Paisagem contemporânea de expansão metropolitana de Belo Horizonte: interações globais em morfologias locais

Abstract

Contemporary metropolitan landscapes tend to accelerate urban expansion, manifesting themselves through the blurring of city limits. These characteristics raise the question as to what may be considered urban or rural at the metropolitan fringes, due to the transformation of increasingly extensive territories which become engulfed in the process of urban dispersion. Such transformations, moreover, are occurring simultaneously at both a local and global level. The economic aspects of globalization have come to influence the incessant expansion of urbanization – a consequence of the role each metropolis plays in the planetary system. The attraction for capital and population is thus conditioned by the ability of the metropolitan landscape to compete within this global dynamic. The ensuing intense process of urbanization as a reflection of the economic performance of cities has a strong impact on global environmental degradation and serves to give rise to social inequality on multiple scales. If on the one hand, recent global socioeconomic forces have contributed to the expansion of metropolitan landscapes, on the other, coexisting local forces, mainly cultural and environmental, have also had the capacity to shape such territories. The local environmental and urban morphologies may therefore be viewed as potential sources for territorial development which can engender environmental resilience and socio – cultural preservation, as well as provide the management for sustainable metropolitan expansion. In constant interaction, global and local forces combine at different intensities in every locality contributing to the ways metropolitan landscapes assume the forms of contemporary urban identity. The hypothesis presented in this thesis argues that expansion of the metropolitan landscape is the result of the interaction of global and local forces analogous to the idea of antennas and roots. As such, the antennas capture the socioeconomic trends of the globalized era, while the roots incorporate the long cultural processes of anthropic environmental adaptation. Utilizing an interdisciplinary and multiscale approach, the research focuses on the southern metropolitan expansion process of Belo Horizonte, in Minas Gerais, in which a territorial type is defined as a specific site for the investigation. Interdisciplinary concepts emerge from the need to understand contemporary complexity, such as the social, economic, environmental and cultural aspects that interact together on the landscape. The process may be considered multiscale as it encompasses global and local issues associated with the formal, compact and dispersed manifestation of contemporary metropolitan expansion. The landscape is therefore understood as a system of interacting forces and as a product of the materiality of human action on the environment. Methodologically, the research combines the approaches of Landscape Ecology, Environmental Studies and Urban Morphology, in order to both develop principals for territorial management and contribute to providing innovative landscape planning and solutions which may be efficaciously used in the contemporary development of the expanding metropolitan landscape.