude people with limited mobility. Elevators and cable cars help in specific spots but don't solve the problem broadly.

• Light and noise

  Very dense construction produces dark rooms and low privacy on lower levels — one reason upper stories are more sought-after.

This list isn't a judgment on the building method, but a description of its limits. Many of these points are the result of missing public investment, not a lack of care by the builders. Where the city and the community have invested together — in stairs, drainage, retaining walls, channels, lighting — measurable improvements have followed.

When a house grows over thirty years, it becomes a document. Residents can tell from it which room was built in which year, which uncle laid the staircase, where the courtyard used to be. This creates a bond with the building that differs markedly from one with a rented apartment — and it explains why resettlement offers are so often turned down.

Identity becomes visible mainly in the parts that can be freely designed: paint colors, tile patterns at the base, wrought-iron grilles, front doors, plants on the parapet, house names and numbers. In some communities, artistic façade projects add to this; in Cantagalo and Pavão-Pavãozinho street art has become part of the streetscape, while in Santa Marta colorful surfaces define whole stretches of the hillside.

An important distinction here is between design from within and design from without. Projects developed together with residents are experienced as an upgrade. Painting projects aimed mainly at photos from outside, on the other hand, regularly come under criticism — because they turn the façade into a backdrop while sewage and stairs remain unchanged. Anyone writing about favela architecture should keep that difference in mind. For more on treating communities respectfully, see our piece on visiting Santa Marta.

In architectural debates, favelas are often described as sustainable. That is partly true and should still be stated precisely. What is sustainable, first of all, are structural characteristics: high density, short distances, mixed use, pedestrian priority, few private cars, small living areas per person, very durable solid construction, and extensive reuse of building components.

Context matters here. Reusing doors, windows and grilles happens for cost reasons, not out of environmental awareness. Turning that into a sustainability ideal romanticizes a hardship. Conversely, it would be wrong to ignore this urban form's ecological footprint — per person it is significantly smaller than in the land-intensive housing forms of many affluent neighborhoods.

Since the 1970s, international professional debate has shifted its view of informal housing: away from the question of how to replace settlements, and toward the question of how to support what residents are already achieving. A particularly influential approach was to provide infrastructure, legal security and technical advice, while leaving the actual construction of the house to families.

• Incremental housing

  Housing units that are deliberately built incomplete and later expanded by residents are now an established model in Latin American social housing — on the argument that families know best what they need.

• Participatory planning

  Stairs, plazas, sports fields and community buildings are developed together with residents. Programs like Favela-Bairro in Rio are regarded internationally as a reference for upgrading without resettlement.

• Infill density instead of new development at the periphery

  The morros show that high density is possible with low building heights — a typology between the single-family house and the high-rise that is underrepresented in European debates.

• Mixed use on the ground floor

  Shops, workshops and services directly along residential paths create lively, self-monitored public spaces without any planning regulation.

• Community projects

  Mutirão principles have been formalized in publicly funded housing projects in Brazil, with mixed results: strong identification, but a heavy burden for those involved.

The people best positioned to speak about self-built construction are those who have built with their own hands. We are building an interview series for exactly this purpose. Until those conversations have taken place and been authorized, this space is deliberately left empty — we do not invent quotes or example houses.

If you are from a community, have built a home yourself, or work professionally on this topic, you can reach our editorial team at info@insidefavela.com.

Morro

Hill. In Rio, colloquially also used to refer to the communities on the hillsides.

Autoconstrução

Self-built construction: building and gradually expanding one's own house through personal effort, with family or local tradespeople.

Laje

A concrete slab, i.e. a rooftop terrace. Simultaneously usable space and the foundation for a future story.

Alvenaria

Masonry construction, usually hollow brick with concrete columns and ring beams — the most common building method.

Barraco

Historically, the simple first house made of wood or sheet metal. Today largely replaced by solid construction.

Escadaria

A staircase complex. Often the actual main street of a hillside neighborhood.

Beco

A very narrow alley between houses, often only about a meter wide.

Viela

A somewhat wider alley connecting several becos.

Mutirão

A communal building effort in which neighbors and relatives work together on a house or a community project.

Pedreiro

Mason. A central figure in self-built construction, usually with years of experience on formal building sites.

Regularização fundiária

Regularization: the legal formalization of informally built housing, for example through surveying and registration.

Caixa d'água

A water tank on the laje that offsets fluctuations in supply.

Puxadinho

A subsequent add-on, usually small and quickly built.

Cobertura

The topmost living level with a terrace — a sought-after place to live in favelas as much as in formal Rio.

Comunidade

Community; a widely used, less loaded term in Brazil for favela.

The architecture of the morros tells the story of its residents. Every extra story, every staircase and every rooftop terrace reflects decisions made by families who expanded their houses over many years — according to need, income, slope, and what could be achieved with their own labor and neighborly help.

This building method is neither a temporary fix nor an ideal. It has remarkable qualities: density without high-rises, short distances, mixed use, durable construction, open space on the roof. And it has unresolved issues: sewage, stormwater, slope stabilization, fire safety, accessibility, legal security. The two belong together — otherwise, you end up with either a cliché of misery or romanticized fantasy.

Understanding the architecture of favelas therefore also means understanding an important part of Rio de Janeiro's history: a city that had a large share of its housing built not through planning, but through the efforts of its own residents. The next time you look up at a morro, you won't see a sea of houses anymore, but thousands of individual decisions that together form an urban landscape.

We mark drawings as illustrations, do not use AI-generated images imitating documentary photography, and avoid figures that cannot be substantiated. Where research holds differing views, we say so. Notices of errors are documented in this section.