Urban fissures as the outcome of enclaved condominiums, artificial topographies and represa formation: the case of Pampulha, Belo Horizonte

In the Latin American context the idea and practice of the horizontal metropolis is strongly related to the application ofthe urban grid and its promises of isotropic distribution of resources, density and demography upon a given territory.Belo Horizonte, a city built from scratch at the tail end of the 19th Century, is no exception. To found the capital city ofthe Minas Gerais state, the plan of 1895 by Aarão Reis proposed a symmetrical array of perpendicular and diagonalstreets. Rapidly outgrowing the 20th Century plan to become a large metropolis, Belo Horizonte is today the 6th largestcity in the country and the 14 municipalities that constituted the metropolitan region created in the 1970s have todayexpanded to 34, hosting a total population of almost 5 million people.The man-made mesh employed to construct Belo Horizonte at its inception would be quickly confronted with theterritory’s significant topographical features on the one hand, and abundance of minerals on the other. Rich in gold andiron ore, additional topographical manipulations related to the extraction of these prime resources have rapidlyaccumulated in Belo Horizonte’s surroundings. These processes have created a landscape of addition and subtraction,where extraction becomes entwined with the creation of new urban fragments. Over time, extreme manipulations ofground-surface conditions have not limited themselves to mining activities, but in the last three decades of metropolitanexpansion, have been performed to allow urbanization to take place in the form of high-rise heterotopic housing entities.The resulting terrain is a creviced one, where spatial and social horizontality is increasingly difficult to practice.Belo Horizonte’s urbanization process appears therefore to match the dominant descriptions in current studies on theincreasing urban divide and social segregation of metropolitan areas in the Latin American continent. In Brazilianscholarship on this topic, the use of fissure as a metaphor to discuss the mismatch of two different urban systems and the(conflicting) encounter of discordant materialities has recently been adopted to emphasize the subversion of preestablisheduses of space within a context of socio-spatial segregation (Montenegro Castelo, 2008). This broaderdiscussion on the emergence of urban fissures in the making of new cities in Brazil finds echo in the identification oftopographical ‘amnesias’ in Belo Horizonte (Teixeira and Ganz), where extreme manipulation of land is advanced toenable urbanization and overcome the natural features that would otherwise hinder its horizontal expansion.Adopting a more projective take on fissures as a leading metaphor to describe a territory, this contribution considers thespatial conditions that have fostered a fragmented urbanization by focusing on the relationship between natural andartificial topographies, residential enclaves and leisure complexes which are representative of Belo Horizonte’s staggeredurban development. Characterized by the transformation of land far away from the more concentrated core, themetropolis features a ‘checkered urbanism’ (De Meulder & Kasaweh, 2014) where artificial water reservoirs (represas) haveeither acted as urban catalysts for state-planned satellite towns and high-end condominiums, or are the visible testimonyof a post-mining landscape.The case of Pampulha is exemplary of the critical entwinement between enclaved settlement processes, artificial groundoperations and water storage production in Belo Horizonte. Pampulha forms the first episode of the dissertation and thecore of this paper. Archival documentation of the 1940 cornerstone intervention will be combined with an interpretativesectional investigation of its shifting topographies, underscoring the area’s participation in the wider challenge of equitableurbanization and resource (re)distribution. As a first fundamental fissure in the city’s development, the satellite settlementplanned along the lake offers an inspiring terrain for re-imagining projectively the conflicts between human settlementand ecological cycles.Pampulha is recounted as Belo Horizonte’s first big dam and artificial lake realized while Belo Horizonte was vigorouslytransforming under mayor Juscelino Kubitschek’s energetic guidance. Located to the north of the city centre, itsrealization not only served the purpose of reducing flooding in the downstream areas but also secured fresh water for theexpanding city. The resulting shoreline was expected to combine high-end residential tissue and leisure landmarksdesigned by Oscar Niemeyer and Roberto Burle Marx before Brasilia had even been considered under Kubitschek’spresidency.The case of Pampulha differs from that of other represas (artificial reservoirs) by virtue of the state-planned relationshipbetween urban fabric, landscapes of leisure and water supply. Far from the speculative shoreline developments inprotected natural areas or the creation of lakes for marketing new condominium complexes, Pampulha nonetheless is aspearhead of enclaved urbanism that is currently a dominant form of urbanization in Brazil.By combining archival material with descriptive and interpretative mappings, this paper will address Pampulha’semergence as one of Belo Horizonte’s primary urban fissures. By focusing on the relation between natural and artificialrationalities, it will further an understanding of the urban fabric’s horizontal dispersion in the form of enclavecondominiumsamong the artificial topographies of iron ore mining and a landscape of represas for the supply and thestorage of water.

ISBN:978-2-8399-1747-6

Publication year:2015