Paper short abstract:

This paper proposes an analysis of the process of appropriation of Portuguese urban patterns in two colonial settlements in Minas Gerais where the engineers’ rationalist plans and the Crown’s employees’ ordinances were assimilated into the local culture resulting in peculiar morphologies.

Paper long abstract:

Unlike the other Brazilian Hereditary Captaincies - that survived on the sugar-cane culture, and that were eminently rural, the mining settlements in Minas Gerais could be considered as true cities, with squares, palaces, theatres, Council Houses. Some of the urban regulations can be credited to the Portuguese government's own employees that served in Brazil in administrative positions, but the teaching of the art of erecting cities in some points of the Captaincy and the local appropriation of the models originated a process of miscegenation resulting in peculiar morphologies.

The methodological procedures for this research were based on H. Lefebvre's studies of the "representations of space" and of "spaces of representation", as well as of the rules and models investigated by F. Choay, that made possible to notice how those Portuguese ordinances assumed urban morphologies that cannot be considered completely dictated by the metropolis, as often affirmed in the historiography of the urbanization in Brazil.

The main subject to be solved is to investigate - in the two mining settlements - how the dialogue between Portugal and Brazil was established and how the local population itself, even supported by the employees of the Crown, have contributed to a more free morphological occupation, although some Portuguese engineers had proposed more rationalists plans for several settlements. In so doing, I intend to bring together these different perspectives in order to build a more articulated understanding of these settlements, not only from the global European perspective, but from the local viewpoint.