Décimas urbanas and census: the material and visual dimension of towns and cities in textual sources

• Autor(a) principal: Bueno, Beatriz Piccolotto Siqueira
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Outros Autores: Arraes, Esdras Araujo, Moura, Nádia Mendes de, Borsoi, Diogo Fonseca
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Urbana (Campinas)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.sbu.unicamp.br/ojs/index.php/urbana/article/view/8651827
• topic: Cities. Textual sources. Colonial period.; Ciudades. Fuentes textuales. Período colonial.; Cidades. Fontes textuais. Período colonial.

The history of Brazilian cities in the colonial period was written, to a large extent, based upon its formal aspects. Images of "abandonment" and "sloppiness" created by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda in his book Raízes do Brasil (1936, 1948) motivated generations of researchers to investigate the morphology of these cores, searching for patterns of regularity and geometry. If much attention was given to the planimetric aspects, little or none was paid to the volumetric aspects and materiality as a historical source. The material dimension of social relations, with rare exceptions, remained in the background as simple scenery. Little attention was also given to its capacity of encouraging new social relations, product and vector in a constant dialectical relation. Detecting the materiality of historical cores is not an easy task. It requires specific methodology and instruments to be mobilized in a regressive perspective, and involves the intertwining of varied documentation. In recent years, a new batch of studies has shed light on empirical evidence, which are worthy of debate for their novelty and for acting towards a necessary review of the materiality of Brazilian colonial cities, including their interfaces with the nearby rural world. Based on textual sources with an accentuated visual dimension, which have been spatialized in regressive cartographies by means of new technological contributions, including the GIS (Geographic Information System), these studies show what otherwise we could not be seen. They focus on material indexes that enlighten social relations and, above all, uneven processes of time accumulation, in a longer historical perspective. The city discussed as an artifact, product and vector of human action, is thus a privileged field of analysis in Urban History, theme of this article, which aims to demonstrate some interesting and yet-to-be-published results in this line of research, on which we are privileged to constitute a research group (BUENO, 2004; 2005, 2016; ANDRADE, 2012; ARRAES, 2017; BORSOI, 2013; BRAGHITTONI, 2015; KATO, 2011 and 2017; MOURA - thesis in progress). In a kind of Archeology of Urban Landscape, our intent is to reconstitute the materiality of five colonial urban centers - São Paulo, Santos, Cunha, Vila Boa and Oeiras of Piauí - with aim on detailing our research methodology, in order to point out some promising paths for the disciplinary field in debate in the present dossier.DÉCIMAS URBANAS AND CENSUS:THE MATERIAL AND VISUAL DIMENSION OF TOWNS AND CITIES IN TEXTUAL SOURCES.