Áreas especiais de interesse social (AEIS) ambientais: propostas para habitação social em áreas verdes como contribuição para a construção do direito ao território no caminho para a justiça ambiental

Abstract

The struggles for housing of low-income groups within the big Brazilian metropoles are reflecting the contradictions within the actual forms of the production of urban space. These conflicts indicate that there is a necessity to formulate a right for territory as means to guarantee fundamental rights for habitation, alimentation, etc., to complete approaches of the right to the city proposed by Henri Lefebvre, David Harvey, and others. Therefore, this study objectives to recognize conflicts in between movements for housing and public and private power, culminating on urban occupations of empty terrains and areas of risk or ecological relevance, as struggles for environmental justice. Based on this perspective of political ecology, we present here a methodology of the delimitation of Special Areas of Social Housing called AEIS which includes also the new proposal of environmental AEIS. This approach is based on the mapping of empty terrains within the revision of the Belo Horizonte´s Master Plan in 2012, conducted by a planning team of the municipality with the authors participation. It could be noted that unlike the current discourse by some politicians and sectors of the real estate market, the city of Belo Horizonte still has considerable empty areas available for social housing and many of them even could be interspersed with green areas. Hence, the obstacles to face the actual housing crisis are not of a technical-administrative nature with respect on the physical disponibility of urban land, but to the power relations which permeate the municipal territorial management.