A TERRITORIALIDADE DAS ORDENS LEIGAS E A CONFIGURAÇÃO URBANA DO CENTRO DA CIDADE DO RIO DE JANEIRO NO SÉCULO XVIII.

The urban configuration of the central area of Rio de Janeiro city, among others, was involved by the religiosity of its inhabitants, who in many cases congregated themselves in religious associations that had exerted an important social, economic and political paper in Carioca's society in eighteenth-century. The present article has for objective to point these associations known as Laypeople Orders - Third Orders and Brotherhoods - that in the exercise of its territoriality had blunted as one of the agents of formation of the downtown urban mesh out of the limits established until the end of eighteenth-century. In such a way, the strategical actions of these associations were pointed that with its devocionals practical as processions, parties and pilgrimages, would have appropriated the territory of Campo da Cidade, region of expansion of the central nucleus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]