Social movements in belo horizonte, Brazil: Conflict and community association in the re-creation of a public sphere in the housing milieu (2006-2010)

Since the 1990s, public administrations have been putting collective efforts and movements in general under scrutiny, leaving our cities up to private interests, irreparably submitted to the big capital. Against all odds and interests embedded in this process and aiming at re-creating housing opportunities, housing related social movements have been building alliances and proposing conflict both as a struggle vehicle and as a dialectical instrument to interact with the State. Within the social realm, manifested conflicts have also constituted a public sphere where differences can be presented.

This essay intends to present and discuss the urban conflicts scenario in Belo Horizonte, capital city to the state of Minas Gerais, Brazil, having as focus those related to housing, especially the community-settlements that have been working under conflictual planning principles, and have been receiving great recognition and importance within the local social movements network. This study sheds light into the ways in which grassroots struggles present themselves through manifested conflicts in the city and how the housing problem is managed by social movements and by different forms of association in the community-settlements. It also intends to explore how the city, structured by the inequality of its places, interacts with its social movements. The main forms and strategies adopted by such struggles will be discussed, at first using a quantitative approach and secondly presenting a couple of brief qualitative reports.

Results show that the Community-settlement Dandara works as the possible dialectical construction antagonism-unity to which Simmel makes reference, as a possible durkheimian social cohesion or as a possibility of eliminating social fear through the exposition to differences, as Bauman would propose. It offers a vivid example of the potential embedded in social conflicts when it elects the dialog as the route to get other sectors’ support, re-creating the public sphere.