Belo Horizonte underground: os sistemas de saneamento e as canalizações dos cursos d'água na nova capital de Minas Gerais

Abstract

Belo Horizonte completed recently 120 years of its inauguration, being the first city in Brazil in which the republican ideology will be present, associated with a process of rupture with the colonial past, and the beginning of a project of modernization of the country. In this dissertation, I work with the hypothesis that the choice of the sanitation systems for Belo Horizonte, made by the Comissão Construtora da Nova Capital - CCNC, was a determining factor for a recurrent process of channeling and buffering urban waterways, now almost entirely suppressed from the landscape. The investigation, however, has shown that such disputes take place in a context of a pre-determined urban conception, the slate, and the choice is one of several factors that are involved in the consolidation of such practice. In order to study the interventions in the watercourses of Belo Horizonte, I took as a case study the process of channeling the watershed of Córrego do Acaba Mundo. This microbasin is a significant sample of the urbanization process of Belo Horizonte comprising a large part of the urbanization forms: types of occupation and uses, interventions and actions of the State and, mainly, the channeling process of watercourses. Understanding that the construction of Belo Horizonte is configured as the genesis of a city model in Brazil, this work concludes with a reflection on the role of genesis over time.