100 anos de verticalização em Juiz de Fora: edifícios de apartamentos na avenida Barão do Rio Branco

Abstract

Located in the southeast of Minas Gerais, Juiz de Fora is the largest and most populous city of the region known as Zona da Mata Mineira, and also, one of the main urban centers of the state. However, its polarization is not only expressed through its horizontal urban sprawl. There is a clear trend of verticalization in the city, which has a large percentage of its dwellings classified as apartments, though there is a lack of researches exploring its development. Thus, the main goal of this study is to analyze the development of apartment buildings in Juiz de Fora, from the perspective of legal incentives and urban law, specifically of land use and soil occupation. As a time frame, we adopt the period between 1913 and 2013, which formalizes one century of verticalization in the city. As a study area, we adopt the Barão do Rio Branco Avenue, the main structuring route of Juiz de Fora and its most important circulation corridor. Further, the avenue owns apartment buildings belonging to different historical periods and is also one of the greatest focus for real estate market action until nowadays. The definition of urban laws and legal incentives for verticalization as central elements of analysis is deals with their influence on the primary shape of the buildings, to whom are related other analytical variables such as architectural styles and market profiles. This is an exploratory and descriptive research, developed at the Post Graduate Program in Built Environment of the Federal University of Juiz de Fora. According to the methodological procedures, this study has a documentary and bibliographic character. As results, we verified that apartment buildings are the materialization of market players influence in the drafting of urban laws in favor of increase land use possibilities, what make us relativize the notion of urban law as a planning mechanism, taking into account the negative effects of this practice in the city analyzed. As real estate market was consolidated in the city, urban law becomes an instrument for the consolidation of a progressive vision of city, imbued with specific interests, articulated both in the marketing sphere as in the policy itself. The laws and the vertical and horizontal growth of Juiz de Fora are both guide by these interests, without any study of its impact in space and urban landscape.