Utopia inside the walledcities of leprosy: notes for the documentation of architectural and urban colonies in Brasil

Abstract

In this paper we are concerned to an architectural and urbanistic approach of leper colonies history in Brazil, an especific kind of those places with urban characteristics which we denominated “hospital cities”. Those hospital cities were mostly constructed during Getúlio Vargas’ first government -1930/1945, and became the main state policy to the disease. We believe that the origin of those spaces could be linked backward to the historyof ideas and to the concept of utopia, developed in sixteenth century, of a totally new place and a specific site for a new society, and later to nineteenth century new proposals for society and for urban development. During Vargas administration this concept was a reference to develop those new types of colonies. With them the disease was taken apart from society but inside walls was possible to reproduce social life with national values required by that goverment. Finally, we indicated some points to be considered in this kind of analyses.