In Brazil's crowded favelas, green space is hard to come by, but this São Paulo community is showing how more sustainable favelas can give back to their residents.

"You have to remove the seeds before they flower."

Maria de Lourdes Andrade Silva is showing me how she picks the buds off a flowering basil plant as she tends to a vibrant community garden in a favela in São Paulo, Brazil – South America's largest city. "If you leave it to flower, it'll use up all its energy and it will die," she says.

When I visited this 0.5 hectare (1.2 acre) garden in Vila Nova Esperança favela in 2022, it was teeming with herbs, plants, vegetables and life. Today, it's been Silva's labour of love for more than a decade. Before Silva's efforts, it was entirely different: the disused space on the edge of the favela was piled high with rubbish and people would come here to dump things, she says.

Originally from Itaberaba, Bahia in the north-east of Brazil, Silva – better known as LiaEsperança, or Lia "Hope" – moved to the favela in 2003 having never lived in one before.

Home to more than 8% of Brazil's population, favelas – or Brazilian slums – are widespread informal settlements often situated on the periphery of major cities such as São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. They are home to low-income populations and can be built precariously on unstable land such as slopes and hills. They are often underserved in formal infrastructure – meaning they can be especially vulnerable to climate impacts and risks such as landslides – and commonly don't have access to public services such as sanitation.

In 2006, Silva, who was working as a florist in São Paulo, learned there was a process in place to remove the families living in the favela. The community is located near – and what São Paulo's Public Prosecutor's Office considered within – an environmental protection area. Because of the litter and lack of sanitation services, the settlement directly impacted the local environment, so the prosecutor wanted to remove the settlement and the litter, restore and promote reforestation of the area, and incorporate it into the nearby Jequitibá Park. It meant 600 families in the favela faced eviction.

"I thought, 'I have to do something to not lose my home nor anybody else's,'" says Silva.

Along with other members of the community, she set out to clean up the area and prove in the process that favela residents could benefit their local environment.

Silva guides me through the garden, ducking under giant passionfruit vines and past uniform rows of seedlings. "Before, the community was completely full of rubbish," she says. City waste collection didn't reach this informal settlement, so in 2006 she instigated a community clean-up which became a regular collective effort. The community also built a waste bin shelter to dispose of waste across the whole favela.

Silva argues that people don't intend to degrade the environment but do it because they don't know any different or lack access to necessary waste collection services.

In 2013, at a community meeting with over 200 residents a year after a court had ruled against a civil public action to evict the community, Silva warned that they still needed to find a way to coexist with the natural environment or face being forced from their homes. "We didn't have sustainability specialists to teach us how to preserve the environment, so we came up with the idea of creating a community garden," says Silva. "And with the garden, we would bring environmental education."

"I thought it was a great idea," says Cícera Maria Lino, a resident of Vila Nova Esperança who joined the efforts against eviction and has volunteered at the community garden since its beginnings. She grew up growing vegetables in the countryside of Pernambuco in the north-east of Brazil and moved to the favela in 2002. "It was a big fight [against eviction], and we didn't have energy at the time. But we got it with Lia."

Not everyone was immediately onboard with the garden project, however. Some residents felt the land should be used to build more houses or sold to bring in money to the community, locals tell me. Ultimately, though, when the community held a vote, the majority were in favour of the garden, they say.

At the beginning, some five or six residents started planting vegetables. "I started out of necessity," says Silva. "I had no idea it would snowball this far." The community began contacting NGOs and universities to help them build a sustainable community.

When Batista Santos, a security guard originally from Bahia, moved to Vila Nova Esperança from a neighbouring community in 2014, he heard about the project but didn't immediately get involved. "I was working 12-hour days... and working in the garden is hard work," he says. It wasn't until the pandemic hit in 2020 and he became unemployed that he started to participate and realised the value of the garden, he........

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