Favela Resistance: Urban Periphery, Pacification, and the Struggle for Food Sovereignty

Food is at the heart of well-being, peace, and health. But millions live without access to basic nutrition, and billions live without control or understanding of where their food will come from and how it is produced.

Nowhere is this problem clearer than in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro. Through meticulous research, community engagement and direct action within the Maré region—a cluster of seventeen favela communities in the northern zone of Rio—Antonis Vradis, Timo Bartholl, and Christos Filippidis have created a shocking, inspiring, and revolutionary collection of essays that go beyond the question of food in the Brazilian urban periphery, and highlights critical issues concerning state control, pacification, solidarity, and grassroots organizing.

Favela Resistance is a lens through which we can understand how the state creates marginalized lives in cities throughout the world under the auspices of welfare, security, and emergency support. The link between food and public security is intertwined with decades-long pacification operations in the favelas of Rio. This fight for food sovereignty shows how local production structures and solidarity networks have radically rethought and reconfigured the relationship between cities and farms; providing a map of how impoverished populations can organize resistance, create health and community, and fight—literally from the ground up—for a better world.

Timo Bartholl engages in local grassroots work and has lived in the Maré favela in Rio de Janeiro, since 2008. He works at the interface of university and community, is a geography professor at the Fluminense Federal University (UFF) in Niterói, Brazil, and a founding member of the Roça! Collective. Geographies in movement(s), militant investigation, favela resistance, urban struggles related to food sovereignty/food autonomy, collective economies and geopolitics from a global south perspective are his key fields of interest.

Christos Filippidis is an architect with a research background in critical urban geopolitics. He is currently an Independent Social Research Foundation Fellow in the Department of Architecture, University of Ioannina, Greece, investigating the urbanization of the Global South within the Cold War context.

Antonis Vradis is an urban geographer based at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. He is the director of the university’s Radical Urban Lab, a new research unit that tries to cut across hierarchies and to research, in a more egalitarian manner, some of the most pressing urban questions of today.

Minhocas Urbanas was the Maré based community action research group of Favela Resistance. It consisted of Maré residents Geandra Nobre do Nascimento, Alessandra de Lima, Bruna Pierroux, and local coordinator Timo Bartholl, at the time all members of Minhocas Urbanas's local research partner the Roça! Collective; Joelma Nobre do Nascimento de Oliveira, a local market vendor; Amanda Mendonça, a social assistant and public health specialist; Jamylle Andrade, a nutritionist, Naldinho Lourenço, a community media activist; and Juliana de Medeiros Diniz, an agroecological farmer from the periurban area of Magé.

Raj Patel is an award-winning author, filmmaker, and academic. He is a research professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, Austin. He is the author of Stuffed and Starved and The Value of Nothing.