Paper short abstract:

This paper uses the journals written by Harriett Low (1829-34) and Carlos José Caldeira (1850-1851) during their travels in China to discuss description models of Macao and Canton in the early 19th century.

Paper long abstract:

This paper uses the journals written by Harriett Low (1829-34) and Carlos José Caldeira (1850-1851) during their travels in China to discuss description models of Macao and Canton in the early 19th century. Descriptions help to create new shared references for urban thinking and urban life, in other words they shape cities. It is more complex to describe cities than to produce or disseminate images. Description is a structural element of the urban phenomenon, and its values and modalities vary according to the local, national or transnational contexts. Describing cities involves a more or less conscious activity of categorizing and constructing discourses and knowledge that can be shared and imported. In this paper, I aim to analyze the link between changes in the urban concept or form and the variation in description models of the city, focusing on the specific process in the context of a sojourn in exotic cities. The tension between the colonial and historical contexts, the invention and diffusion of images of urban modernity are the main lines of this paper.