Rio de Janeiro’s Manguinhos district, a large urban area in the north of the city, is the site of around ten favelas, informal settlements in which some twenty-eight thousand people live in close proximity to industrial plants. The inhabitants suffer from a very high crime rate and a lack of public space and community facilities. Jorge Mario Jáuregui is a pioneer and advocate in the field of slum upgrading. In 1993 he started working with Rio’s Favela-Bairro program, which has reached out to hundreds of thousands of favela dwellers through small interventions. In 2005 the city commissioned Metrópolis Projetos Urbanos, Jáuregui’s firm, to undertake an urban-planning study of Manguinhos. The architects conducted interviews and hearings with the district’s inhabitants and representatives to understand both their immediate concerns and their long-term requirements, developing a detailed analysis of the area.

The result is a plan for the elevation of a major rail line adjacent to the district’s main road and the creation of a long public park in the space beneath. Raising the rail line will remove a physical and psychological barrier between Manguinhos and Rio at large and create a new public amenity equipped with scenic walkways, bicycle paths, and athletic fields. The park will be a central meeting place, thus enabling social connections. The architects have limited the number of people who will need to be relocated during construction and have incorporated replacement housing into the design. The project represents a new approach to slum upgrading: the entire community enjoys new infrastructure, and existing social networks remain largely untouched.

Jorge Mario Jáuregui is an architect-urbanist based in Rio de Janeiro and a graduate of Universidad Nacional de Rosário, Argentina. He earned his diploma in Urbanism at Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. In the 1980s he begn his research into the urban-social division between Rio’s favelas and the rest of the city. He was commissioned by the City Hall in 1993 to work on more than twenty projects of the Favela-Bairro Program. This “slum to neighborhood” project was based on interventions to "potentialize" social structures. Since 2007 Jáuregui has been working on two large-scale urban redevelopment projects in Rio de Janeiro—Complexo do Alemão and Complexo Manguinhos—that are being opened in 2010 by the Lula Government. Jáuregui was the recipient of the Veronica Rudge Green Prize in Urban Design from Harvard University's Graduate School of Design in 2000.

• • Design team: Jorge Mario Jáuregui (architect), Ana Luiza Sampaio, Eduardo Trelles, Maurício Santos, João Paulo Pope, João Paulo Figueiredo, Fabiana Matos, Flavio Nunes, Marcelo Fernandes (collaborators)
• Landscape design: Jorge Mario Jáuregui
• Engineers: Arte Pontes Consultoria and S. F. Engenharia (structural engineers)
• Construction: Consórcio Manguinhos
• Client: Empresa de Obras Públicas do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (EMOP)