The main goal of this article is to understand the dynamics of land tenure, in an important Brazilian metropolitan area, « Belo Horizonte », the capital of « Minas Gerais », over the last ten years. The study area is characterized by the dichotomy of a poor peripheral region, which becomes the object of massive public-private partnership investments in large-scale urban projects (LSUP). Empirical studies on urban land tenure are rare, and thus the research reveals an unknown reality. The article is organized from a multidisciplinary and multi-scalar approach and combines, in a pioneering way, unpublished land tax databases, and semi-structured interviews with the real estate sector, local and regional public authorities, and inhabitants, in order to collect the perceptions of agents producing this urban periphery. Our results demonstrate huge inequality : land tenure is becoming more concentrated ; there is strong private sector participation in controlling peripheral lands ; and the peripheral zone has become the object of “land banking”, especially by construction, real estate and financial capital. In this sense, the concentration of land tenure seems to lead to the resurgence of a new “patrimonial capitalism”. If the history of Minas Gerais, during the Portuguese colonization, and of Belo Horizonte, the first planned city of the Brazilian republican era, and its leap-frog urbanisation process favor the constitution of this patrimonial capitalism in the urban periphery, our results show that contemporary processes of land financialization and large urban projects intensify this unequal condition in the periphery. Moreover, this phenomenon does not necessarily imply the subdivision and fragmentation of urban land : it may present a pattern of ownership like observed in rural areas. The results show a seemingly paradoxical situation : urban and rural contexts that do not exclude each other.