Abstract

In traditional statistical systems, the adoption of categories by National Statistical Institutes with little social participation creates accessibility barriers and statistical invisibility for vulnerable populations, who often do not see themselves represented in official data. To overcome this challenge, the session proposal for the International Statistical Institute (ISI) Congress is grounded in the Copenhagen Framework on Citizen Data, which maintains that public statistics only acquire legitimacy and public value when citizens act as active agents throughout the entire data value chain.
The relationship of the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) with the mapping of popular territories dates back to the 1950 Demographic Census, a milestone when favelas were incorporated for the first time into a national census survey. Over more than seven decades, the Institute used various nomenclatures: "Favelas" (1950 and 1960), "Exceptional Urban Agglomerations" (1970), "Special Urban Agglomeration Sectors" (1980), and finally, "Subnormal Agglomerations" (used from the 1991 Census to the 2022 data collection). Although these revisions sought to ensure cartographic identification and methodological standardization, the prevalence of concepts framed by land tenure irregularity and infrastructural deficiencies ended up repeatedly defining these territories by negation and by what they lack.
In the context of citizen data, a key highlight is the trajectory of institutional reflection and broad dialogue promoted by IBGE with social movements, academia, and local leaders to replace the nomenclature "Subnormal Agglomerations" with the term "Favelas and Urban Communities." This change, formalized in January 2024, is grounded in the premise that naming is an exercise of state power and authority. Official concepts are not mere neutral cognitive operations, but ethical-political instruments that establish worldviews and recreate social reality. The expression "subnormal," used for four decades, operated as an "obstacle-concept" by labeling territories as "below the norm," "illegal," or "the flip side of the city," stigmatizing their residents.
The adoption of the term "Favelas and Urban Communities" represents an epistemological and political shift. This movement breaks with pejorative narratives and reorients official classification toward the normative framework of human rights, the right to adequate housing, and the social function of property and the city, guaranteed by the 1988 Federal Constitution and the City Statute. The newly drafted criteria define these spaces as popular territories arising from autonomous and collective strategies to secure housing and associated uses, valuing socioterritorial identity, cultural diversity, and the paradigm of potential over the homogenizing perspective of deficit.
Beyond the conceptual dimension, the session covers the dissemination stage and data capacity building through educational workshops aimed at community leaders and civil society organizations. These training sessions enable residents to autonomously access, interpret, and handle statistical and geospatial data on Favelas and Urban Communities, converting official information into a practical instrument for civic empowerment, participation in public debate, and social control. The experience demonstrates how national statistical systems can democratize information, rebuild institutional trust, and ensure that populations living in popular territories transition from passive subjects of counting to active participants in the production and appropriation of statistical knowledge.