November arrived bringing the expected and welcome rain, but also great concern for the populations living in risk areas. According to a survey conducted in January by the Civil House and the Ministry of Cities, 1,942 Brazilian municipalities (34%) have residents in regions susceptible to landslides, flash floods and flooding. In total, 8.9 million people live in these conditions. The data, updated until 2022, show the urgency of government actions aimed at risk management and disaster prevention, as well as the land regularization of these properties, a measure that contributes to territorial planning and sustainable urban development, benefiting both residents and society.

Brazil has legal mechanisms for this. Social Interest Land Regularization (Reurb-S), implemented by Federal Law 13,465/2017, is a set of legal, urban, environmental and social measures that aim to regularize irregular settlements and grant title to their occupants, in order to guarantee the right to housing, the full development of the social functions of urban property and the right to a balanced and safe environment.

IEME Brasil works in the area of ​​land regularization through its Urban Development Department, composed of a multidisciplinary team (urban architects, lawyers, sociologists, social workers, engineers and other professionals).

Learn more about IEME Brasil’s work in this area

The housing situation in Brazil is worrying. The Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), in its 2022 Census, reports that there are around 16 million people living in more than 11 thousand favelas in the country. Furthermore, more than 236 thousand people live on the streets of Brazilian cities. The housing deficit reaches 6 million units and more than 5 million homes are irregular – they are houses in slums, squatters, communities and irregular subdivisions without access to basic sanitation and electricity. At least 1 in every thousand Brazilians has nowhere to live.

To minimize the problem, states and city halls find support in Federal Law No. 13,465/2017, which establishes Urban Land Regularization (Reurb). This is a comprehensive process, which involves legal, urban planning, environmental and social measures. The legislation extends, in particular, to areas predominantly occupied by low-income populations, through the Urban Land Regularization of Social Interest (Reurb-S).

IEME Brasil has long worked with land regularization in São Paulo, supporting the Secretariat of Urban Development and Housing of the State of São Paulo, through the Cidade Legal Program, providing advice to more than 95 partner municipalities, in addition to the Municipal Secretariat of Housing of São Paulo (SEHAB) and several city halls, such as the cities of São Bernardo do Campo, Mauá, Suzano, Guarulhos and Itaquaquecetuba. In these projects, it applies its knowledge about possible urban planning and legal alternatives to effectively fix communities in their place of residence, being identified as one of the companies specialized in developing projects aimed at recognizing the right to decent housing.

About Reurb

In the legal aspect, Reurb seeks to guarantee property title to occupants of informal urban areas and, consequently, security and legal stability in possession of the property, as well as other rights arising from this regularization. The urban measures in the process aim to adapt the subdivisions to the regularized city, including the implementation of essential infrastructure. On the environmental side, the focus is on settlements without licensing and in violation of regulations. Social measures seek to provide quality of life, especially for low-income families.

Reurb emerges as a fundamental instrument for integrating informal urban centers into territorial planning, guaranteeing rights and promoting sustainable urban development. And IEME Brasil works towards this.

IEME Brasil started a new contract with the São Paulo Municipal Housing Secretariat (SEHAB) to provide specialized services in the area of urban development. It is worth remembering that the previous work with SEHAB extended from 2012 to 2019 and benefited 82,056 families.

In that project, IEME was a pioneer in carrying out the registration of families using the municipal system Habisp and HabitaSampa. The work was carried out in all regions of the city of São Paulo and with different types of housing (slums, irregular subdivisions, housing complexes, tenements, etc.). In the final line of the process, after thousands of individual analyses, there was the delivery of property titles to eligible families that irregularly inhabited the mapped places.

The work involved architects, in the survey of each house (state, area, finishes, etc.), social workers, who collected documents and registered the families (number of residents in each unit, income, children and school attendance), and lawyers, who carried out the screening and analysis to categorize the situations encountered. With this information in hand, the city hall assigned property titles to those who were able to do so.

Before land regularization, families were afraid that someone would invade the house, because they did not have a property title. “Once they receive the title, everything changes. Life becomes more peaceful and they even invest in the conservation of the property. It is very exciting to see that, in some way, we are contributing to improving people’s quality of life”, says Liana Becocci, director of IEME Brasil.