Alcances, limites e interfaces entre o Direito Urbanístico e a Agricultura Urbana

Abstract

Belo Horizonte is a great example to discuss how agriculture was put out of the formal city when it was conceived in the late 19th century, and later, from the 1980s / 1990s, reappearing with prominence in the national and international scenarios. Social movements and communities in the metropolitan region have been demonstrating how agriculture, associated with agroecology, can promote quality of life, income generation, healthy eating, new ways of relating and building urban spaces in a participatory way, joining popular knowledge with public policy. Belo Horizonte, for some years now, has laws and institutions that provide some support for groups and people to mobilize themselves in the planting of food in urban soil, a category dear to Urban Law, which in turn gives timid treatment to the function of the soil, which is to store seeds for food production. Instead, in the performance of the urbanistic function by the public authorities, the well-cemented notion among urban planners and urban planners has long prevailed that in urban areas the plots must serve the construction of buildings for sale and profit (and taxation), and that the city should only serve mobility, leisure and work. Which is legitimate, but it has been a factor of unrest for many farmers, conscious consumers who aspire to a proactive public power in promoting a more sustainable city. As the capital has its entire territory declared, in law, as an urban area, the planting of vegetable gardens, orchards, flowerbeds, agroforestry systems and urban farms in addition to other forms of cultivation that are present in this territory, have been a variable an increase that cannot be ignored by the regulation system, not least because it presents itself as a positive qualifier of the social function of property. This study carried out extensive bibliographic research on the central themes that orbit the problem of food production by industry, the countryside and cities, to then perceive the possibilities of forming a city agrifood system based on the norms, principles and instruments of urban policy. Among the results, advances in the process of institutionalizing urban agriculture in the city are mentioned, as well as setbacks and challenges that are on the agenda of the day given that the municipality had its new master plan approved in 2019. As this is the constitutionally valid document for ordering coexistence in Brazilian cities with special and spatial rules, is supported by the human right to adequate food and the notion of food and nutritional security that is argued by the necessary contribution of Brazilian Urban Law to the formation of a city agrifood system.