AMERICAN SHANTY TOWNS

Being part Brazilian, and having traveled to Brazil many times, I’m definitely familiar with the concept of a shanty town. In Brazil they call them “favela’s” and they literally pepper the landscape of that country, often growing to consume all the spaces between official public and private developments. They regularly spring up under highway overpasses, near railway tracks, along mountainsides and even in the alleyways between large skyscrapers. Probably established as a temporary shelters, they expand to form a patch work of improvised construction and makeshift infrastructure and sometimes over years, or even decades, evolve to become these sprawling outcroppings of found objects that are probably more like a Tim Burton take of some twisted Dr Seuss storybook-like town. They usually have nicknames, and the more established shanty towns have their own set of unique rules, customs, slang and subculture.

Anyhow, growing up I always associated shanty towns as a phenomenon of the third world limited to impoverished countries and rarely seen by American’s except as charity infomercials and National Geographic specials. Welcome to a post-Bush America…

Via PSFK. To see more Favela images checkout Flickr.