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Accepted Paper:

has pdf download Constructing a new territory: the role of land ordinance in the urban design of the Azorean new towns  
Antonieta Reis Leite (UNL/UAÇ e UC )

Paper short abstract:

This paper proposal aims to present the set of rules, regarding land ordinance, that were available during the settlement process of the Azorean islands and stress how they were applied to this new territory, namely in Angra and Ponta Delgada where the urban pattern resulted strongly geometrized.

Paper long abstract:

The goal of this paper is to bring out to discussion how the discovered and settlement of the Azores islands allowed to start an innovative settling program that was based in a simple but very efficient set of rules directed to the land regulation.

By law, the Lords (donatários), and their delegates the Captains (capitães), should distribute the land to the settlers according to the Lei das Sesmarias. This law ruled the distribution of unoccupied and not producing ground, either urban and rural, in the mainland Portugal since 1375, and served has a base to the occupation process in all the portuguese atlantic territories - but it was first tried and improved in Madeira and Azores the so called "near Atlantic islands".

Despite this law was already in use it needed to be added with new rules in order to be efficient in an unoccupied and remote territory, such as the islands.

In fact, in the first place this policy intended to guarantee that the settling process was conducted in a lucrative way. Meaning that, the agriculture production, as well as the tax system should be optimized to its potential level.

The land ordinance became a tool to accomplish that, as well as the donation of land was a way of attract population to this far-off islands.

In result of this regulation process, a rural and urban landscape devised and laid out according to geometrical principals emerged.

Panel P04
The land issue in the early modern overseas empires
  Session 1 Wednesday 17 July, 2013, -