We also end up with favela-type housing on the edges of the capital – people living in garages, sheds, in homes of multiple occupation, in abysmal conditions.
By Colombia's own reckoning, there are up to seven million people living in extreme poverty (favela-like housing with no electricity or clean water).
Rio's biggest challenge is to improve conditions and cut crime in more than 30 favelas that house more than 1 million of the city's 9 million inhabitants.
According to official data, there are 487 individual neighborhoods in Belo Horizonte including 215 favelas, vilas (up-dated improved favelas), and other public housing spread throughout the city.
At the more desirable bottom of the favela, a two-bedroom house can go for R$80,000 (around £22,000).
Waiting for a flight at São Paulo airport a few months ago, I caught the end of one that showed a blonde actress fleeing timidly through a "favela" with cardboard-looking houses, street lamps and implausibly placid onlookers.
The prefeitura's emphasis is pointedly on what it calls "essential", "emergency" and interim electricity and sanitation works, predicated on its commitment to provide alternative housing for the Favela do Moinho families, in a social housing development currently under construction close to Ponte dos Remédios, eight miles from the city centre.
For inspiration, Mr. Aravena drew on favelas and slums, building small housing units that can be easily expanded, while working closely with local residents.
"I'm excited for the money," says 49-year-old Erineia Goncalves, a single mother of two who hopes to leave her rented accommodation and build her own house in the favela where she lives.
In 2000 Bob pounced on the then governor of Rio, Anthony Garotinho, at his inaugural international press conference, and presented the plans of an abandoned warehouse behind his house on the favela's peak, challenging him to station a police squad there.
