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Paper short abstract:

This paper proposes to discuss how the Portuguese building culture adapted to new worlds and environments and how islands and shores were used as experimentation territories for the construction of the Atlantic World, during the 15th and 16th centuries.

Paper long abstract:

When King D. João III decided to install the captaincies system in Brazil (1536), as an administrative formula to improve the settlement process, he was not inventing a new colonial policy. On the contrary, he was making use of a strategy tried out with great success on the settlement process of the Atlantic islands along the previous century. First in Madeira island, since circa 1425, then in the Azores archipelago, with equal success, around the year 1450.

Mainly, this strategy (which was based, itself, on the medieval Christian conquest and settlement process of the Iberian Peninsula) intended to guarantee that the settling process was conducted in a lucrative way, both on the agriculture production and tax system level. In order to do so, new towns were founded, land grants were donated to settlers and a tax free policy was implemented. On this scenario urban and land use planning became an important tool to accomplish success, resulting on a rural and urban landscape devised and laid out according to strong geometrical principals emerged.

This paper aims to present the set of rules, regarding land ordinance and urbanism that were available during the settlement process of the Atlantic area by the Portuguese. Namely how they were transferred and applied to new territories, such as the islands (namely the Azores and Madeira archipelago's) and then to Brazil, were the territorial dimensions eventually required a new redefinition of the strategy, showing how urbanization was at the service of power.