Reclaiming the City
Occupation, Belo Horizonte, the vertical banners, read “Popular Housing in the centre”
Maria Arrial was not for moving. She wasn’t intimidated by the government officials in their absurd tight suits, or the gangs of men armed with sledgehammers and pickaxes. This was her home, her garden, her community. She had watched as her friends and neighbours were evicted one by one, but she was determined to battle it out to the bitter end. To begin with the officials were polite enough and even showed her the plans for a grand new city divided into geometrically perfect lots. She thought it perverse to try and impose such regimented order on the wild curves of nature, but the men were insistent that the plateau, nestled between mountains, was the perfect place to locate the new State capital. That there were thriving communities of subsistence farmers most of them of African descent, could not be allowed to stand in the way of progress. The past must be expropriated to make way for the future, a future of grid-iron certainty, and Maria’s humble home stood in the way, for it sat on the precise location of the proposed Praça de Liberdade. It was by any measure, a savage irony. One hundred and twenty years later, a short walk down the hill from Liberty Square, eighty families invade the empty ten story former Commercial Apprenticeship Building. Inspired by Maria’s defiance and spearheaded by the MLB, Movimento de Luta nos Bairros Vilas e Favelas,[1] such direct action is part of a nationwide movement to occupy abandoned buildings, public institutions, and former common lands. The act of occupation is the global and historical battle cry of the homeless, the landless and the dispossessed, and with so many buildings in downtown Belo Horizonte lying empty and boarded up, it is a legitimate response to urban poverty and the lack of affordable housing. In this case, it is also a symbolic reclamation of the city centre by the marginalised descendants of communities expelled from the land over a century ago.
[1] Literally the ‘Movement of struggle in neighbourhoods, villages and favelas’