In 1885 with the plan for the new state capital ‘Cidade de Minas’, a metropolitan form was stamped on a then still virtually untouched land. This urban form – today the Centro of Belo Horizonte – contains the entire program of a metropolitan downtown: wide avenues, monumental squares with obelisks, high-rise buildings, museums, libraries, theaters, government palaces, a central train station, a large central park etc.

The Centro has in recent decades been increasingly deserted by both upper class dwellers and businesses, many of which have moved to the southern tip of the Centro or even beyond the Avenida Contorno, the ring road defining it. At the same time the high real estate prices keep away more modest users. As a result the very center of the growing metropolitan region has become partially abandoned and exists today in a strange mélange between pressure and neglect. Why is the very entry point of the city into the territory slowly losing its role as center? And where are those central functions going? This investigation tries to answer these and many more questions discribing the changes and movements currently affecting and forming Belo Horizonte’s centralities.