ABSTRACT
Planned and built by the State as the capital of Minas Gerais’ province, Belo Horizonte is an exemplary expression of late nineteenth-century transatlantic circulation of knowledge between Brazil, Europe and North America. Progress, order and hygiene set the basis for the implementation of a rigid grid crossed by diagonals onto an undulated landscape. Attempting to superimpose this artificial isometry also on a very diverse social reality, this move had several unexpected physical as well as social outcomes. While the 1895 plan is frequently associated with French positivism and compared to other cities such as Paris, Washington D.C. and La Plata, not much has been exposed on the several forms of knowledge appropriation that bridge the alleged urban models to the material results seen in this city. Our chapter goes beyond the ideas of ‘influence’ of ‘transference of models’ and concentrates on how urban knowledge has been appropriated, transformed and reinvented locally through an accumulation of events and the interaction between different actors. Moreover, the focus shifts to beyond Belo Horizonte's gridded urban core towards the suburbs and rural zones, where the several layers of knowledge appropriation become more evident, where the model and local reality clash and create a new grounded urban knowledge.
