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Strong spatial segmentation accompanied by persistent social imbalances justifies the use of the concept of socio-spatial fragmentation, which is key when it comes to analyzing the Brazilian metropolises. It is a way of rejecting traditional dichotomized visions that oppose the center and periphery, and of explaining the processes of segmentation that transform large Brazilian cities into kinds of patchworks that have contrasting morphologies and are made up of “pieces of town” that are occupied alternately by people with high-incomes and by people in highly precarious situations. Nevertheless, while the main aim of this paper is to display the particular geography of social inequalities in large Brazilian cities, specifically focusing on the phenomenon of the favelas, it also aims to think about the outcomes and effects of public action relating to precarious residential areas. For many years, public policies have wavered between attempts to eradicate the spaces of poverty, which involves removing their inhabitants, and the desire to requalify them in order to ensure the “right to the city” and the right to tenancy for the populations concerned. This issue is all the more important because the strategies of metropolitan marketing imposed by globalization on the one hand, and the fight against urban fragmentation on the other, are difficult to reconcile. However, as we are not able to deal with the socio-spatial fragmentation in all large Brazilian cities, we focus in this paper on the case of Recife, using other examples where necessary. In many respects, Recife is paradigmatic of the issue of “the right to the city” in Brazil. In Recife in particular, even during the dictatorship, the inhabitants of the favelas, aided by NGOs and academics, demanded regularization measures for their neighborhoods, in the name of the “right to the city.” These later became laws and juridical rules. Moreover, not being able to deal with all the types of public action conceived to reduce urban fragmentation, in this article we attempt to analyze the impacts and limits of the “regularization plan of special areas of social interest” (the so-called PREZEIS), which was implemented in Recife in 1987 in order to consolidate and regularize the favelas and the highly precarious urban areas, as the inhabitants had demanded. The first part of this paper is therefore dedicated to the consequences of metropolization in terms of urban fragmentation, as we can observe in Recife, whereas the second part analyzes the procedures and the effects of the PREZEIS regarding the requalification of precarious neighborhoods and the fight against urban fragmentation.