Railway cultural heritage in Belo Horizonte

preservation, abandonment and resignification in the vast human hive

Abstract

Analysis of the history of railway cultural heritage in Belo Horizonte in two temporalities: the period of construction and initial growth of the city, when the railway occupied a central place in everyday urban dynamics, evidenced in official, literary and journalistic, iconographic and cartographic textual sources and archaeological works produced between 1895 and 1935; and the period of decline of railway transport, between 1975 and 2005, marked by the attribution of the concept of cultural heritage to the set of movable and immovable assets linked to the railway in the city. In this last temporality, Belo Horizonte's railway heritage found itself in different situations, with cases of preservation policies, others of resignification and also cases of abandonment, revealed by research into journalistic and photographic sources from the period. The analysis of the sources is carried out from a methodological perspective of cultural history, seeking to understand the meaning of the phenomena for historical subjects who experienced them. Thus, it is concluded that the railway crossed the history of Belo Horizonte starting from a mark of modernity, at the end of the 19th century, going through the political, economic and social crises of the 20th century, and reaching the 21st century as a symbol of a past time.