A produção desigual do espaço urbano de Juiz de Fora: a ocupação Vila Barroso

Abstract

This master’s dissertation aims to discuss the Juiz de Foras’s uneven production of urban space – an important Brazilian’s medium sized city – by presenting the shanty town Vila Barroso as a materialization of this process. The shanty town began at the same time that the town hall started investing on attraction of big companies in order to adapt the city to the global capital interests. Intending to understand this scenario, it is needed to consider that the capitalism contradictions are present in urban space, and, willing to keep them, the dominant actors (re)produce the space, putting in evidence the socio-spatial inequalities as manifestation of contradiction between the social production of space and its private appropriation. Based on this, it is discussed Juiz de Fora’s uneven production of urban space, from a medium sized city perspective, presenting current and past dynamics that enable to put the shanty town Vila Barroso in the housing question context. After a decade living under precarious conditions, the homeless people were taken from where they had been living in, because their shanty town was located in an area under valorization process. Because of this, the families had been suffering pressure from town hall until they were finally relocated in a site of the governmental program “Minha casa, minha vida”, when they left the area nearby BR-040 roadway, making possible its selling or renting. In this game of interests that involves the mainly urban space (re)producers, Juiz de Fora’s urban space has been constantly reorganized and remarked by social classes separation. For the homeless people this process represented houses to live in, but also the loss of their identity and the connection they had with the place they were taken from.