14
Favelas, with their streets, buildings and residents, are not included on these maps. There
is a political and “technical” reason why slums are not drawn in government-approved maps.
Professor Paul Amar, a political science professor and expert on security and insecurity at
Rio’s Universidade Federal Fluminense, asserts that only registered houses and streets can
legitimately be drawn on a map (Interview by author, 6/25/04). Favelas are considered
“squatter settlements” and are not registered with the government for taxation and utilities
purposes. Nevertheless, according to Amar, map-making is a strategy that decreases the
visibility of the poor and increases the impunity of social control agents who police them
(Interview by author, 6/25/04). As other social scientists have shown, making a group
invisible is an effective way of marginalizing them as the “other” and protecting those who
mistreat them.
7
Map-making is an extremely powerful tool that can be used to exclude a given area
and/or community. John Price writes about the marginalizing effects map-making had on
outcaste groups during Japan’s Tokugawa period (1603-1868):
Since outcastes are ideologically outside normal society, they have been systematically
ignored or information concerning them has been distorted…outcastes were often not
listed in census tabulations…Some maps were made without outcaste settlements drawn
in, and distances indicated on maps were even foreshortened to exclude these
communities. (1966: 10)
Mapping defines the boundaries of place, space, and security. These maps demonstrate a
powerful way in which certain areas are shown as safe and others as “off limits” or insecure.
Promotional city government tourism literature shows certain places, areas, and people as
desirable, clean, and safe, and others—by extension of not being shown—at the very least
unimportant and excluded, and at the most, as potentially unsafe and dangerous. Map-making in
7
Huggins and Mesquita assert that the “civic invisibility” of kids makes them powerless in relation to the
State and more vulnerable to being victimized (1995: 265).
Convention