The unique spatial patterns of Rio de Janeiro: on topography, spontaneous architecture, and fashion
And why we’d cheat with a Brazilian
Happy Chinese New Year from the Big Apple,
I kept coming back to an essay, one that I wrote four years ago about my sojourn in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. It remained in my draft graveyard since 2020. Despite the time elapsed, I somehow found the energy to return to it.
Rio is unique, and I must share it with you.
It might have been the mountains and the sea, the unique urban form, or the colorful dresses. There, I felt I became a different person, more open, warm, maybe attractive, like the Cariocas.
—
My love for Rio began when I landed in Santos Dumont, a small airport by Guanabara Bay.1
Normally, landing in a new city meant an inevitable journey transiting from a distant airport—buried behind rings of industrial sprawl—to the city center. The first impression of arriving in the city of our dreams involved watching time slip away finding the right transit and sitting in traffic.
Santos Dumont is different. I remember walking out of the plane into a spacious arrivals hall, adorned with monumental paintings and vast glass windows overlooking the stunning bay. In the distance, I saw Christ the Redeemer standing sentinel on top of Corcovado Mountain, watching over the city.
Removing the layers of transport, Rio felt immediately intimate. It’s like eating food by hand, removing the extra layer of metal, food just tastes better.
I lingered in the arrivals hall, holding onto every detail of the scene in front of me. I’ll be back. Like love at first sight, my mind wandered to planning a future with Rio before my journey had even begun.
At the Santos Dumont airport.
Rio, a visual symphony
“Rio is a cacophony of instruments all playing different tunes yet somehow producing a cohesive melody of a city. And each musician is wearing their genders' version of a bikini." -Roosh
On the shoreline of Ipanema, a sort of visual complexity pulls eyes around. In the foreground Cariocas played beach volleyball and soccer by the bustling quiosques and mobile street carts selling refreshing cups of açaí. In the midground, on the steep hillside perched colorful box-like informal settlements, juxtaposed against the luxurious white modernist high rises. In the far distance, beyond the palm trees is a dreamy landscape: odd-shaped sugarloaf-like peaks peeked behind the misty clouds into the sky.
It was like a visual symphony, plus eye porn.
In the culinary world, greatness is achieved by mixing and matching different taste profiles and food textures. The most exquisite cuisine is often made up of a multitude of tastes experienced at the same time, be it the crisp cashew mixed in the smoothness of hazelnut cream or the touch of sweetness from apricot jam on the savory duck breasts.
Rio is comparable but on a topographical scale.2
It’s the mixture of texture from the mountains and water, an unusual mix of architecture, and a placement of things that challenges our conscience because they normally do not belong to the same picture frame.
On a narrow strip of somewhat inhabitable land surrounded by dramatic rock formations and cliffsides, the city found its way by squeezing into any available space.
“Rio is a chain of beaches flayed around some almost inhabitable rock cliffs.” —Josh Knox
Bottom: A topography map of Rio de Janeiro (source)
There is a technicality behind Rio’s urban form. Most cities fit into the standard urban model where a city’s population density decreases from a central point towards the periphery as people commute to the center to access the job market. This model applies to cities including Paris and Beijing, built on flat planes with radial roads converging from the city center.3
In Rio, on the contrary, numerous ocean inlets and steep forested hills fragment the built space, forming decentralized neighborhoods and producing unique urban traffic patterns.
On a bus ride from Centro to Barra da Tijuca, the roads followed the contours of the mountains and the winding coastline, passing through a variety of neighborhoods: the cobblestone hills of Santa Teresa that resemble Bernal Heights of San Francisco, the lagoon that features picturesque riverside buildings that reminded me of Fenghuang, China.
As an American, I tend to value the efficiency of getting from point A to point B. But commuting in Rio meant spending time on “inefficient” roads that twist and turn. As I rode along the coastline, I slowly learned to sit back and relax in the commute. Even though travel time was longer, these inevitable detours made the commute enjoyable.
Left: Beijing with population density concentrated at the center. Right: Rio de Janeiro with a more distributed population density (Source: Research Gate on Rio and Beijing).
Favelas, spontaneous architecture
Rio is not known as the safest city. There are favelas4 situated on the hillside. Yet there is a lot we can learn from them.
The architectural design of favelas is not planned. For decades, people helped each other with constructing the unit next door (on a whim it seems!), resulting in a complex and intricate pattern of interconnected buildings and winding stairway systems. For a visitor, it is easy to get lost; yet for residents, they are highly efficient. One always knows the fastest way to get from one side of the hill to the other, running into neighbors in between.5
I discovered an abundance of unique designs in Rocinha—the largest favela in Rio. The spontaneously created architecture created a thousand facades, diverse shapes, bright colors, and unusual ways of using materials. Every door is different, no two adjacent windows are the same, and each dwelling has its unmistakable look.
Top: Our tour guide showed us his home in Rocinha. On the top floor, conversation with the neighbor is just a low fence away. And they continue to build and work on the home to make it better.
I’m not sure how safe Rocinha would have been if I had wandered there on my own. But from the little that I’ve seen, they are rich in culture and hold strong community values.
Living in New York City, the city is also densely packed, yet we exist independently in our own spaces and spend a lifetime not knowing our immediate neighbors. While in Rocinha, architecture is social.
Residential developments in New York follow a carefully designed architectural plan that usually optimizes for financial feasibility—maximizing gross floor area (GFA) and revenue while adhering to the city’s planning codes and setback rules—monetary values take precedence over the experience of actual residents. The informal building culture of the favelas, on the other hand, meant the ability to build in iterations upon the live feedback of its residents.
The spatial patterns of these “slum architecture” can serve as creative solutions to modern urban residential developments, one that is spatially interesting, playful, and most importantly, encourages social connection.
Life in between the buildings in Rocinha. And on social architecture, we grabbed a beer with our guide at the local bar he frequents.
Cariocas, a passionate, attractive species
I have a theory. The unique topography of Rio produced a unique group of people.
I was there for about a month. I didn’t meet anyone that I can consider friends; I couldn’t find cafes where I could work from (at least back in 2020, hip coffee shops with lattes was not a thing in Rio). Yet, every time I glanced at the mountains and sea, the problems that I thought bothered me, didn’t. I felt at peace with myself under the alluring landscape. This feeling of inner content translated to a spirit of openness and an expression of outer joy.
To grow up playing sports with the backdrop of alluring mountains and dramatic curves, I think it does something to your psyche.
Garota de Ipanema: 🎶 "Tall and tan and young and lovely, the girl from Ipanema goes walking…"
Cariocas are known as a passionate crowd. Animated, affectionate, and expressive. There is a cultural concept known as calor humano, or human warmth, that values emotional openness and genuine connection.
One time I stood by the bus stop and a Brazilian walked up to me. The entire time we communicated via Google Translate, and yet the limited communication wasn’t a reason for holding back. He had a warm, infectious energy, a look with a kind of passion and a desire to really know you. It is no wonder there is a common saying that one that goes to Brazil is bound to cheat on their husband or wife. Somehow, it just made sense.
"I am attracted to free-flowing, sensual curves. The curves I find in the mountains of my country, in the sinuousness of its rivers, in the waves of the ocean." —Architect Oscar Niemeyer on how Rio's curves influenced his design philosophy.
Top left: steep hills of Rocinha, Top right: lagoon by Barra da Tijuca, Bottom: on the summit of Pedra da Gávea
This passion is exemplified in fashion.
At a dress event in Rio, individual designers showcased their dresses in a mansion tucked away in an urban forest. Wandering around rows of beautifully designed dresses, it is a style I rarely see.
Carioca fashion is defined by bright colors, bold prints, and structure. Put in more technical terms, the dresses are characterized by dramatic sleeves, structured with interlacing and internal lightweight boning to create angular, architectural shapes, along with pleating and gathering at the shoulder to create controlled volume. This kind of geometric boldness of the dress is a similar kind of boldness in the vibrant disposition of the people.
Fashion speaks a lot about the personality traits of a culture. In China, most clothing pieces are subdued in color, and flowy with soft materials. There is usually little structure or color saturation. It is telling of the culture—the Chinese perceive color as too much, and consciously or subconsciously are more reserved and do not want to stand out. And in New York, we all know that everybody wears black—kind and helpful but never friendly. The black embodies the culture of directness, remove the flashiness and move along.
I walked out of the mansion with bags of colorful, bold dresses.
I want to be like them, the Cariocas.
I want to learn to show affection and desires without holding back and to carry the passion and courage back home.
Rio, till next time,
Coco
Trespassing the seaside bike path (dangeous, but worth it.)
Thank you to friends who have helped with brainstorming, feedback, and edits on this essay (in chronological order since 2021): Inga Chen, Bryan Sim, Ambika Vohra, Matt Schneiderman,
(Claire Butler), Sahil, Arjun Madgavkar (), (Dominik Gmeiner), William Tran (), Camilo Moreno-Salamanca (), Cam Houser (), Josh Knox (), Bryan Liu (), and Rose ().The Santos Dumont airport was originally designed for seaplanes which at a point in time operated the majority of domestic and international flights, with extended runways built on reclaimed land over the ocean. Nowadays, most people fly into the international airport serving Rio (GIG in Galeão). I was lucky that I had transferred through São Paulo and arrived via Santos Dumont.
Topography refers to the arrangement of the natural and artificial physical and geographical features of an area, including its terrain, elevation, and landforms, often including mountains, hills, canyons, bodies of water, coastline, etc.
Cities generally follow 3 spatial distribution patterns: monocentric with a single central business district (CBD) (doesn't exist with cities >5M in population), polycentric with multiple clusters of economic activity (most common in large cities), and acentric with more dispersed and uniform distribution (in the case of Los Angeles); Order Without Design: Ch 4, Spatial Distribution of Land Prices and Densities: Models Developed by Economists.
In the table below, the R² value represents the similarities between the observed density value at each kilometer interval, and a higher number represents a similar radial distance from the center. Most cities in the world follow the standard model where R² values are above 0.8. Rio is the only city in this sample study with R² of 0.37, meaning that the pattern of concentric circles is not observed.
Favelas are informal settlements that are often referred to as slums. The term favela is named after the Brazilian creeping plant to describe the behavior of spreading rampantly without control. (Structures of Spontaneous Architecture in the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro by Patricia Parinejad).
To read more on favelas, I recommend this book: Nemesis: One Man and the Battle for Rio (Portuguese: O Dono Do Morro).
Fun fact: Each favela unit does not have a specific address, and people often receive mail from the nearby convenience store.