Rio's planning institute, the IPP, keeps a municipal register of favelas — SABREN — and publishes its boundary layers openly on data.rio under CC BY 4.0; the 2022 reference layer holds 1,072 polygons drawn by photointerpretation of aerial imagery. Being on the map cuts both ways: the same municipal geography that underpins service planning also carries the Geo-Rio "risk area" reports used to justify demolitions. Street mapping inside favelas began with residents in 2013 under UPP Social, but that programme is defunct, and postcodes reached Maré only through a federal scheme in 2026.
1,072 favela polygons in the 2022 reference layer, published as open GIS under CC BY 4.0 (data.rio item modified 29 January 2025); SABREN itself records 1,018 favelas and 440,552 households — two counts from the same institute at different vintages.
🎓 Lesson
A boundary layer is a political instrument. The same polygon that tells a utility where to lay pipe can be labelled a risk area, and publishing it openly does not decide which use wins.
Evidence🏛️ Official
Scale🏙️ City-wide
FundingCity of Rio de Janeiro (IPP budget)
Sources
↗ DATA.RIO — Limite Favelas 2022 (IPP boundary layer)Item metadata (read via the ArcGIS Hub API, hub.arcgis.com/api/v3/datasets?q=Limite+Favelas+2022, because the /about page is JS-rendered and returns no body to automated fetch): licence CC-BY-4.0, 1,072 records, owner Prefeitura da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, modified 29 January 2025, description "Cadastro de Favelas da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro, ano referência 2022". Carries the record count, the licence and the currency date.
↗ ArcGIS item search — "Limite Favelas" seriesConfirms a multi-year series (1999, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2022) owned by PrefeituraRio, all CC-BY-4.0, hosted on pgeo3.rio.rj.gov.br. Carries the claim that this is a maintained time series, not a one-off publication.
↗ SABREN — Sistema de Assentamentos de Baixa Renda (IPP)The operator's own public application. Direct fetch returned only the word "SABREN" (ArcGIS Hub is JS-rendered); the figures of 1,018 registered favelas and 440,552 households come from the site's indexed text and are repeated in Observatório das Metrópoles research. Carries operator identity and the registry counts.
↗ Dicionário de Favelas Marielle Franco — SABRENScholarly wiki. Sole source for the founding dates — a 1983 "Cadastro de Favelas da Cidade do Rio de Janeiro" and the formal system in 1990, when the municipality decided monitoring needed "um sistema próprio e mais complexo". Also carries the method: "Área mensurada através da delimitação dos assentamentos com características de favela por meio de fotointerpretação", using orthophotos of 1999, 2004, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2013 and 2015. yearStart 1990 rests on this source alone — IPP's own pages returned 503.
↗ RioOnWatch — A importância e os desafios de colocar as favelas no mapaCarries the street-level mapping claim: UPP Social/Rio+Social mapped 12 favela complexes (56 communities) in 2013 with residents redrawing alleys, paths and staircases — and that the programme is now defunct. Also documents Google removing the word "favela" from its maps around 2013 and the resulting community objection.
↗ RioOnWatch — O fantasma das remoções volta a assombrar moradores da EstradinhaThe counterweight, sentence-level: "um laudo da Geo-Rio, órgão responsável pelas avaliações de riscos geológicos, apontou a comunidade Estradinha e outras sete favelas como áreas de 'alto risco'" — the classification preceded demolition of about two-thirds of the community's homes by 2010, with residents arguing in court that required risk studies were skipped.
↗ Faulhaber & Azevedo, SMH 2016: Remoções no Rio de Janeiro Olímpico (Mórula, 2015)The book-length account of Olympic-period removals, built on municipal data. Cited totals conflict across summaries (about 60,000 people per the authors; other accounts give 67,000 families for 2009–2013) and could not be resolved to a single sentence — no removal total is stated in this entry.
↗ Agência Brasil — 120 mil moradores da Maré vão ter um CEPApril 2026. Carries the claim that formal addresses arrived in Maré through the FEDERAL "CEP para Todos" (Ministério das Cidades with Correios), not the municipal programme — thirteen years after the municipal street mapping. Verified at search-summary level only; the audio page and the Ministério das Cidades article ("Conteúdo Restrito") were not fetched, so no CEP counts are quoted in the entry.
↗ IBGE — Censo 2022: Favelas e Comunidades Urbanas (context, federal)Federal statistics, deliberately NOT the subject of this entry. IBGE renamed "aglomerados subnormais" to "Favelas e Comunidades Urbanas" in January 2024; the 2022 census counted 12,348 such areas nationally with 16,390,815 residents, Rocinha the most populous single favela at 72,021. Included only to mark that the federal and municipal bases are separate and their lists diverge.
📎 Cite this project
1001 Smart Cities (2026). “SABREN: Rio's Municipal Register of Favelas” — Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The Smart City Atlas. https://1001smartcities.org/projects/rio-sabren-favela-register/ (last verified 2026-07-26). Data: CC BY 4.0.
The underlying data is free to reuse with attribution — see the open data page.
