The 2014 FIFA World Cup is to be held in Brazil this year, and the final will be played in Brazil’s most famous city -- Rio de Janeiro.

Rio de Janeiro is neither the largest urban area in Brazil, nor is it the capital of the country. It is, however, Brazil’s most well-known and the most visited city. Rio is Brazil’s face to the outside world. When most people think of Brazil, they think of Rio de Janeiro.

Brazilian writer Coelho Neto coined the city’s nickname, Cidade Maravilhosa ("The Marvellous City"), in tribute to the natural beauty of its landscape.

And the scenery certainly is breathtaking: lush mountains next to sandy beaches, with a major urban centre nestled in between. The view from the top of Corcovado Mountain, from where Rio’s famous Christ the Redeemer statue overlooks the city is, in my opinion, one of the great vistas of the world.

Rio has been, for many years, a major cultural hub for both Brazil and the world. Bossa nova, a wonderful style of music with roots in jazz and samba, originated in the city, and has had a major influence worldwide. Rio’s annual celebrations for carnival are famous around the world, and have become so big that a permanent parade area has been set up just for them, with seating for over 90,000 people.

And of course, there’s football: Maracanã Stadium, where the World Cup final is set to take place, is one of the largest in the world, and the birthplace of Ronaldo, Zico and Romario is also home to five major football clubs.

Given all of this, it would make sense that Rio has been chosen as the venue for two of the world’s biggest international events. In addition to this year’s World Cup, it is also playing host to the 2016 Summer Olympics.

But what is surprising is that all of this is in spite of Rio’s darker side, the side of economic disparity and crime.

It is not that people aren’t aware of the problems. The city’s slums (known as favelas) are some of the most talked about and studied in the world, and are well-known as sites of urban warfare and violence. Brazil’s most successful movies internationally are about crime in Rio. City of God, a crime drama film that was nominated for four Academy Awards, is about the growth of organised crime in the city, and Elite Squad, the most commercially successful in Brazilian history, is about urban warfare conducted by the paramilitary corps that polices the favelas.

I stayed for three weeks in Rio’s upscale neighbourhood of Leblon on the south side of the city, and I could see the favelas from my hotel. They’re hard to miss -- upscale areas such as Leblon are near the beach, and the favelas run up all along the mountains behind them. Look up from Leblon, and you’ll see the slums.

But this seemingly insurmountable obstacle to having a decent image seems to have been largely overcome. Rio has been able not just to mitigate the negative effects of having this huge, ugly disparity, but to take advantage of it. Rio has turned its favelas from something that should scare people away into something that brings them in.

Tourists in Rio take tours of the favelas, the neighbourhoods having been re-branded as "open-air museums" that help bring people into the city. The image transformation has been so successful that the word favela has become almost a brand name, with themed bars such as "Favela Chic" in Paris or "Miss Favela" in New York using the brand name to attract customers even outside Brazil.

A lot of the credit for this change must go to the residents of the favelas, for the work they have done to try to reinvent the image of their own neighbourhoods. One example is Museum of Favela, an NGO founded by community leaders from the slums of Rio that has worked to change perceptions about the city’s favelas through various initiatives. Instead of giving in to the hope-sapping problem of having to live in a slum, these people found a way to address the problem in a novel way, by turning shame into pride.