This chapter discusses resilience in informal settlements amid the COVID-19 pandemic of 2019–2022, focussing on the case of Favela Paraisópolis, a large informal settlement in São Paulo, Brazil. It highlights the importance of community organisation in building resilience while arguing the importance of the State's action in structuring informal spaces as a condition for greater success of community resilience. It seeks to clarify factors leading to community resilience in Paraisópolis and whether these factors can contribute to an expanded understanding of the concept. It does so by revisiting resilience theory and conducting a critical analysis of the history of the pandemic inside the favela, informed by interviews with key stakeholders and health and demographic statistics. It subsequently highlights the limits of these actions organised by an economically and politically oppressed population that lacks the necessary capital to face a health crisis of this magnitude. It draws attention to the risks of a neoliberal appropriation of the concept of resilience as a narrative that delegates the solution of societal problems solely to individuals and communities, taking the State off the hook. Finally, it highlights the power of resilience as a dimension of oppressed communities’ struggles for effective public policies.

This chapter addresses the multidimensional impacts of the COVID- 19 pandemic on the lives of citizens of one of the largest and most unequal metropolises in the world, São Paulo. It is widely recognized that Brazil’s response to the COVID- 19 pandemic has been more than flawed, with a disproportionate impact on poor and indigenous communities (Curtice, 2020; The Lancet, 2020). The virulent politicization of the pandemic set the powerful federal government, in the hands of a far- right populist, on a collision course with the interests of federal states and cities in Brazil. While the Brazilian president has repeatedly denied the gravity of the pandemic, states and cities struggled to impose partial lockdowns and to organize medical responses, in the face of contradictory policy being enacted in their distant capital, Brasilia. This chapter describes the structural circumstances that led São Paulo to become one of the cities worse affected by the virus, leading to the almost complete collapse of its public health system. While COVID- 19 was initially perceived as the ‘great equalizer’, infecting all regardless of race or social class, it soon became apparent that marked socio- spatial inequity means the effects of the pandemic are felt differently by various socio- economic groups in the city (see Xavier, Volume 2).

In order to approach these differences from a multidimensional perspective, we give accounts of three lifestories under the pandemic that illustrate these issues. These short accounts outline the daily lives of three ‘Paulistanos’ (inhabitants of São Paulo) who must negotiate urban space and access citizens’ rights in radically diverse ways.