4. The Boundaries of Heritage: The Paradoxes of Ouro Preto

Currently, an increasingly urgent need is to protect the cultural heritage, over many years, missing values and meanings as a result of the rupture and the various transformations from the Industrial Revolution that led to the abandonment of traditional technologies and ways of doing, at the expense of modernity and the mechanization of the processes of human creation. In Brazil, it was in 1920 that such goods, products of human creativity, and fruits of various social and historical methods became part of the conservationist ideas of the country, only then made arrangements to ensure their maintenance. This understanding intends to analyse the maintenance process, which deals with the protection and development guidelines focused on Ouro Preto, a world heritage site, a veritable laboratory for producing protective standards. Various instruments of the various spheres of Government were created throughout the twentieth century. However, the exaggeration of the protection and default on urban management transformed the city into a territory divided between historic X and non-historical cities. Even with the evolution of urban management practices to pursue sustainable development that reconciles the needs and potentialities, the insistence on treating the city depends on growth and conditioning, structural, aesthetic and economical, the historic. The standards of more recent heritage protection seem to perpetuate these paradoxes in establishing the bounding border of the historical and non-historical city.