Condomínio: status e utopia num subúrbio brasileiro do século XXI

Abstract

This dissertation attempts to understand the suburbanization process in its historical construction by focusing mainly on aspects related the dichotomy distinction and status versus exclusion and segregation, which among various trajectories, is tracked by the searches of the city and of the ideal society as announced by utopias. The construction of this dissertation departs from a historical approach which traces its origin in the villae suburbanae, then passes through the medieval era, and then returns as the Renaissance villas. However, at the end of the eighteenth century the suburb has undergone substantial transformation when the British, and later, the Americans, as confronted with an intense and rapid urbanization triggered by the Industrial Revolution, began a process which, in its latest stage, has changed the idea of polarizing centrality with the creation of new peripheral centralities. Brazil, a country in which the centralized city has been highlighted throughout history, has had its own suburbanizing moments, an option which nevertheless occurred late, by the beginning of the twentieth century, when a peripheral neighborhood near São Paulos capital was built up, exclusively for housing the bourgeoisie. This enterprise has affected several Brazilian settlements, even Goiânias building plant and it has signaled a new path to the countrys urbanizing processes, while retaining the tradition of centrality, as observed in the construction of Brasília. Simultaneously to the construction of the new Brazilian capital, on the outskirts of Belo Horizonte, the roots of what would be considered a new Brazilian urbanizing paradigm had emerged - the closed condominium - and it would be seen as a model for many similar ventures, which, in the 1970s, have reached new thresholds with the construction of Alphaville in the outskirts of São Paulo. Alphaville is close to a North American model, and it adds up to form a new component to the Brazilian suburb: the symbol of status and of social prestige. And it was this new component that has guided the construction of Alphaville Lagoa dos Ingleses, in the municipality of Nova Lima, estate of Minas Gerais. In this new connotation, the Brazilian suburb incorporates North American influences and a whole set of material valuation and distinctiveness symbolisms that are a society / community ideal proposal, a materialized utopia.