ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

ocupações:

a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

ocupações:

a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

word count: 8.756

student: 21176609

UCL, bartlett school of architecture MA architecture and historic urban environments

BARC0068: final project tutor: Dr Lakshmi Rajendran

I would like to thank the following people without whom this dissertation wouldn’t exist. Thank you to my tutor Lakshmi, for her guidance and help in moments of panic, and all the guest critics for their invaluable comments. To my MAHUE friends who have given me support, encouragement and brought comic relief during our long studio days. To my family who believed in my dreams and gave me their full support.

summary

introduction

belo horizonte: the planned unequal city - centro centro: vacant buildings and social housing - site analysis - social housing ocupações: social housing as a community resource - ocupação carolina maria de jesus - ocupação zezeu ribeiro e norma lúcia zezeu ribeiro e norma lúcia: design for the commons - moments discussion - important takeaways - limitations and further research conclusion references image and illustration list appendix

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

image 01 - centro and railway view from viaduto francisco sales

“When Housing Is a Privilege, Occupation Is a Right”: Housing Struggles in Brazil

abstract

This project aims to look at the existing vacant buildings in the centre of Belo Horizonte (Brazil), exploring the possibility of repurposing them through social housing as an alternative to the existing housing policy in Brazil. The idea for this project comes from the condition of many city centres in the country, which have been experiencing a process of degradation and reduction of their population since the 1980s, as well as data that states that there are over 6.8 million unoccupied domiciles while the country’s housing deficit is around 6.3 million units.

The appropriation of vacant buildings is already a common practice in the city centre in many cities in Brazil and South America through socialpolitical movements, that establish squatting communities and fight for their right to the city and housing. These movements suffer immense pressure from authorities and law enforcement, as many challenges arise, the main problems being the change of ownership of the properties, be it privately or publicly owned buildings, and how or if the public authorities should be part of such redevelopments.

The intention to work with existent vacant buildings and squatting communities is to take a stance that reusing buildings, which are part of the city’s collective memory, is a way to value and reinforce the city’s urban identity and guarantee access to the city life for

a marginalised population.

The objectives of this work are to value the city centre through its historical buildings, to address the importance of social housing and the presence of people in such urban context as well as to question the current social housing policies through the proposition of a different model. This is done in this work through the study of the existent squatted communities in the city centre, called Ocupações in Portuguese, and the proposal of small-scale design strategies for the common areas of these buildings with the aim to empower the existent community, potentializing its existing conditions, creating new ways of inhabiting the city centre and becoming a catalyst for a bigger change in this area as well as an example for future Ocupações.

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

“The problem is not architecture. The problem is the reorganization of things which already exist.” (Yona Friedman in Brillembourg, 2013)

“A call to action to our fellow architects, and all those who hope to become architects, to see in the informal settlements of the world the potential for innovation and experimentation, and to put their design talents in service to a more equitable and sustainable future.” (Brillembourg, 2013)

image 02 - central station and railway

This dissertation discusses the condition of the city centre of Belo Horizonte, in Brazil, looking more specifically at the existent vacant buildings and exploring the possibility of repurposing them through social housing as an alternative to the existing housing policy in Brazil. The idea for this project comes from the condition of many city centres in the country, which have been experiencing a process of degradation and reduction of their population since the 1980s, as well as data that states that the number of unoccupied domiciles is greater than the country’s housing deficit.

This work looks specifically at the situation in Belo Horizonte, similar to many other cities in Brazil and Latin America, but also has its particularities. Belo Horizonte is a planned city that was inaugurated in 1897, being designed to be the new capital of the state of Minas Gerais, and therefore it was expected to house all public employees and the state’s elite. The historical spatial segregation created by the city planning that only included housing for the higher income population and left the working-class population to create informal settlements outside of the city is still present even though the city has already the city has grown outside of the planned limits, and it is home to over 2.5 million people.

Following this constant history of unequal occupation, this work looks

introductionmore closely at the city centre – the planned city of the 19th century – and the opportunities it might present to welcome a population that has always been part of the workforce of the area but was never allowed to live there. Doing this through the investigation of the vacant buildings and the possibilities they might have for being repurposed into social housing projects.

One of the existent ways that vacant buildings have been repurposed in Brazil, has been through social housing movements that occupy buildings that have been vacant for decades not following their social function. Those movements create Ocupações, a squatted community that repurposes those empty buildings to fit their housing needs in the city centre.

The appropriation of vacant buildings is already a common practice in the city centre in many cities in Brazil and South America through socialpolitical movements, that establish squatting communities and fight for their right to the city and housing. These movements suffer immense pressure from authorities and law enforcement, as many challenges arise, the main problems being the change of ownership of the properties, be it privately or publicly owned buildings, and how or if the public authorities should be part of such redevelopments.

The intention to work with existent vacant buildings and squatting

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

“It is unacceptable for a person to freeze to death for living on the street in a country that has 6 million empty properties!” - 19 May 2022

“Belo Horizonte Hypercenter has at least 89 idle properties waiting for a new use” - 21 May 2018

“Brazil has 6.9 million homeless families and 6 million empty properties, says urban planner” - 07 May 2018

“In Belo Horizonte, urban occupations built more housing than the city government. A report from the Chamber shows that 35% of the houses built by the city are for families removed by the city itself.” - 26 August 2020.

“Hunger grows in Brazil and reaches 33.1 million people in 2022 National Survey on Food Insecurity shows that only 4 out of 10 families managed to have full access to food during the pandemic” - 08 June 2022

“Abandoned buildings in BH cost R$ 5.7 million (£946k) per year” - 23 January 2013

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

communities is to take a stance that reusing buildings, which are part of the city’s collective memory, is a way to value and reinforce the city’s urban identity and guarantee access to the city life for a marginalised population. This will be done through the proposal of design strategies for the common areas of one of the squatted buildings identified in the centre of Belo Horizonte, the Ocupação Zezeu Ribeiro e Norma Lúcia, trying to understand how these developments can influence the existent social relations between the community itself and with members of the outside, as well as given strength to the social movement and influence the urban space around it.

The key research questions this study addresses are:

How can vacant historical buildings be repurposed into social housing?

How does this repurposing act can be a catalyst for revitalisation of the city centre?

How can social housing be a resource for community-led regeneration initiatives?

The objectives of this work are to discuss the historical context of spatial segregation that has existed in the city of Belo Horizonte since its planning in the 19th century, looking more specifically into the city centre and its historical vacant buildings addressing the importance of social housing in such context. The study also aims to question the current social housing policies

through the analysis of the existent informal squatted communities, the Ocupações, in the area.

This will be done through a series of small-scale design strategies for the commons, having Ocupação Zezeu Ribeiro e Norma Lúcia as a case study for the propositions. The idea behind the strategies is that they showcase different possibilities of uses that can be developed by the community at different times and locations, according to their needs and allowing them to maintain one of their most important characteristics, the ad hoc manner that Ocupações are developed.

Note: all quotes from Portuguese written works were translated to English by the author of this dissertation.

“Giving these currently decadent regions conditions for development and recovery is a fundamental task within an idea of recognition and appreciation of the city.” (Pontes, 2006)

image 03 - centro and railway

belo horizonte: the planned unequal city

The object of study of this work is the city centre and the development of social housing in Belo Horizonte (Brazil), a city that was planned by the end of the 19th century to be the new capital of the state of Minas Gerais. To better understand the existing conditions that will be presented in the next chapters, it is necessary to look through the history of the new capital and how housing, especially for lower-income populations, has been dealt with.

The new capital was planned by the engineer Aarão Reis, between 1894 and 1897 (image 05), being one of the first cities in the country to be designed and the first after Brazil became a republic (1889), it was meant to merge European and American traditions of urban planning, with a rational grid, perpendicular streets cut by diagonal avenues, that opened to monumental perspectives, blocks of about 100m and an avenue delimiting the city centre’s extension, Avenida do Contorno (Prefeitura Belo Horizonte, 2020). Inside this planned area would be located the essential public buildings, educational and cultural establishments, as well as housing for the government employees and the state elite that decided to move to the new city.

Before the inauguration of Belo Horizonte, informal settlements already existed outside this planned area, as there was an “absence of area thought or planned for the poor population, represented by a large number of construction workers, adventurers, and immigrants that had

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

Brazil

Minas Gerais

Belo Horizonte Centro image 04 - location of belo horizonte

belo horizonte: the planned unequal city

difficulties to settle since the first moments of the city’s construction” (Gomes and Lima, 1999 in Pontes, 2006) as there was no provision of housing for this population. Showing how housing, from the beginning, was seen as a private problem and not as a matter of a collective (social) order that deserves systematic action by the State (Lourenço, 2014)

Until the 1930s, a hygienist view dominated the ideas over urban planning, therefore the informal settlements, like the ones developing in Belo Horizonte since the late 1800s, were overlooked by the State and were considered a sanitary problem that should be dealt with by the police instead of being seen as a social right that should be guaranteed to the population (Bonduki, 2004). From the 1940s onwards, a very

characteristic typology of the 20thcentury urbanisation in Brazil started to be developed by pension funds in the form of housing blocks for the working middle class (Singer, 1973 in Lourenço, 2014), (image 06) but these were never intended for social housing, having this population relegated to precarious settlements on the outskirts of the growing city limits.

It is in the second half of the 20th century, that the first favelas start to grow in the South of the city, an area that later would become the vector of real estate growth for the wealthiest population of the capital. During these decades, Brazil went through a strong economic and urban growth, that left the lower-income population out of the formal market and resulted in the growth of favelas and different informal settlements. (Maricato, 1987 in Lourenço,

image 05 - map of the planned city of belo horizonte with north facing down

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

image 07 - 1955 photo of centro, ocupação zezeu ribeiro e norma lúcia building location highlighted

image 06 - historical photo of pedreira prado lopes, one of the first favelas in Lagoinha, one of the first informal settlement of belo horizonte

centro

belo horizonte: the planned unequal city 2014).

This economic growth had a direct effect on the area investigated in this work, the centre of Belo Horizonte. The centre – which will be referred to in this work as Centro – is the historical planned city from the late 1800s, it compromises 13 neighbourhoods (image 08) that have a completely different characteristics and developments, but the actual area identified by most of the citizens by the name Centro is very particular and uniform.

Centro, once occupied by the wealthy population of the new capital’s elite, starts suffering with the exodus of

this population in the 1970s, becoming a strong migration between the 1980s and 1990s, when this group was attracted to the new front of high-end real estate developments in the southern area of the city. This is the beginning of a cyclical process where the economical and populational depletion feed the degradation of the region and vice versa, consequently leading to the degradation of the built environment and the existence of many vacant buildings (Mc Murtrie, 2021).

This move to the South from the higher income population created two different realities, one that is very usual in many Latin American metropolis, where the high-end high-rises are neighbours to the established favelas,

image 08 - map of neighbourhoods in centro

Belo Horizonte - centro’s neighbourhoods

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte but it also resulted in the removal of other less established informal settlements. The poorest population are moved to the most peripheral areas of the city, reserving those with the highest social status the best places in the city, showing how the spatial mobility reflects the socioeconomic segregation of the population from Belo Horizonte. (Souza, 2008)

Belo Horizonte’s Centro, like the central areas of many medium and large Brazilian cities, has some singular characteristics related to the process of segregation and manipulation of centralities created by the affluent population. Even though excluded from inhabiting the city centre, it is in this area that a big part of the lowest income population works, as it accumulates jobs, commerce and services for this population as well as remaining the region with greater accessibility, especially from the point of view of public transport. (Pontes, 2006)

Even though there is a concentration

of uses that are directly targeted at the low-income population, the social housing developments promoted by the government, be by the municipality, state, or federal government, are always done in areas on the peripheries (image 10).

“It was the working-class population, that excluded from the central space of the city, of the power of citizenship, the extended agora, that indeed determined the production of the city. And Belo Horizonte grew oppositely, from the periphery to the centre, in a process that repeated itself countless times on the planned cities in Brazil” (Monte-Mor, 1994 in Pontes, 2006).

It is with this history of unequal occupation through the last 125 years of Belo Horizonte, and that it is still produced reinstating this segregation, that this work turns to investigate the opportunities that the city centre might have to house a population that has always been excluded from it, and the “equal opportunities, urban culture, and policies in the service and well-being of the citizens.” (Brillembourg, 2013) this place can offer.

image 09 - 1957 photo of centro view from viaduto da floresta

belo horizonte: the planned unequal city 0

5km N

Belo Horizonte centro social housing - informal settlements social housing - government projects PBH, 2019

image 10 - map of belo horizonte city centre and location of social housing

image 11 - view of the city from avenida afonso pena - main avenue in belo horizonte’s centrefrom 1956

image 12 - view of the city from avenida afonso pena - main avenue in belo horizonte’s centrefrom 2022

“… central areas gain importance not as obsolete environments to be suppressed to make way for the new, but as places possessing a wealth of their own, incapable of being rebuilt.” (Pontes, 2006)

“Empty buildings are (once again) becoming a political issue for which the broader public has to be mobilized if they want to have a say in urban planning and development.” (Brillembourg, 2013)

image 13 - 2022 photo of centro view from viaduto da floresta

centro: vacant buildings and social housing

centro: vacant buildings and social housing

Centro, the Portuguese word for city centre and the name given to the area of study, was incredibly affected by changes in the last few decades of the 20th century, the exodus of the wealthy population in the 1980s and 1990s resulted, according to Pontes (2006), in a reduction of almost 45% in the population living in the area, as well as almost 50% of the population there in the 2000s had moved in in the previous two decades. This new population was characterised by having a lower income than the one that was there previously, even though the profile changed it still didn’t welcome the poorer population to the area.

In this period, according to Pontes (2006), there was an increase in the number of existent housing in the city centre but at the same time, there was a rise in the vacancy rate. The number of public vacant buildings also escalated in the 2000s and 2010s, as many of the government functions, that had operated in Centro since the construction of the city, were moved to a new building on the outskirts of Belo Horizonte.

According to Fundação João Pinheiro’s, a research institute in Brazil, report from 2015, the country had almost 8 million vacant buildings, 80% of those located in urban areas, with 6.8 million in conditions to be used and the rest under construction or renovations. This number of vacant properties would be enough to attend the demand of the 6.3

million housing deficit (FJP, 2018).

In the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte (RMBH), an area with a population of 6 million people (IBGE, 2020), the 2016 report estimated that the housing deficit was around ninetyfive thousand houses, while by 2019 this number was over a hundred and six thousand (FJP, 2021)1. At the same time, the latest data reported states that there were 190.238 vacant housing units solely in the RMBH (FJP, 2018).

An important data related to the housing deficit in Brazil is that it heavily affects the population that makes under R$ 3.600 (around £560) per month, a population that is excluded from most real estate financing programs, be it private or led by government agencies. Even though real estate vacancy is a protagonist in the structuring of contemporary urban space, it is still neglected both by the government and research institutions and results in a lack of data to support the formulation of public housing policies that address housing vacancy (Mc Murtrie, 2021).

As stated by Turner (1976), the mass production of housing is intrinsically uneconomic as well as socially and ecologically destructive. Even though this idea has been around for over 40 years, governments still insist on the 1 - It’s important to notice that all those numbers account for the situation pre-COVID-19 pandemic, which could have affected the situation for the worse.

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

production of two typologies of lowincome housing. The first in the format of small houses repeated tirelessly on a plot of land while the second is characterised by a complex of low-rise four-storey tall buildings, with four apartments per floor, no lift and with an open-air parking lot surrounding the buildings, (Pontes, 2006) both on the outskirts of the city. We must have in mind that buildings are temporary mutable structures (Brillembourg, 2013), and the work of current and future generations of architects surrounds itself around the repurposing of various building typologies and how their new uses will fit the everchanging society. Architecture for Brillembourg (2013), must strive to be resilient, adaptable and transformable, the resilience would be

its capacity to absorb changes without resisting it, the adaptability relating to the building components and their influence on resilience over time, while the transformability is what allows the building to survive.

site analysis

The initial analysis of the current conditions of housing in the city centre was done through the information available from the Brazilian Census, last conducted in 2010. Even though the census has important information, it only records data by census tract and households, which makes it not so useful for an area with a reduced number of existent housing as it is in

2010 Census - Demographic density per Census Tract (inhabitants/km²) IBGE, 2010

0 - 8.835 8.835 - 15.219 15.220 - 20.240 20.241 - 31.141 31.142 - 464.210 0 N 500m

image 14 - 2010 census - demographic density per census Tract (inhabitants/km²)

centro: vacant buildings and social housing

2010 Census - Individual or Collective Residences per Census Tract

1 - 131 132 - 203 204 - 261 262 - 323 324 - 494

IBGE, 2010

0 N 500m

image 15 - 2010 census - individual or collective residences per census tract

2010 Census - Housing Vacancy per Census Tract

0 - 11 12 - 23 24 - 35 36 - 54 58 - 235

IBGE, 2010

0 N 500m

image 16 - 2010 census - housing vacancy per census tract

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

Belo Horizonte’s Centro.

Analysing the three maps (images 14 to 16), it is possible to identify overlap between lower density and a reduced number of occupied houses in this area as well as some overlap between those two parameters and the number of vacant housing. This made the research turn the attention to a more specific area of Centro, known as Hipercentro. The work produced by Mc Murtrie (2021) was of great value for this research as it is focused on this same area, and it is the most recent and detailed data available on vacant buildings in the city of Belo Horizonte. This dissertation uses the energy consumption data of June 2019 to identify possibly idle, possibly vacant, or vacant buildings in Belo Horizonte, with a focus on 67 areas in the

city centre that were checked through Google Street View data. The initial idea was to work with the overlap between the vacant buildings identified and the listed buildings. So, for that, maps were developed to help identify the location of those buildings, followed by a stakeholder’s map that would help identify potential intervention sites.

buildings - vacant buildings MCMURTRIE, 2021 PBH, 2022

hipercentro 0 N 500m image 17 - highlight of hipercentro - area of study

centro: vacant buildings and social housing

buildings - vacant buildings MCMURTRIE, 2021 PBH, 2022

vacant possibly vacant possibly idle 0 N 500m

image 18 - vacant buildings

buildings - listed buildings MCMURTRIE, 2021 PBH, 2022

listed 0 N 500m

image 19 - listed buildings

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

buildings - overlap MCMURTRIE, 2021 PBH, 2022

vacant listed overlap 0 N 500m

image 20 - overlap of vacant and listed buildings

stakeholders PBH, 2022

public private 0 N 500m

image 21 - stakeholders map

centro: vacant buildings and social housing

The work followed by looking at the uses present in the area, through Google StreetView images from January and February 2022 and a site visit in June 2022 (image 22), the number of buildings that are vacant or don’t serve their social function2 is even bigger than estimated by the data from Mc Murtrie (2021). This area has a very strong character to attract people there for uses that can hardly be found anywhere else in the city, what makes most of the service and commercial uses of the area not aimed for daily consumption, like car repairment shops, construction materials stores, governmental functions, only a few restaurants, small diners and grocery shops exist in the area.

2 - Função Social da Propriedade or Social Function is a concept introduced by Estatuto da Cidade, that states in its fifth article that states that the urban or rural property must, in addition to serving the interests of its owner, meet the needs and interests of society. In this way, the social function conditions the right to the property, by establishing that this right is limited by respect for the collective good. (Estatuto da Cidade, 2001)

2

1

hotel 1 - ocupação carolina maria de jesus 2 - ocupação zezeu ribeiro e norma lúcia

vacant recycling facilities religious housing parking public buildings commercial mixed use ocupações

22- uses map

social housing

Social housing comes as a response to the number of vacant buildings in the centre of Belo Horizonte, informed by the existing popular character of the area due to the existing commercial uses and being easily accessible by public transport, according to Pontes (2006) it is desirable to guarantee the popular character of the region, in addition to being an affirmative action to combat spatial segregation. The author states that “it is the least volatile use and subject to depletion, especially if the departure of one to better conditions means the rise of the other.” (Pontes, 2006) as well as the best lever for the recovery of central areas (Maricato, 2001 in Pontes, 2006).

The repurposing of vacant buildings through social housing is also a way to bring life and revitalise the city centre, as the buildings are, ultimately, constitutive of the form of the city, and therefore, its degradation is also the degradation of the urban environment it is inserted into (Pontes, 2006). This proposition is also a way to contain the horizontal expansion of cities, reducing the demand for peripheral development and consequently contributing to a more sustainable city that demands fewer resources and recycles land and buildings (Bromley, 2005).

The adaptive reuse of the vacant buildings in Belo Horizonte could also have a wider effect on the city centre, as it promotes the “urban intensification and encourages the use of public transport” (Heath, 2001) it could also

lead to the return of leisure activities and social relations in the public space that have been lost through the years and strengthen the existent commercial uses. It could contribute to the characterisation of public spaces and the incorporation of new uses and programs within broader strategies (Pontes, 2006).

This work changed the first route from vacant and listed buildings to look at the existing Ocupações3 in Centro. These communities have been questioning the absence of social housing in the city centre by occupying previously vacant buildings, of both private and public ownership, that were not following their social function, trying to break “the culture of peripheralization and urban segregation and improving the possibilities of integration to the urban economy” (Rolnik, 2005 in Pontes, 2006).

This is an alternative that recognizes the potential of an underused area that is greatly located and historically has been occupied by middle to high-income households, but in more recent years with squatters occupying vacant buildings, it gained a different possibility. So, this work will continue investigating the possibilities of developing social housing in the city centre through the case study of existing squatting communities.

3- Ocupação is the term used in Portuguese for communities that live in squatted buildings, that are usually led by organised housing and homeless movements that had been forming in the city centre for some time, came into being from the second half of the 1990s onwards. (Rolnik 2019)

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

image 23 - hotel othon palace - one of the vacant buildings

image 24 - hotel imperial - vacant building

“Shift the focus of contemporary architectural practice away from its preoccupation with form, toward a marriage of design with social impact” (Brillembourg, 2013)

“…social implications of the built environment and the possibilities of using architectural structures in ways for which they were not originally intended.” (Schmid, C. in Brillembourg, 2013)

image 25 - view of centro’s art murals

ocupações: social housing as a community resource

Ocupação (Ocupações plural) is the act or effect of occupying or taking possession of anything, being used in Brazil as the way to refer to squatted buildings and their communities. This work understands these social-political movements through the concepts of Lourenço (2014) that states it means to make something useful, to make useful a space that is unused, that does not fulfil its social function, and of Rolnik (2019), that sees the existence of these occupations as a way to fight for their space in the city, by transforming how the space is created and appropriated.

Informal settlements and squatter communities are a response to “the decades-long insufficiency and inefficiency of housing policies” (Rolnik, 2019) as well as a way of creating a community-led space that is open to accommodate the diversity of needs and backgrounds of the people that conform to this community. The few social housing opportunities offered by governments are done in a way that creates a homogenous area, assuming all those that live there have the same needs, which creates a mismatch between people’s housing priorities and what it’s offered.

Ocupações can be often seen as an easy way out of paying for rent, but living “rent-free” is not an option to spend less money but a necessity faced by many families in Brazil, as the growing economic crisis has created

a harsh reality where over 30 million people suffer from famish and 6 out of 10 Brazilians are considered to have some level of food insecurity (Verenicz, 2022).

In this situation, according to Turner (1976), saving the rent money to buy food becomes a necessity and a way for many families to re-establish themselves:

If a family or household has to spend nearly all its cash income on food in order to keep alive, the proportion it can spend on housing is negligible – or even negative after feeding and clothing and paying for the breadwinner’s journey to work. So, of course, they squat or double up with relatives. And to suppose, as many agencies and statisticians do, that any family can spend up to a quarter, or even a third, of its income on housing, is dangerously wrong in such cases (Turner, 1976)

In Belo Horizonte and many other metropolises in Brazil, two different types of Ocupações have been established, the horizontal occupations and the vertical occupations – which are the theme of this project. The first happens in empty plots of land on the peripheries of the city, mostly through the self-construction of houses, and is considered a “political fight with greater possibilities of resistance to repression and eviction” (Lourenço, 2017) than the squatter communities in the city centre, but they are not the answer to the needs of many families as those settlements can be far from people’s jobs and services the city has to offer.

The second usually happens in the city centre through the occupation of

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

vacant buildings, which might present complicated issues in construction, maintenance, and formation of social circles, but allows access to the city and its benefits, in addition to the symbolic factor of the class conflict in the centre of the territory and public opinion (Pedro, 2019). In Belo Horizonte, the first Ocupação of this kind happened in 2002, with some new movements between 2005 and 2008 and returning in 2015, with Ocupação Zezeu Ribeiro e Norma Lúcia.

As Brillembourg (2013) states, the “maps of the mega-cities typically do not even show evidence of squatter communities.” So, it was imported for this work to identify and highlight the existing Ocupações (image 26) inside the delimited working area in the centre of

ocupações: social housing as a community resource

Belo Horizonte4, these are the Ocupação Carolina Maria de Jesus, housing over 200 families, and the Ocupação Zezeu Ribeiro e Norma Lúcia, where around 46 families currently live.

buildings - ocupações

MCMURTRIE, 2021 PBH, 2022

ocupações 0 N 500m

4 - Other Ocupações exist outside the limit of the Hipercentro but still inside the limits of the planned city and are mainly used as cultural centres, such as Casa de Referência da Mulher Tina Martins, Kasa Invisível, Espaço Comum Luiz Estrela. image 26 - ocupações map

ocupação carolina maria de jesus

Ocupação Carolina first started in September 2017 in a public vacant building inside the limits of the planned city but outside of what is considered the Hipercentro of Belo Horizonte. Through the pressure of the government and police, the families were evicted in 2018, but through their negotiations with the municipality, they were granted access to a private building in Centro –the building used to be a hotel that had been vacant for over 20 years and was in poor conservation conditions – and have their rent paid by a grant from the city government.

Following this negotiation, with the technical assistance of students and professors at the School of Architecture of the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, the living conditions of Ocupação Carolina were improved. Although one important aspect of the original occupation couldn’t be recreated in this new space, the social, cultural and political events that were carried by the Ocupação and the socio-political movements that run it, as the former hotel lacked adequate physical space (Pedro, 2019).

The future of this community is a little more certain as in this negotiation they were given a plot of land on the outskirts of the city, where houses are to be built, but they are still fighting for the right of those families that need to live in Centro, to be able to stay on the same building and house others that

need social housing in this area as well. Living in the city centre is not a response to everybody’s life needs, many will prefer their housing to be located on the outskirts of the city or in a certain neighbourhood because of existing social relations and cultural practices. For many people, though, the creation of social housing in the city centre would be the answer to their housing priorities, as it would minimise their expenditures allowing them to be a walking distance away from their workplace and other essential services, like hospitals and leisure areas.

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

image 27 - ocupação carolina maria de jesus

ocupação zezeu ribeiro e norma lúcia

Ocupação Zezeu has also suffered immense pressure from the public authorities, but they have been the longest-standing squatting community in the city centre, occupying the same building since April 2015. It has been proposed by city legislators for the building to be turned into social housing and have its ownership changed from the public agency Brazilian Social Security Institute (INSS) to the community that currently lives there, but the project didn’t move forward, and the community still lives with the insecurity and fear of eviction.

There is no official record of the profile of the population living in squatted buildings. To understand better the existent community at Ocupação Zezeu Ribeiro e Norma Lúcia, this work looks at the description given by Pedro (2019), where the author, through contact with the leaderships of the different movements housed at the building, got a basic description of the community. All the inhabitants of the Ocupação are of low income, with a varying degree of social vulnerability, most only studied until 4th grade and make up to the minimum wage, and many are unemployed and receive financial support from the government. Most of the occupants are families of four, with some individual occupants and other families with more than six members (Pedro, 2019).

The building, located in Rua dos

Caétes, 331, was supposed to be alienated during the 2000s in a program where the municipality had identified over 90 vacant buildings in Centro (including the hotel where Ocupação Carolina is located), aimed to create a livelier city centre through a major set of urban renovations and the introduction of residential use in the area, with one of the strategies proposed being the adaptive reuse of the abandoned buildings. The first part was done through major public investment in the rehabilitation of public spaces, such as the main squares and streets in Centro, but the second part was relegated to the private sector only executing three projects, with none aimed at social housing (Pedro, 2019).

A third Ocupação existed in Centro, Ocupação Vicentão, with over 120 families occupying an empty building from December 2018 until January the following year. The building – also included in the list of vacant buildings by the municipality – had very poor living conditions for the occupants resulting in their removal to different areas around the city, but not to another building in Centro.

The Ocupações identified in this work have many similarities regarding the poor living conditions their buildings were first found, the hardships faced and the constant threat of eviction, the process of development of the private and public areas, as well as the absence of help from the government and public authorities in the search for their housing needs in the city centre. Even though they have many similarities and similar fights, a few conditions distinguish them, including the length of the

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

image 28 - ocupação zezeu ribeiro e norma lúcia

a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

occupation, Ocupação Zezeu has been in the same building for over seven years while Ocupação Carolina was moved into its current building four years ago, this move created one of the main disparities between both movements, as the families living at the latter have financial aid from the city government to pay rent at their current location as well as the fact that many of those will move shortly to houses built by the municipality in the outskirts of Belo Horizonte.

To Tonucci and Castriota (2022), the movements live in a duality between aspiring to be recognised by the state, therefore not living anymore under the threat of eviction, and the fact that entering the formal city can result in the loss of collective projects and arrangements that engaged the community in resistance and sociospatial experimentation. It is possible to identify this change in the Ocupação Carolina, as, before the move to the new building and consequent formalisation, the movement was extremely active housing important political and cultural events.

This work moves forward looking more specifically at Ocupação Zezeu Ribeiro e Norma Lúcia as a case study, believing that the conditions presented by this building and community can be improved and be seen as an example of how social housing can be a community resource to better their living conditions and impact its surroundings, without losing its socio-political importance. This will be done in the form of a case study for design strategies that can be done to the building it currently occupies, with the possibility to be expanded to

other existing and future squatting communities, as a way to occupy a vacant building and give the inhabitants a good living condition.

ocupações:

Ocupações are the “manifestation of the relationship between a social movement, professionals and activists is one of the ongoing insurgents, counter-hegemonic movements in (…) a hotly disputed territory” (Rolnik, 2019).l

image 29 - “When Housing Is a Privilege, Occupation Is a Right” written on the façade of ocupação zezeu ribeiro e norma lúcia

zezeu ribeiro e norma lúcia: design for the commons

Through the research of social media posts, videos and literature about the squatted communities in Brazil, especially the two highlighted in Belo Horizonte, it was identified the potential and the importance of the common areas for daily life and the strength of the Ocupações. As Tonucci and Castriota (2022) explain, squatting communities are “platforms for cooperative work and production of the common, whether as a condition of survival or fruit of the political and social experimentation”

In this work “commons is best understood as a social relation, a practice of collective production and social sharing between a community and some resource” (Bollier, 2014 Linebaugh, 2014 in Tonucci and Castriota, 2022), that are collectively used and managed by a given community through a series of practices and relations of sharing and reciprocity. This characteristic is essentially related to the urban poor and slums, especially in Brazil and other countries of the Global South, as a survival strategy created by the social conditions and informality (Tonucci, 2017 in Tonucci and Castriota, 2022).

Those commons are collectively produced and appropriated and might assume different forms according to the changing needs of each community. They can be “community centres, communal kitchens, community daycare, urban gardens” (Tonucci and Castriota, 2022). Those are important in the opening to a

wider community, where public meetings can be held, assemblies helping to guarantee the future of the occupation or fighting laws that try to evict this population, as well as a place for cultural movements and performances, as Rolnik (2019) presents “these busy common spaces bring together the day-to-day existence of the occupation, its residents and the rest of the city.”

Ocupações “also experience contradictions and ambivalences, lying between the potentialities of autonomy and collective construction of commons, and the harsh realities of an extreme condition of exclusion, deprivation, segregation and violence.” (Tonucci and Castriota, 2022). So, taking Turner’s (1976) ideas on self-construction and local developments, it is necessary to understand that this population needs aid in the form of community resources to help them bring out their housing needs and ideas to life.

Architecture can be seen as one of these community resources, helping them to develop plans on how to bring their ideas to life, in the most effective way, along with construction materials, and adequate tools that can even lead to the guarantee of tenure or ownership of the space. For social housing to act as a resource for community-led initiatives it should aim to establish a strong social network within the housing community and to project a strong sense of identity to the outside world (Brillembourg,

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

zezeu ribeiro e norma lúcia: design for the commons 2013).

As stated by Urban Think Thank (Brillembourg, 2013) about Torre David that the building was always in a near-constant state of evolution and modification, both physically and socially, that is also true about most squatted buildings in Brazil. It is important to understand for the development of this project that interventions that might fit at one point soon enough might not make sense for the community anymore and needs to be removed or repurposed, it’s with that idea in mind that the design strategies in this work have been developed.

For that reason, this work aims to develop design strategies instead of a design proposal. The first can

be understood more as a method of approaching design alternatives fitting the adaptable character of an Ocupação as well as the theoretical approach taken in this study, while the second would need to rely on more in-depth research with community involvement and longterm flexible solutions that don’t fit into the scope of this work.

The methodological approach used was to work with visual and textual references as a support to the development of the design strategies proposed. Identifying the most important quotes from all the bibliography read that would be the theoretical base for the development of the investigation proposed, those are:

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

zezeu ribeiro e norma lúcia: design for the commons

image 30 - sketch of the section of ocupação zezeu ribeiro e norma lúcia

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

image 31 - sketch of the façade of ocupação zezeu ribeiro e norma lúcia

Along with those ideas, it was important to set from the beginning that Ocupações are organised, grow and blend in a very ad hoc manner that only makes sense for their community. With those ideas clear, the design strategies were first tested through the development of sketches of the façade and sections of the building (images 30 and 31), identifying the potential uses and interventions that could be alocated throughout the building.

The textual approach was essential to make sure the theoretical framework previously developed translated into physical actions and interventions in the common areas of the building, to improve the living conditions of the Ocupação. For this, the essential quotes were included in a textual manner around the sketches, as well as questions and observations that would arise during the process of sketching.

moments

The design strategies were separated into different categories thinking about both the daily life of the inhabitants as well as the strengthening of the Ocupação as a social-political movement. Those categories are called in this work as Moments as they represent a state of the Ocupação that can quickly change and adapt to the different needs the community might face, being all those propositions only an idea of what can happen inside the building.

The categories included were decided based on the information obtained about the Ocupação Zezeu

zezeu ribeiro e norma lúcia: design for the commons

Ribeiro e Norma Lúcia, especially through Pedro (2019) and the social media content, as well as the common spaces existent in other Ocupações, such as Ocupação Carolina Maria de Jesus and Ocupação 9 de Julho5 .

Another important point for the proposition was to address the financial insecurity faced by a part of the Ocupação’s community, according to Pedro (2019), the possibility to develop trades and sell their services inside the building would be a “self-support policy for families” allowing them to develop financial autonomy, provide better living conditions and create a network of possibilities within the community. The Moments were thought through the concept used by Lourenço (2014) of architecture as an event, thinking about the experiences that generate, define and appropriate the spaces. The uses considered were:

5 - Ocupação 9 de Julho is a squatting community located in a vacant building in the centre of São Paulo (Brazil) since 2016, housing over 120 families. The building occupied was owned by the same government agency as Ocupação Zezeu Ribeiro e Norma Lúcia. The community has developed different common areas inside such as thrift store, carpentry, collective kitchen and cafeteria, library and toy library, art gallery, court, and parking. (Negrão 2022)

image 32 - arquibancada (assembly area)

arquibancada (assembly area)

Here represented the stage for a round table with local community leaders, researchers, and the community, but it can also house community meetings, religious ceremonies, and cultural events, such as movie nights, kids’ plays and concerts. The existence of such space in a Ocupação is vital to create a connection between the socialpolitical movements that exist inside it and the outside actors, especially in the early stages of the Ocupação, where all the support and validation of other movements give it strength to stay and fight against eviction threats.

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

zezeu ribeiro e norma lúcia: design for the commons

image 33 - bazar (thrift store)

bazar (thrift store)

It is the only existent service already existent. It is located on the ground floor of Ocupação Zezeu Ribeiro e Norma Lúcia, and it is the result of the donation of clothes from the population and local stores to the community. This is the first contact the external population has with the Ocupação, and all the work developed there, is thought to welcome this other population that might be hesitant to get in contact with the community.

image 34 - churrasco (common area)

churrasco (common area)

An important part of the Brazilian culture is the gathering around a Churrasco (barbecue) on a weekend or holiday, with live music bringing together the entire community. This area in the back of the building was thought of as a space that can easily be adapted to house informal events and creates a new area where the community can see and feel like part of Centro.

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

zezeu ribeiro e norma lúcia: design for the commons

image 35 - costura (seamstress)

costura (seamstress)

One of the trades identified by Pedro (2019) as to potentially be developed inside the building, a seamstress studio is very traditional in Brazilian culture, and it can be seen as a way for unemployed women that live in the Ocupação to develop their work and earn money..

image 36 - cozinha comum (communal kitchen)

cozinha comum (communal kitchen)

Existent in most of the Ocupações, it is extremely important in the early stages of the Ocupação, when the families still don’t have their housing units settled, the inhabitants don’t know each other that well. The communal kitchen and cafeteria can represent the creation of a bond between the community and the guarantee of food for all. Through the years of development of the squatted community, the kitchen will still represent a gathering area and can start serving the external community and becoming another source of income for the community.

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

zezeu ribeiro e norma lúcia: design for the commons

image 37 - creche (day care)

creche (daycare)

A daycare/study room is essential for many families that live in the Ocupação, it allows parents to be able to work outside the house and it gives the possibility for others that live in the building to work in this space. It is also really important for the development of the kids, giving them a space to go to after school hours, as in most schools in Brazil the students are there only in the morning or the afternoon, leaving them with one free shift.

jardim zezeu e norma (terrace)

image 38 - jardim zezeu e norma (terrace)

A space for the community to develop their hobbies is extremely important, especially thinking the Ocupações as an alternative model to the social housing developed by the government. Most estates created by public authorities lack outdoor spaces where the community can be free to develop their hobbies and leisure activities, the terraces at Zezeu Ribeiro e Norma Lúcia were thought as a place, where communal gardens can be grown, and an inflatable pool can be there on the summer days and kids can play football and other sports.

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

Jardim Zezeu e Norma

Jardim Zezeu e Norma

zezeu ribeiro e norma lúcia: design for the commons

moradia (housing)

image 39 - moradia (housing)

There is little information available on how the housing units are located inside the building. As this was not the focus of this work there won’t be much focus on how and where this use is located throughout the building, but it was represented as a way to highlight the diversity in the size and needs of the families and individuals that create the Zezeu Ribeiro e Norma Lúcia’s community.

image 40 - salão (hairdresser)

salão (hairdresser)

A hairdresser salon or a barber shop can exist in different areas inside the building, be it informally in a living room of a housing unit or growing into a bigger shop that can attend both the inside and outside community. This service can be important for the growth of the community, as it also allows for the population to earn money as well as it can become an important learning space where others can learn the trade, work there, or open their shops.

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

zezeu ribeiro e norma lúcia: design for the commons

mercado dona luzia (grocery)

Oferta R�1,99

Banana

image 41 - mercado dona luzia (grocery)

Through the study of the uses around the building it was identified a lack of grocery and convenience stores, a small grocery store inside the building would allow for easier access for its population to produce as well as open space for local bakers to sell their productions.

image 42- movimento social (social movement)

movimento social (social movement)

An important aspect of the organisation of the Ocupação is the existence of a room where the social movement leaders can meet with the community and between themselves. This office exists in one way or another inside the building since the start of the Ocupação in 2015.

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

The idea behind joining all the Moments and many other daily activities that can happen inside the Ocupação in one section that merges different areas of the building is to show that those events can happen at different times and locations throughout the building, changing and rearranging according to the community’s needs. The section drawing (image 43) is the result of eight different sections of the building that were placed together as a way to demonstrate the changing aspect of the Ocupações as well as how all the uses are interconnected in such a community.

Many more Moments could be developed such as carpentry workshops, a library, galleries, space for weekly fairs and markets, computer rooms, studios, etc. The ones represented in this work try to encapsulate the essence that is to create spaces where the community can develop their trades and hobbies, create social relations, be the catalyst of the production of the commons and, ultimately, give the Ocupação’s community the feeling of “what it does for people rather than what it is”.

Along with the daily uses shown in the Moments, this section portrays in its details how the social housing movements in Brazil are connected to other social-political organisations. Represented in this image are several existent movements and themes that they get involved with, such as cultural movements, represented by the “Batalha De Mc’s”6, environmental protection movements, political groups shown in the image of Marielle Franco7 on the façade, the “União Nacional Por Moradia Popular”8 flag as well as “MLB”9

zezeu ribeiro e norma lúcia: design for the commons

movement. These movements and causes are part of what makes the Ocupações so relevant and necessary for the social housing movement in the city centre. They are responsible for the vibrancy and the constant engagement of the community in the socio-spatial experimentation that happens inside the Ocupação and spread into the city centre.

6 - A rap battle that happens in Belo Horizonte since 2007, beneath Viaduto Santa Tereze, that is one of the main meetings of the country’s hip hop culture and is a symbol of resistance and occupation of the urban space. (Leocádio 2020)

7 - Marielle Franco was a Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) city councilmember, and member of the Party for Socialism and Liberty. She was also a member of the LGBT community and a human rights activist, especially against police brutality in the favelas, or slums of the city. She was murdered March 2018, and it was deemed suspicious for several reasons. (Fernandez, 2018)

8 - A social movement that fights for the right to housing and to the city, popular participation in public policies and the fight to end evictions and against the criminalization of social movements. (“História União Nacional por Moradia Popular” n.d.)

9 - The Movimento de Luta nos Bairros, Vilas e Favelas (MLB) is a national social movement that fights for urban reform and the human right to live with dignity. (‘Movimento de Luta nos Bairros, Vilas e Favelas’ n.d.) image 43 - section image 44 - façade

“Value the built heritage as a creator of urban identities, the mix of uses as a factor of its vitality, and the small and medium scale as the way for intervention.” (Pontes, 2006)

“…squats always have a history, a social structure and, for the most part, an element of political organisation.” (Schmid in Brillembourg, 2013)

image 45 - centro viewed from viaduto santa tereza

This study discusses the spatial segregation existing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte (Brazil) through the lens of vacant historical buildings and social housing. Centro has gone through a degradation process of its built environment since the 1980s, with the exodus of its higher income population to newer developments as well as the move of government facilities to the city’s outskirts, leading to the existence of over 90 vacant buildings in Centro.

discussion important takeaways

occupied empty buildings in the city centre. These social housing movements are seen as a very important character in the regeneration process that could happen in the city centre, identifying the potential of small-scale interventions in the common areas of those buildings as a way to create new social relations between the community of the Ocupação and the outside city.

Even with the migration of its richer population to other areas of the city, the lower-income population was never welcomed to the centre, with no social housing projects developed there by the government. This group is heavily affected by the incompatibility between what is offered in the real state market and what they can afford, being the ones most impacted by the housing deficit in Brazil.

Even though the country has over 6 million housing deficit, the number of vacant housing is even greater reaching almost 7 million units. With this data, this work aims to respond to the degradation of the centre of Belo Horizonte and the existence of many vacant buildings with the introduction of social housing in this area as a catalyst for its revitalisation. This research found that there are already initiatives that question such conditions as well as the social housing policies in Brazil, through the squatted communities – Ocupações – that have

One of the most important takes from this research is to understand that the process of spatial segregation and degradation of the city centre are connected, this works considers as the only way to promote a proper regeneration project of Belo Horizonte’s Centro is to include new social housing initiatives as well as value the informal communities already settled there through the Ocupações.

Looking more specifically at the design strategies, an important take from this work is to value the smallscale interventions as a resource for community-led projects that can have a great impact on this population and even influence its surroundings. In this work, the proposal to do this through the commons is a way to strengthen the existent and new social relations and consequently the Ocupação as a socialpolitical movement.

limitations and further research

Some of the challenges faced in the development of this project are related to not being able to have direct contact with the community living in the Ocupações, as it would involve a longtime partnership and the build-up of a relationship of trust that wasn’t possible in the time of the development of this project as well as the physical distance.

It was also a conscious decision to not conduct any interviews with leaders or any members of the community as this is an academic work and there was no intention to give the community false hope for any possible changes. As a way to overcome the lack of direct contact with the community, it was used as a methodology the research of social media content and videos that could give an inside into their needs and how they live, as well as academic work developed by researchers in a closer position with the community.

Establishing contact and trust with the community would allow this work to develop further, with deeper discussions about their housing needs. In this way the work could expand into design propositions instead of strategies, that would still fit into the idea of constant change and adaptability through the proposition of modular or material solutions that would allow for the interventions proposed to be quickly repurposed into different common uses.

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

“Rather than erasing what already exists, we conceive of the ‘new’ city as rooted in and arising from and with the old” (Brillembourg, 2013)

“...it is, ultimately, the process of designing on the designed, of building on the built, accepting the organization of the territory by accumulating interventions and overlapping contributions, maintaining the search for form as a qualifying objective.” (Lamas, 2000 in Pontes, 2006)

image 46 - centro and the south developments seen from Floresta, one of the first neighbourhoods outside the planned city

conclusion

The initial idea surrounding this research was to investigate how social housing could be a catalyst to the revitalisation of the city centre, looking more specifically to the city of Belo Horizonte in Brazil. For that the work looked more closely into the history of the city, planned at the end of the 19th century, designed to house the middleand high-income classes leaving the lower income population, then formed mostly by the construction workers that built the city, to create the first informal settlements outside the planned limits, starting with a spatial segregation and peripheralization movement that has shaped the city.

Looking specifically at how this planned city developed in the last 125 years, not much changed for the poorest population that still have no access to social housing in this area. One important data for the development of this work, was the understanding that over 90 buildings are vacant in the city centre, and this is not a phenomenon exclusive to Belo Horizonte, in Brazil the number of empty buildings is greater than the housing deficit of the country.

The authorities have for years ignored the existence of one of the instruments created by Estatuto da Cidade, the social function of the property. If this law were used the housing crisis in Brazil could be handled in a different way and the housing deficit numbers wouldn’t be as high as current

data shows

Following those findings, this project has looked at the vacant buildings in Centro of Belo Horizonte investigating the possibilities and potentials of including social housing in this area through the conversion of those buildings. The work investigated this through the lens of squatted communities, which are in Brazil known as Ocupações, that have occupied vacant buildings, fighting against threats of eviction and having to deal with the poor living conditions that the buildings empty for decades have.

Squatting became an alternative to this population as the public authorities have never fully addressed the quality of social housing produced, seen by the government as a matter of standardisation of the unit offered in a peripheral location, usually with difficult access to public transport, and other facilities. While the vacant buildings in the city centre are mostly ignored by the authorities with no official data collected, it is seen by part of social housing movements as an alternative to the mismatch between the population’s needs and what is offered.

The work followed by looking more specifically at one of the Ocupações existent in Belo Horizonte, called Ocupação Zezeu Ribeiro e Norma Lúcia as a case study for the development of design strategies that could potentialize the life of its community as well as

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

contribute to the revitalisation of the area surrounding it. It was important to understand that Ocupações grow in an ad hoc manner and interventions proposed at one point might not make sense soon.

The most important take from the work developed is to understand the power and importance commons have on the daily life of the Ocupações, it can be their space to create and nurture social relations, the area where they develop their work and earn money, as well as the areas that allow contact between the community and the outside actors, which can grant the Ocupação legitimacy, a stronger political stance, the chance to fight and survive eviction threats as well as the possibility to influence the changes happening outside.

The interventions in a small scale inside those communities can generate a greater impact on the central area as a whole, as the repurposing of vacant buildings through the movement of Ocupações bring social housing into an area where they had always been segregated from, bringing diversity to the users and the social profile of the area, as well as reducing the degradation of the built environment caused the existence of many vacant buildings and promoting urban intensification.

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

references

1) Theoretical Reading

Bonduki, Nabil Georges. 2004. ‘Origens da habitação social no Brasil’, 22. Brillembourg, Alfredo, and Hubert Klumpner. 2013. Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities. Lars Müller.

Bromley, Rosemary D. F., Andrew R. Tallon, and Colin J. Thomas. 2005. ‘City Centre Regeneration through Residential Development: Contributing to Sustainability’. Urban Studies 42, no. 13: 2407–29. https:// doi.org/10.1080/00420980500379537.

‘Déficit Habitacional No Brasil – 20122015’. Fundação João Pinheiro (FJP), 2018. ‘Déficit Habitacional No Brasil – 20162019’. Fundação João Pinheiro (FJP), 2021.

Estatuto da Cidade, Pub. L. No. 10.257/2001 (2001). http://www.planalto. gov.br/ccivil_03/leis/leis_2001/l10257.htm.

Harvey, David. 2008. ‘The Right to the City’. New Left Review, no. 53: 23–40.

Heath, Tim. 2001. ‘Adaptive Re-Use of Offices for Residential Use: The Experiences of London and Toronto’. Cities 18, no. 3: 173–84. https://doi.org/10.1016/S02642751(01)00009-9.

IBGE. ‘IBGE | Censo 2010’, 2010. https://censo2010.ibge.gov.br/.

“História União Nacional por Moradia Popular”. n.d. União Nacional por Moradia

Popular (blog). https://unmp.org.br/o-quee-a-unmp/historia/.

Lefebvre, Henri, and Robert Bononno. 2003. The Urban Revolution. University of Minnesota Press. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/10.5749/j.ctt5vkbkv.

Lourenço, Tiago Castelo Branco. 2014. ‘Cidade ocupada’. Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. http://hdl.handle.net/1843/ BUOS-9QRGL5.

———. 2017. ‘Ocupações Urbanas Em Belo Horizonte: Conceitos E Evidências Das Origens De Um Movimento Social Urbano’. Cadernos de Arquitetura e Urbanismo 24, no. 35: 182–217. https://doi.org/10.5752/P.23161752.2017v24n35p182-217.

Mc Murtrie, Ada. 2021. ‘Vazios Invisíveis: O Método de Identificação Da Vacância Imobiliária Por Consumo Zero’. Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. http://hdl.handle.net/1843/36457.

“Movimento de Luta nos Bairros, Vilas e Favelas”. n.d. Website MLB. https://www. mlbbrasil.org/quem-somos.

Oc, Taner, and Steve Tiesdell. 2022. ‘Safer City Centres’. SAGE Publications Ltd, 10 April 2022. https://uk.sagepub.com/engb/eur/safer-city-centres/book229527.

Pedro, Carina. 2019. ‘Reabilitação De Edifícios Ociosos E A Moradia Popular No Centro Da Cidade’. Master Dissertation,

Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. http://hdl.handle.net/1843/38473.

Pontes, Mateus. 2006. ‘Requalificação Do Hipercentro De Belo Horizonte: Possibilidades De Inserção Do Uso Residencial’. Master Dissertation, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais. http://hdl.handle.net/1843/RAAO-72VQ85.

Prefeitura Belo Horizonte. 2020. ‘História de Bairros’. Prefeitura de Belo Horizonte. 18 November 2020. https:// prefeitura.pbh.gov.br/fundacao-municipalde-cultura/arquivo-publico/informacoes/ historia-de-bairros.

‘Reduce/Reuse/Recycle. Resource Architecture.’ n.d. Accessed 10 June 2022. http://www.reduce-reuse-recycle.de/index_ en.html.

Rolnik, Raquel. 2005. ‘Por uma política de reabilitação de centros urbanos’. blog da Raquel Rolnik (blog), 29 June 2005. https:// raquelrolnik.wordpress.com/2005/06/29/ por-uma-politica-de-reabilitacao-decentros-urbanos/.

———. 2019. ‘Rebels with a Cause: Insurgent Practices in São Paulo’s Abandoned Spaces’. Architectural Review (blog), 30 October 2019. https://www. architectural-review.com/essays/rebelswith-a-cause-insurgent-practices-in-saopaulos-abandoned-spaces.

Souza, Joseane, and Fausto, Brito. 2008. ‘Expansão Urbana De Belo Horizonte E Da RMBH’.

Tonucci, João, and Rodrigo Castriota. 2022. ‘Occupy the Periphery: Housing Occupations and the Production of Urban Commons in Belo Horizonte’. In Beyond the Megacity: New Dimensions of Peripheral Urbanization in Latin America. University of Toronto Press.

Turner, John F. C. 1976. Housing by People: Towards Autonomy in Building Environments. Marion Boyars.

2) News Articles

‘Alicerce: Pandemia escancara crise de moradia no Brasil, mas produzir casa adequada para todos é possível -- e urgente’, 8 May 2020. https://www.uol.com. br/ecoa/reportagens-especiais/moradiadigna-e-prioridade-para-refazer-cidadespos-covid/.

Almeida, Elis. ‘Em Belo Horizonte, ocupações urbanas construíram mais moradias que a prefeitura’. Brasil de Fato, 26 August 2020. https://www.brasildefato. com.br/2020/08/26/em-belo-horizonteocupacoes-urbanas-construiram-maismoradias-que-prefeitura.

Alves, Lara. ‘Com cerca de 500 mil famílias sem-casa, MG é o 2o com maior déficit no Brasil | O TEMPO’, 26 July 2021. https://www.otempo.com.br/cidades/ com-cerca-de-500-mil-familias-semcasa-mg-e-o-2-com-maior-deficit-nobrasil-1.2516703.

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

CNN Brasil. ‘Pré-candidatos à Presidência falam sobre déficit habitacional no Brasil’. Accessed 11 July 2022. https://www. cnnbrasil.com.br/politica/pre-candidatos-apresidencia-falam-sobre-deficit-habitacionalno-brasil/.

Emiliana, Cecilia. ‘Sem-teto ocupam casarões avaliados em até R$ 7,5 milhões em BH’. Correio Braziliense, 18 May 2021. https://www.correiobraziliense.com.br/ brasil/2021/05/4925359-sem-teto-ocupamcasaroes-avaliados-em-ate-rs-75-milhoesem-bh.html.

Fernandez, Maritza. 2018. “Marielle Franco (1979-2018)”. 3 April 2018. https://www. blackpast.org/global-african-history/francomarielle-1979-2018/.

Figueiredo, Pedro. ‘Prédio do P7 Criativo Tem Destino Incerto Após Obras de R$ 56 Milhões | O TEMPO’, 11 May 2021. https:// www.otempo.com.br/politica/predio-do-p7criativo-tem-destino-incerto-apos-obras-der-56-milhoes-1.2483527.

G1. ‘Brasil tem 6,9 milhões de famílias sem casa e 6 milhões de imóveis vazios, diz urbanista’, 7 May 2018. https://g1.globo.com/ economia/noticia/brasil-tem-69-milhoes-defamilias-sem-casa-e-6-milhoes-de-imoveisvazios-diz-urbanista.ghtml.

———. ‘Uma das maiores ocupações verticais do país vai ser transformada em habitação popular em SP’, 14 March 2022. https://g1.globo.com/jornal-da-globo/ noticia/2022/03/14/uma-das-maiores-

ocupacoes-verticais-do-pais-vai-sertransferida-em-habitacao-popular-em-sp. ghtml.

Gonçalves, Brian. ‘Associação Quer Utilizar Imóveis Vazios Em BH Para Abrigar Pessoas Em Situação de Rua Na Pandemia’. Rádio Itatiaia, 15 July 2020. https://www. itatiaia.com.br/noticia/associacao-querutilizar-imoveis-vazios-em-bh-paraabrigar-moradores-de-rua-na-pandemia.

Leocádio, Thais. 2020. “Duelo de MCs de BH completa 13 anos e competição nacional é realizada em novo formato”. G1. 30 August 2020. https://g1.globo.com/mg/minasgerais/o-que-fazer-em-belo-horizonte/ noticia/2020/08/30/duelo-de-mcs-de-bhcompleta-13-anos-e-competicao-nacionale-realizada-em-novo-formato.ghtml. Mariano, Raul. ‘Cerca de 200 famílias ocupam prédio abandonado na Afonso Pena, em BH’. Hoje em Dia, 6 September 2017. https://www.hojeemdia.com.br/ minas/cerca-de-200-familias-ocupampredio-abandonado-na-afonso-pena-embh-1.557487.

Mariano, Raul, and Mariana Durães. ‘Hipercentro de Belo Horizonte tem pelo menos 89 imóveis ociosos à espera de uma nova utilização’. Hoje em Dia, 21 May 2018. https://www.hojeemdia.com.br/minas/ hipercentro-de-belo-horizonte-tem-pelomenos-89-imoveis-ociosos-a-espera-deuma-nova-utilizac-o-1.623515.

Marques, Aluisio. ‘Imóveis

Abandonados Levam Medo a Moradores Da Região Central de Belo Horizonte | Minas Gerais | G1’, 4 April 2019. https://g1.globo. com/mg/minas-gerais/noticia/2019/04/04/ imoveis-abandonados-levam-medo-amoradores-da-regiao-central-de-belohorizonte.ghtml.

Mena, Fernanda. ‘33 milhões de pessoas passam fome no Brasil, mais que há 30 anos, aponta pesquisa’. Folha de S.Paulo, 8 June 2022. https://www1.folha. uol.com.br/cotidiano/2022/06/33-milhoesde-pessoas-passam-fome-no-brasilatualmente-aponta-pesquisa.shtml.

Morais, Lucas. ‘Ocupações urbanas de BH têm recorde de 100 mil moradores | O TEMPO’, 22 June 2020. https://www. otempo.com.br/cidades/ocupacoesurbanas-de-bh-tem-recorde-de-100-milmoradores-1.2351443.

Negrão, Beatriz. 2022. “Por dentro da Ocupação 9 de Julho, um símbolo da luta habitacional em SP”. Medium (blog). https:// medium.com/labjorfaap/por-dentro-daocupa%C3%A7%C3%A3o-9-de-julho-ums%C3%ADmbolo-da-luta-habitacional-emsp-76efd16c39a8.

Paranaiba, Guilherme, and Mateus Parreiras. 2018. ‘Bombeiro aponta “risco elevado” em prédios ocupados no Centro de BH’. Estado de Minas. 3 May 2018. https://www.em.com.br/app/noticia/ gerais/2018/05/03/interna_gerais,955936/ bombeiro-aponta-risco-elevado-em-

predios-ocupados-no-centro-de-bh.shtml. Verenicz, Marina. 2022. ‘Fome cresce no Brasil e atinge 33,1 milhões de pessoas em 2022’. CartaCapital, 8 June 2022. https:// www.cartacapital.com.br/sociedade/fomecresce-no-brasil-e-atinge-331-milhoes-depessoas-em-2022/.

Xavier, Heberth. ‘Prédios abandonados em BH custam R$ 5,7 mi por ano’. Brasil 247, 23 January 2013. https://www.brasil247. com/geral/predios-abandonados-em-bhcustam-r-5-7-mi-por-ano.

3) Social Media and Videos

Brasil de Fato. Como Funciona a Gestão de Uma Ocupação? 2019. https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKnj7wT9Fek. D’Oliveira, Rafael. ‘Ocupação Carolina de Jesus: As Histórias e Sonhos Que Invadiram Um Prédio No Centro’. Medium (blog), 28 September 2018. https://medium.com/@ rafaeldoliveira/ocupa%C3%A7%C3%A3ocarolina-de-jesus-as-hist%C3%B3rias-esonhos-que-invadiram-um-pr%C3%A9diono-centro-cc89f2323dd3.

Frei Gilvander Luta pela Terra e por Direitos. Ocupação Carolina Maria de Jesus, BH/MG: Organização Comunitária Na Luta Por Moradia. 07/9/17, 2017. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=2_pysxVHi1A. ———.

Ocupação Carolina Maria de Jesus/MLB, Belo Horizonte/MG: 200 Famílias/ Prédio de 14 Andares. 06/9/17, 2017. https://

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte www.youtube.com/watch?v=rL66O04fkiY.

Katy Watson [@katywatson]. ‘Here He Is Taking Food and Clothes to a Soup Kitchen. He Says He’s Never Seen It This Bad. The Homeless Population in #saopaulo Has Risen 31% since the Pandemic Began. Official Figures Put the Number at 32,000 on the Streets but the Real Number Is Thought to Be Far More. Https://T.Co/IQpnQUsYiE’. Tweet. Twitter, 20 May 2022. https://twitter.com/ katywatson/status/1527459332069150720.

Rehabitare UFMG. Ocupação Carolina Maria de Jesus, 2019. https://www.youtube. com/watch?v=prDxmjnrHf0.

Renata Souza [@renatasouzario]. ‘É inaceitável uma pessoa morrer de frio por morar na rua em um país que tem 6 milhões de imóveis vazios!’ Tweet. Twitter, 19 May 2022. https://twitter.com/renatasouzario/ status/1527271860592943104.

Ronaldo Candin. #Ocupação, Resistência e #lutapormoradia Dignidade No Hipercentro de BH., 2019. https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=f4nke-VFxLU.

MLB Minas Gerais. 2021. “ Hoje, dia 6 de setembro de 2021, a Ocupação Carolina Maria de Jesus completa 4 anos de luta e resistência no centro de Belo Horizonte.” Facebook, 06/09/2021. https://www.facebook.com/ mlbminas/posts/4081535885288503

———.. 2021. “ #tbt da primeira semana da Ocupação Carolina Maria de Jesus” Facebook, 09/09/2021. https://www. facebook.com/watch/?v=853904265295419

———.. 2021. “ Essa semana a Ocupação Carolina Maria de Jesus fez 4 anos de muita luta e resistência!” Facebook, 10/09/2021. https://www.facebook.com/mlbminas/ posts/4094784053963686

MLB Movimento de Luta nos Bairros, Vilas e Favelas. 2020. “#ResisteCarolina | Você conhece a história da Ocupação Carolina Maria de Jesus, que fica no centro de Belo Horizonte?” Facebook, 25/08/2020. https://www.facebook.com/mlbbr/ posts/3526167134109652 Ocupação Urbana - Antigo Prédio Do Inss Pode Ser Destinado À Moradia Popular (2015). http:// portal6.pbh.gov.br/dom/iniciaEdicao. do?method=DetalheArtigo&pk=1143781.

image and illustration list

image 01 – “centro and railway view from viaduto francisco sales” –photo by the author, 2022 image 02 – “central station and railway” – photo by the author, 2022 image 03 – “centro and railway” –photo by the author, 2022 image 04 – “location of belo horizonte” – illustration done by the author, 2022 image 05 – “map of the planned city of belo horizonte with north facing down” – available at https://upload. wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ b0/Planta_BH.jpg

image 06 – Jablonsky, Tibor; Strauch, Ney. (1955) “image 06 - 1955 photo of centro, ocupação zezeu ribeiro e norma lúcia building location highlighted” Available at https:// biblioteca.ibge.gov.br/visualizacao/ fotografias/GEBIS%20-%20RJ/MG12520. jpg

image 07 – unknown author (1958) “1958 photo of centro view from viaduto da Floresta”. Available at https://biblioteca. ibge.gov.br/visualizacao/fotografias/ GEBIS%20-%20RJ/mg42828.jpg – edited by author

image 08 – “map of neighbourhoods in centro” – illustration adapted by the

author, 2022 image 09 - unknown author (19--) “historical photo of pedreira prado lopes, one of the first favelas in Lagoinha, one of the first informal settlement of belo horizonte”. Available at https://biblioteca. ibge.gov.br/visualizacao/fotografias/ GEBIS%20-%20RJ/mg42768.jpg - edited by author

image 10 – Prefeitura de Belo Horizonte - Lei de Parcelamento, Ocupação e Uso do Solo (2019) “map of belo horizonte city centre and location of social housing”. Available at https:// prefeitura.pbh.gov.br/sites/default/ files/estrutura-de-governo/politicaurbana/2020/lei11181-01-anexo-i-mapade-estrutura-urbana-zoneamento.pdfedited by author image 11 - Jablonsky, Tibor; Strauch, Ney. (1956) “view of the city from avenida afonso pena - main avenue in belo horizonte’s centre - from 1956” Available at https://biblioteca.ibge.gov. br/visualizacao/fotografias/GEBIS%20 -%20RJ/MG12521.jpg

image 12 – Simões, Gustavo (2022) “view of the city from avenida afonso pena - main avenue in belo horizonte’s centrefrom 2022” Available at https://scontentlhr8-2.xx.fbcdn.net/v/t39.30808-

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte 2161265379_3108470231200789888_n. jpg?_nc_cat=105&ccb=1-7&_ nc_sid=a26aad&_nc_ohc=_ okX6YAjJh4AX95Puxb&_ nc_ht=scontent-lhr8-2. xx&oh=00_AT-I3nVyiZN0dGPn5Ye8uiFYEi4rv_ bxHjEvd6k_Pz1y8w&oe=631463F1

image 13 - 2022 photo of centro view from viaduto da Floresta – photo by the author, 2022 image 14 - 2010 censusdemographic density per census Tract (inhabitants/km²) – illustration adapted by the author, 2022 image 15 - 2010 census - individual or collective residences per census tract – illustration adapted by the author, 2022

image 16 - 2010 census - housing vacancy per census tract – illustration adapted by the author, 2022 image 17 - highlight of hipercentro - area of study – illustration adapted by the author, 2022 image 18 - vacant buildings –illustration adapted by the author, 2022 image 19 - listed buildings –illustration adapted by the author, 2022 image 20 - overlap of vacant and listed buildings – illustration adapted by the author, 2022 image 21 - stakeholders map –illustration adapted by the author, 2022 image 22 - uses map – illustration

by the author, 2022 image 23 - hotel othon palaceone of the vacant buildings – photo by the author, 2022 image 24 - hotel imperial - vacant building – photo by the author, 2022 image 25 - view of centro’s art murals – photo by the author, 2022 image 26 - ocupações map –illustration adapted by the author, 2022 image 27 - ocupação carolina maria de jesus – photo by the author, 2022 image 28 - ocupação zezeu ribeiro e norma lúcia – photo by the author, 2022 image 29 – “When Housing Is a Privilege, Occupation Is a Right” written on the façade of ocupação zezeu ribeiro e norma lúcia – photo by the author, 2022 image 30 – sketch of the section of ocupação zezeu ribeiro e norma lúcia – illustration by the author, 2022 image 31 – sketch of the façade of ocupação zezeu ribeiro e norma lúcia –illustration by the author, 2022 image 32– arquibancada (assembly area) – illustration by the author, 2022 image 33 – bazar (thrift store) –illustration by the author, 2022 image 34 – churrasco (common area) – illustration by the author, 2022 image 35 – costura (seamstress) –illustration by the author, 2022 image 36 – cozinha comum (communal kitchen) – illustration by the

author, 2022 image 37 – creche (day care) –illustration by the author, 2022 image 38 – jardim zezeu e norma (terrace) – illustration by the author, 2022

image 39 – moradia (housing) –illustration by the author, 2022 image 40 – salão (hairdresser) –illustration by the author, 2022 image 41 – mercado dona luzia (grocery) – illustration by the author, 2022 image 42 – movimento social (social movement) – illustration by the author, 2022 image 43 – section – illustration by the author, 2022 image 44 – façade – illustration by the author, 2022 image 45 – “centro viewed from viaduto santa tereza” – photo by the author, 2022 image 46 - “centro and the south developments seen from Floresta, one of the first neighbourhoods outside the planned city” – photo by the author, 2022

appendix - model photo

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

ocupações: a viable way to introduce social housing in the city centre of Belo Horizonte

student: 21176609

UCL, bartlett school of architecture MA architecture and historic urban environments

BARC0068: final project tutor: Dr Lakshmi Rajendran