This article uses the Brazilian city of Belo Horizonte as a case-study to show that beyond the centralized planning model that prevailed in the 1970s, a new model of urban intervention has developed, based on the participatory budget and focused on the most vulnerable portion of the Brazilian urban population: the favela dwellers. While larger Brazilian cities such as Sa ̃o Paulo and Rio de Janeiro have a deeper history of intervention in the favelas, this article focuses on Belo Horizonte as the polar opposite to the well-known model of Curitiba. If we agree that any real sustainable urbanism should be built upon a participatory community, the favela’s interventions carried on in Belo Horizonte might rise to the occasion as a promising alternative.
