Traditionally, the city of Belo Horizonte was restricted in its growth southwards, due to a sharply defined East-West-stretching mountain ridge. Nowadays, the slope of this ridge, as well as the ridge itself, represent the upper class concentration in the city, located in neighborhoods correctly dubbed with names such as ‘Belvedere’. The municipality however wants to stop this vector and focus the city growth northwards, even though this is an immense expansion already. Apparently this entire area is a case of ‘private urbanism’ and its roots can be traced back already to the 70’s, when developers started to make areas with second homes in the outskirts of the city, in the neighboring municipality of Nova Lima. Nova Lima is mostly owned by the mining agglomerations, nowadays, and it was already the case in the last century. As the iron mining drew to an economic slump mid-last century, an upscale urbanization phenomena started to occur, and the miners were converting land spotted initially to have iron, and developing it for a profit.

The trend has continued up to today, although nowadays the mining activity has once more become very lucrative. With the growth of Belo Horizonte creating a land value increase on its outskirts, this has meant that the perimeters of Nova Lima have become new city parts of Belo Horizonte. Ongoing mining activity, ongoing condominium and high-rise development, along with some pieces of leftover nature, now define what one sees when one climbs up from the center to the ‘Belvedere’. This topics deals with the question of private urbanism, in a very particular context of a ridge, which used to be the former natural barrier of the growth of the city, and inevitably the study also deals with the mining giants, albeit in another role here, in the role of land developers.