Paisagem em disputa:

Vila Aparecida, patrimonialização e a fabricação da "desordem" em Ouro Preto

Abstract

This article examines Vila Aparecida, in Ouro Preto, turned into a symbol of urban “disorder” due to its interference in the landscape of the listed historic site. Formed since the mid-20th century through land concessions, self-construction and migration flows, the neighborhood only became a political concern in 2011, when a Federal Prosecutor’s Office report, during the inspection of construction works at the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Minas Gerais (IFMG), incidentally framed its houses as a landscape problem. The case illustrates how the notion of disorder operates as a grammar that naturalizes exclusion: housing needs are framed as noise, while order is associated with preserving an eighteenth-century atmosphere – colonial houses framed by surrounding green hills. From a dialectical materialist perspective, the neighborhood is not an anomaly but a historical product of the contradictions between the reproduction of popular life and the commodification of the landscape. Administrative documents, technical reports and land records show how legal norms and planning schemes do not confront these contradictions, but instead manage them, reinforcing urban hierarchies that the neighborhood makes visible.