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It’s a Saturday afternoon in Jardim Colombo, a favela southwest of São Paulo, and residents have gathered in Fazendinhando Park for a community cleanup event. Volunteers in bright pink T-shirts swirl around the hillside, sweeping pathways, applying rainbow-colored paint to park surfaces, and handing out free household supplies while children jump rope and kick a soccer ball on the playground.
At the center of the action is 27-year-old resident Ester Carro. As a professional architect and the visionary behind Fazendinhando Park, Carro could easily be giving orders. Instead, she’s shoulder to shoulder with other volunteers, picking up loose scraps of garbage and pouring paint into roller trays. The only time she puts down her paintbrush is when her seven-year-old son, Ilias, comes up to give her a hug.
In 2017, Carro stood before the 2,000-square-foot lot, wondering how she would transform the abandoned site into the community’s first leisure space. When Carro was a little girl, the area was a small farm (or fazendinha), where cows and horses grazed. When the man who cared for the land and animals became ill, the area fell into disuse and residents started disposing of their garbage there. Over time, the mound of trash grew bigger until it swelled to the size of a landfill, with mattresses and other detritus cascading down the hill, overflowing onto streets and into neighbors’ homes. The dump was home to poisonous snakes and scorpions, and the decomposing trash produced toxic methane gasses linked to cancer and other serious diseases.
Local officials had promised to extend garbage pickup and other basic services to the favela, home to 18,000 people. But Carro didn’t expect anything to change—she had experienced their lofty promises and delayed action before. So she took things into her own hands, carrying out a revitalization of the community inspired by Parque Sitiê, a landfill turned ecological reserve in Rio de Janeiro’s Vidigal favela.
Clearing the area would require removing 100 garbage trucks’ worth of trash by hand over a grueling two-year period. But Carro was undeterred. The park was but the first step in her plan to restore dignity to her beloved community.
Growing up in Jardim Colombo, Carro lived in a modest home in the shadow of another landfill. There was little more to the structure than outer and inner walls, and the house was infested with rats and cockroaches. She was so ashamed to live there that she never invited friends over after school. And there was no park where they could gather and play. “It felt like our community had been forgotten,” she says. “We lived in precarious housing, without public, educational, and cultural facilities or green areas.”
Because favelas are unplanned, unregulated settlements on the periphery of major Brazilian cities—usually on flood-prone hillsides and river plains—they often lack basic infrastructure and public services. Waste collection is limited due to high-density housing and complicated topography, among other factors. Improper disposal of trash leads to environmental hazards like flooding and air pollution, as well as the spread of diseases. A 2006 study examined factors like environmental conditions and the “burden of disease” to determine that life expectancy varies by nearly 13 years between wealthy areas and favelas. While access to green space may not seem as urgent a priority as, say, access to clean drinking water, studies have identified myriad health benefits associated with being in nature, from improved sleep and reduced stress to lower mortality rates and infectious diseases.
While Carro’s family and neighbors struggled to get by, residents of the neighboring community of Morumbi, one of São Paulo’s richest neighborhoods, lived in high-rise apartments with private pools and tennis courts—a contrast famously captured in this photo by photographer Tuca Vieira.
The nearest school was a 40-minute walk from Carro’s house, and getting there required walking on busy roads as cars sped by. But Carro loved school and fantasized about becoming an architect, a dream she’d had since her grandmother, who worked as a housekeeper, started bringing home design and architecture magazines from her clients’ houses. Carro was fascinated by the magazines and spent hours sketching what she saw.
As she got older, Carro became more serious about the profession, especially as her father, Ivanildo, went from being a construction worker to taking on more of a leadership role in the community. As part of his new position, Ivanildo led architects from city hall around Jardim Colombo and helped draft plans for the neighborhood’s redevelopment. Carro followed him to all the meetings and site visits, witnessing how urban planning and legislation could transform communities. “I didn’t know it then, but the seeds of Fazendinhando were planted,” she says.
Because of her early exposure to architecture, Carro assumed she’d be set up to succeed when she was accepted to Faculdades Metropolitanas Unidas, a private university located in Vila Mariana, an hour and a half by bus from Jardim Colombo. To her dismay, the opposite was true. Carro was the only one of her classmates from a favela, and many of the references in class were over her head—unlike the other students, she’d never traveled outside Brazil or been to a museum. “It was a shock,” she remembers about her first year at university. “I realized I’d have to work three or four times harder to get to the same point as my classmates.”
The biggest hurdle came the summer between her first and second years, when Carro found herself unexpectedly pregnant. She was only 19 and would have to take a semester off. She fell into a depression and wondered if she’d ever muster the strength to go back to school—she’d read there was a 1% chance that a single mother from her background would complete education.
But when she gave birth, her sadness gave way to fierce resolve: She would achieve her dream and affect real change in Jardim Colombo, not just for herself but for her son. “When I held Ilias in my arms for the first time in the maternity ward, he became my everything, my hope, and I knew that I was no longer living for myself but also for him,” she says.
Three years later, Carro graduated with a degree in architecture and urbanism from Centro Universitário FMU and immediately got offered a scholarship to complete her master’s degree. She accepted but never lost sight of her vision to transform Jardim Colombo, even when she landed an internship at the mayor’s office. “I wanted to be dedicated to my community, and I wanted to be paid to do it,” she says.
In the early stages of the Fazendinhando initiative, Carro had very little support both from within and outside the community. Residents were skeptical about change, and government services couldn’t be counted on. Clearing the landfill and constructing the park required creativity and resourcefulness.
As a first step, Carro reached out to Arq.Futuro, a Brazilian think tank that helped structure and organize the Parque Sitiê project in Rio de Janeiro. After obtaining their support, Carro and Ivanildo contacted local humanitarian organizations for funding, then created a community task force and a cleanup schedule. Once the piles of trash had been cleared, Carro and a group of volunteers—mostly young people and women—went around the community, collecting discarded materials that could be repurposed in the park. Car tires were stacked, painted, and turned into seating, while a fridge was turned into a lending library. Carro then invited 40 local graffiti artists to come to the community to create colorful murals, and in July 2018 Fazendinhando hosted its first event: an arts and cultural festival with talent shows, origami-making instruction, and karate performances. “The whole community was participating and enjoying themselves,” recalls Carro.
The opportunity to focus full-time on Fazendinhando came in 2020, when São Paulo became one of the global epicenters of the coronavirus pandemic. Carro decided to pause the park’s expansion and solve the community’s more immediate needs.
A survey of 900 people in Jardim Colombo revealed that the women of Jardim Colombo were most vulnerable to the economic impacts of COVID-19. So Carro and a group of volunteers started paying female residents to make packed lunches for children and other vulnerable members of the community. Next they recorded educational videos—about cooking, woodworking, and basic electrician skills, among other subjects—and sent them to residents via WhatsApp. The videos combined theoretical and practical knowledge so the women could apply what they learned to their lives. Of the 80 residents who received training, several went on to be hired full-time in these fields, while others used the skills to renovate their houses and create shelving for the community’s art gallery, which opened inside a shipping container a five-minute walk from the park last year.
Because of the work that she and other volunteers carried out during those critical first few months of the pandemic, Carro received some donations that are currently keeping her—and the Fazendinhando initiative—afloat. In the coming years, she hopes to start a vegetable garden and open a gazebo where additional concerts and other programming will be hosted. She also dreams of helping revitalize other favelas in Brazil. But her priority will always be Jardim Colombo.
“There are things we don’t see because we look far away, even though the problem is right in front of us,” she says. “We waste too much time trying to do big changes when all we need to do is work little by little, and consistently, in our backyards.”