Production of space and environmental conflict: The urban occupations for the right to the city

Abstract

While public investments promote the expansion and modernization of the Northern vector of Belo Horizonte's Metropolitan Region, Minas Gerais State (Brazil), the region of Isidoro becomes a propitious space for land tensions among different social agents, which are aggravated by involving a considerable green area that remains in Belo Horizonte city. Represented by the company entitled Granja Werneck S./A., the main claimants for the private tenure of the aforementioned region present, with legal support from the municipal administration, a different project with complex real estate products in favor of a planned and sustainable occupation. And, at the same space, Rosa Leão, Esperança, and Vitória occupations struggle to appropriate those public investments as a popular agenda to guarantee the right to adequate housing, mainly due to spatial location. In the midst of these tensions among the public sphere, the private one, and the occupations, this paper aims at discussing the resultant conflicts from the production of space in Isidoro through an environmental perspective. By means of a theoretical discussion, documentary analyses, and semi-structured interviews, the study of environmental conflict was based on the spatial and individual/social triads proposed by Henri Lefebvre (1991). As a result, the material dimension elucidated how Belo Horizonte city’s historical production directs the region of Isidoro to the current conflict scenario between people, who claim basic rights, and others, who aim at accumulating profit; whereas the dimension of ideas interpreted how the contemporary production of dominant knowledge perversely reinforces the guilt of poverty for ecological degradation; and the symbolic dimension demonstrated how the daily production of meanings in urban occupations is dialectically intermediated among domination and appropriation, exchange and use. Finally, it is warned that public-private discourses, when based on sustainable ideas, can disguise the daily lives of historically marginalized people, as well as delegitimize their mobilizations for the right to the city, from the moment they question the modern urbanism status quo and its preponderant exchange value of the space.

Keywords: Three-dimensional; Urban policy; Sustainable development; Social rights; Belo Horizonte city.