O espaço urbano no contexto colonial: o caso de Luanda

Abstract

This paper must be characterized as a study and discussion of the use of the urbanization as an element that characterize the structure of power in terms of the evolution of the historical process in the perspective of the country settler’s insert in the international plan, second each time, taking into account some variables, as for example, the residents’ origin: Africans and Europeans. The sense of the process, or the sense of the urbanization, appears preferentially among a cut and other along the time, showing the insertions in both plans: the external and the internal one. This relationship usually reflects a vision of the ‘we’ and of the ‘other’. In the attempt of avoiding an analysis of the society of Luanda starting from the central ideas that are usually accepted as lines of the Portuguese colonial process – a group of ideasforce associated to a conception of ideological stamp –, we opted for the accomplishment of a
research seeking to surprise the sense of a transition period among two moments of the colonial process: the end of the traffic of the slavery, at the end of the first half of the XIX century, and the insert of the colony in the international capitalist process, at the end of the second half of the XX century. The demographic analysis is used for a better characterization of the global space of Angola and, in a second moment, of Luanda, what makes possible to verify the importance of the agglomerate urban “Luandense” in the context of the colony, aspect that suffers changes along the time. The space distribution of the population according to the
somatic groups, as in relation to the space of Angola, as in relation to the urban space of the colony, reveals points of greatest importance to the understanding of the colonial process.