Colonial and Postcolonial Urbanism Research Papers (original) (raw)

In the mid-16th century, the Portuguese succeeded in establishing themselves in the Pearl River Delta, developing in the Macao peninsula a burgeoning city with an exclusive status as the sole western permanent trading post allowed in the South China Sea. Macao will grow to become a cosmopolitan urban center, closely connected to Canton, at the heart of trade between China and the world. Only with the 1st Opium War (1839-1842) will this golden era come to an end, with the English imperial power forcing the “gospel” of free trade into China Sea ports, where more competitive western settlements soon blossomed.
The World Heritage property bears witness to Macao’s exceptional history, placing the peaceful encounter of cultures and intertwining of influences between East and West at the heart of its outstanding universal value declaration. Macao is, by these criteria, the quintessential “in between city”, as it has throughout its history developed in between cultures, identities, empires and, more importantly, in between autonomous spatial appropriation and centralized urban planning.
Putting it in a schematic way, Macao has known essentially two very different forms of urban development, closely related to the official settlement strategy deployed by the Portuguese imperial administration which, in its turn, reflected how it was coping and adapting to the changing geopolitical circumstances in the Pearl River Delta region.
From the early settlement to the mid-19th century, the city follows an “organic” pattern, meaning that it grew with no predetermined geometrical regularity in the configuration of the urban structure and the built space. Instead, it developed adapting itself morphologically and functionally to the site, while establishing strong military and religious visual elements in the urban landscape.
We may interpret this irregularity of the urban form as the result of an absence of political or colonizing purpose during these first three centuries: the occupation of the territory and the spatial organization of the city were the product of relatively free individual appropriation and shaping of the built space by the different communities that inhabited it, combined with an absence or relative debility of a centralizing authority. For example, it was only in the 1620s that the first Portuguese governors were appointed to Macao, the matters relating to the town government being treated up until the 1850s by the local Senate, a group of elected representatives among the resident Portuguese merchants. It was them who established with the Chinese local authorities the practice of a “divided sovereignty”, which in effect meant that the Chinese dictated the rules (or rather the restrictions) namely in what concerned land usage, as well as construction and urban renovation. Given this case-by-case and extremely negotiated management scheme, no global urban planning could prevail.
This state of affairs is radically overthrown in the years following the 1st Opium War. Even though Portugal had chosen not to take part in the western offensive against China, when it was time to negotiate its terms of surrender, the Lisbon authorities lost no time in taking their place beside de winning party, thus trying to secure the recognition of Portuguese sovereignty over Macao. This meant the end by 1844 of the “divided sovereignty” system, with both the Chinese authorities expelled from the territory and their restrictions overruled, and the Portuguese Senate’s prerogatives reduced to those of a municipal council. The Governor had the upper hand now and at long last the Portuguese metropolitan grasp was reaching as far as China.
In terms of the urban form, this political change brought about a revolution in the development strategy paradigm. Determinately conveying the new colonial enterprise, and borrowing on the European hygienist trend of the 1800s, a new set of urban extensions started to materialize, outside of the old city walls, but also towards the River and the sea, through a vast land reclamation program. The same modern principles were used to reflect on the renovation of the old city itself, namely the Chinese Bazaar which was, in the eyes of the new administration, the perfect symbol of everything that was wrong with the permissive (and submissive) old system. A project of opening a grand avenue through it, directly connecting the inner river harbor to the outer sea coast, is then suggested by a group of intellectuals, as means to reorganize this “messy” and “dirty” district.
The plan for this New Avenue clearly represents the new vision of the territory by the central government, as do all its contemporary urban extension plans. From this moment, the will of the Government and its definition of public interest, public health, modernity and progress are placed above any other institution or social group. The city becomes a wholly politically submitted territory. Thus, space appropriation ceases to be a free and autonomous process, but a completely centralized one, controlled by judicial and economical instruments that aim to regulate the urban practice in all its aspects.
Based on the analysis of city plans dated from the 18th to the 20th centuries, and particularly focusing on the Chinese Bazaar New Avenue project, we will look at the contrast between these two great geopolitical paradigms that have presided over the destinies of Macao, how they have influenced its territorial administration throughout the centuries, and how finally they have produced two opposite urban development models and two essentially different urban structures: the first, a bottom-up process, resulting in an “organic” appropriation of the built space and urban form by its inhabitants, the second a top-to-bottom process, resulting in a more controlled urban environment and a more geometrically “regular” urban form, meant to stage the dominion of the built space by the centralizing power.