Brazilian cities: between values and narratives of urbanism

Abstract The old Brazilian cities, constituted in the colonial period, have urban spaces with characteristics linked to Portuguese urban traditions, but still, they allow different readings and interpretations due to their singularities related to the location in the country, especially between interior and coast. Throughout the 20th century, these singularities favored the formulation of different narratives about these cities, with publications that did not always consider such urban characteristics from different perspectives, attributing negative and positive values to them. In order to demonstrate the epistemological process of construction of these narratives, some temporal milestones are pointed out, such as 1930, 1960 and 2000. These milestones were established, for the purposes of this study, to guide the contexts of these narratives and the values involved, based on Boaventura de Souza Santos and his contributions on common sense and science. From bibliographic and documentary research, examples of some coastal cities and case studies in the interior city of Ouro Preto, Minas Gerais, were pointed out, due to the ways in which the processes of constitution of their spaces are presented in the bibliography. As a result, this article demonstrates how the different values related to the historical context of the old Brazilian cities were transposed between common sense and science through some predominant narratives.