Maré (or Complexo da Maré), in the northern periphery of Rio de Janeiro, is a complex of several favelas with 130.000 inhabitants stacked on 10 sq.km. The Museu da Maré was created by popular initiative to reclaim and de-stigmatise the identity of the neighbourhood. Tesserae researchers had the chance to visit the place and get in contact with the promoters thanks to the CoCreation project.
Forgotten for almost a decade, the complex of buildings that once constituted the offices for the administration of statistics under the old socialist regime came to the center of the public discourse as a symbol of an across-the-board struggle for the right to the city of Berlin. Civic society actors and public stakeholders joined their efforts to put the unconditional selling of publicly-owned buildings to a halt, stressing the need to replace the monetary principle with the pursuing of the societal common good. The professionalization of bottom-up forms of activism claiming space for culture and diversity transformed the Haus der Statistik initiative into a large-scale project. This currently aims at regenerating the buildings to benefit local neighborhoods, refugees and cultural producers alike through the implementation of participatory practices of urban development.