Racial Property Regimes: The Formation of Downtown Belo Horizonte

Abstract

This article examines the formation of central Belo Horizonte through the notion of racial regimes of property, as proposed by Brenda Bhandar (2018). Drawing on a historical-documentary reconstruction of the making of the capital of Minas Gerais—mobilizing legislation, technical reports, administrative records, and institutional discourses—the article argues that urban planning, property law, and territorial governance practices did not merely organize the city’s material fabric, but actively participated in the production of social, territorial, and ontological categories. It contends that the periphery does not constitute a late effect or a deviation from the urban project, but rather a structural condition of the modern city, necessary to its material production while simultaneously disauthorized as a legitimate mode of inhabitation. By articulating the Belo Horizonte case with a critique of modern private property as an ontological technology, the article shows how the modern-colonial separation between body and land establishes differential regimes of value, recognition, and belonging in urban space. Finally, it proposes understanding the production of space as a field of ontological dispute, in which not only forms of territorial ordering but also socially recognized modes of existence are defined.