URBAN COLONIAL AND SYMBOLS OF POWER: the example of Rio de Janeiro in the XVII and XVIII centuries

Abstract

The present article analyses the experience of the colonial city of Rio de Janeiro in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It interprets its urbanism, and discusses how the Portuguese Crown presided over the tasks of fortification and creation of overseas cities, just as it did over the entire endeavor of overseas conquest. As the center of political administration. tax collection, commerce, and defense in the vast central-southern region of the Luso-America, Rio de Janeiro was the privileged stage for the exercise of metropolitan dominance over the colony. Thus, through a study of Rio de Janeiro, this article discusses how the physical, social, and political spatiality of Portuguese colonial cities in America was a symbolic expression of royal metropolitan power, and also a space for the intersection and clash el interests of the representatives of the Portuguese Crown and their colonial vassals.