The Favela Community Land Trust (Favela-CLT) project was born in August 2018, shortly after the city of Rio de Janeiro experienced the largest wave of evictions in its history. At this time, some 80,000 people were removed from their homes, justified by the purported need to prepare the city for the mega-events that were hosted there, especially the 2016 Olympics. The enormous scale of this eviction policy, combined with a gentrification process that affected a number of favelas, made clear the inability of existing land instruments to guarantee the permanence of residents in their spaces. Faced with this scenario, we sought new ways to strengthen the security of tenure amongst Rio’s communities, making connections to an innovative model that emerged in the United States in the 1960s, and which today is being implemented across the world: the Community Land Trust (CLT).
