Espaços e saberes canalizados: discussões sobre a natureza social dos rios em Belo Horizonte

Abstract

The research exposed in the following texts started from the uneasiness felt due to the relationship of Estrangement constituted between the dwellers of the Belo Horizonte metropolis and the rivers that are part of its territory. Taking this uneasiness as a starting point, our reflection treated the bodies of water and their integration within the urban tissue as an element of the landscape through which its possible and necessary to show the reach of the production of Space and the complex process of creation of needs in and by contemporary urbanization. In Belo Horizonte, such as in many metropolises, the relationship with the rivers was marked by degradation, occultation and mutilation of the hydric element of urban landscape, taking away with itself the social wealth of the lost experiences of their living space appropriation. Thus, throughout the research, a theoretical and conceptual exercise was developed, working towards understanding the urbanization processes of Belo Horizonte which determine the relationship we have towards nature, with social history of rivers in scope. We sought to analyze the interventions and sanitary works as part of the sociospatial processes of the city, taking as main observation axis the role of technical knowledge in social nature production and its employment in urban planning as an instrument and reproduction means of social relationships through urbanization. Contexts and debates concerning relevant moments of urban (re)structuring, watercourse interventions and municipal sanitation, drainage and road system plans and programs were reviewed and discussed. In order to develop this discussion, we took as main question the idea that nature presents itself to us as a social nature, a product of the process of appropriation performed by human activity in the world, which expresses specific social relationships of the historical moment in which we live. For this reason, if theres estrangement between Man and Nature in contemporary cities, this is a manifestation of the estrangement of Man and their own activity: their forms of work, knowledge and world appropriation. The production of urban space, as a constructed mediation towards nature, carries and reproduces the inherent contradictions of capitalist social relationships, which reach into our everyday lives. In order to break free from alienation regarding our own activity (an the space that results from it), its necessary to comprehend and to question such contradictions.