Complexo do Alemão in Rio de Janeiro. Some rights reserved.
Rio de Janeiro is not one, but many cities. There´s the one that most people have heard about - made up of posh beach facing neighbourhoods such as Copacabana, Ipanema and Leblon. Then there´s the city that gets less attention which includes vast informal settlements called favelas. Rio is one of the world´s most unequal urban agglomerations, with multi-million dollar apartments cheek by jowl with excruciating poverty. Extreme levels of urban fragmentation and segregation are partly responsible for fueling blistering levels of violent crime and victimization.
Yet not all Brazilians experience violence equally. To be sure, 80 percent of Rio de Janeiro´s residents believe they are at risk of being murdered in the next twelve months. But a closer inspection of the statistics suggests that roughly half of all homicides occur in just two percent of the city´s street blocks. And these blocks are overwhelmingly located in areas of concentrated disadvantage. Residents from these areas are routinely subjected to aggressive police sweeps and daily fighting between drug-trafficking factions.
