The roundtable was entitled “Between the Archive and the Repertoire: co-producing urban histories in Belo Horizonte, Brazil” and aimed at exposing the work of the primary phases of the extension project “Urban Memories”, that the two professors have been developing together with other researchers from the research group Lab.Urb and Natureza Política, both based at UFMG.
Junia Ferrari started with a presentation on the previous extension project, entitled CFAS (Curso de Formação de Agentes Sociais) that originated the current one. In order to contextualize the audience, she brought some important data concerning Belo Horizonte, explaining that it is a planned city from 1897, being the capital of the state of Minas Gerais, in south-eastern Brazil, and a city marked by very intense processes of densification and vertical growth, making the struggle over urban space even more complex. According to the latest census, more than 300,000 people live in favelas across the city — that’s more than 13% of the capital’s population. In short, there is a very intense struggle for inclusion, housing, and access to infrastructure and public services. And it was in those places that the previous extension project, CFAS, took place, allowing for community leaders from different regions to establish a network of knowledge exchange.
CFAS - Social Agents Training Course Extension Project - was funded by the European Union and brokered by the Observatório das Metrópoles, a national research group. At that time, there were meetings with community leaders, with the aim of understanding the challenges faced by these groups and to encourage the exchange of collective action strategies, the sharing of knowledge, and the building of support networks. The idea was to bring together different leaders, civil society groups, students and professors to see the realities of each community that agreed to participate in the project, welcoming us into their territory and visiting other communities. This itinerant approach allowed for a very rich exchange of experiences, struggles, and perspectives. In 2023, there was another round of visits. This time, it included a Quilombola community — which is a group of African descendants in Brazil who preserve their culture and lands. They live in a municipality of the metropolitan region of Belo Horizonte. The topics discussed were diverse and were decided collectively with community leaders, based on the initial conversations in 2021. Discussions ranged from urban issues to the challenges of dignified housing, human rights, race, and gender. Individual stories were shared, but there were clear patterns in the ongoing struggle for housing, food, transport, healthcare, leisure, work, and income. In 2024, without European Union funding, there were adjustments in the project focus, as itinerant visits were no longer possible. We decided to concentrate our activities in a Single área, in partnership with the organised social movement Movimento Brasil Popular (MBP), in the peripheral Mariano de Abreu neighbourhood.
In this phase, as Junia Mortimer presented, the extension project decided to focus historical imagination to foster futurity, going through archival research, considering both institutional and personal collections, interviews, physical model, photography workshops, exhibition and editorial experiments, amongst other activities. By bringing together what was heard from the various conversations with the community and what was found (or not found) in institutional archives, some narrative lines emerged pointing towards the struggle for water, sewage and transport, besides the questions of self-built architecture and, above all, the presence of women in the building of the city. In order to expand the possibility of developing a better understanding of that area, historically, and at the same time allowing for urban imagination to be fostered, amongst community residents, students and researchers, Junia Mortimer dedicated to the project two editions of her undergraduate courses on the subject of Local Planning, disciplines from the School of Architecture, in the Federal University of Minas Gerais. In the first one, students, community residents and researchers produced an exhibition and a zine. In the second one, a dossier of urban analyzes was the outcome.
The roundtable discussion made it evident the importance of building alliances between university and communities under precarious situations in order to better understand the city and its complexities. Only by facing the challenges brought about through this dialogue it becomes possible to collectively conceive of planning strategies in order to fight for a more just and equitable urban space.