Colonial city, historiography and representation: note of a study on the urban formation of Mariana, Minas Gerais (18th century).

Abstract

This article aims to discuss the formation of the colonial cities in Portuguese America. Using the case of the city of Mariana, built in the eighteenth century during the movement of occupation of space by gold mining in the central region of the current state of Minas Gerais, as a paradigmatic example and two iconographic representations, made probably in the eighteenth century, what we will try here is to shed light on the historiographical debate, pointing rather peculiar aspects of urbanism and Portuguese occupation and formation of urban space that village. The exemplary case of Mariana can help to achieve better understand how their own city occupants should see the space of the city, showing the importance of interpreting contemporary documents to produce better compression about the construction of colonial cities. Therefore, attempts to cross the historiographical debate with the iconographic representations in order to produce some considerations on the Luso-Brazilian urbanism of the eighteenth century.