Estruturas Territoriais do Carvão: Do Espaço Productivo ao Espaço social.

The fostering to national fuels led since the constitution of the Instituto Português dos Combustíveis (1936-1974), as the internal settlement policy from the Junta de Colonização Interna (1936-1974), led to the development of territorial settlement in which the productive activity assumes the role of blinding structure.

These territorial structures assert themselves since the end of the late thirties while formalization of a social model subjacent to the agricultural production and productivity increasing, in the agricultural colonies, and to the extractive one, in the Coutos Mineiros. The urban structures settled around the extraction points on the Douro Coalfield –in Coutos Mineiros do Pejão and S. Pedro da Cova- will be approached, according to this premise.

Despite the difference of assumptions supporting each of these settlement systems, in both there is spatial devices leading to the recognition of an identity and a territorial legibility, more or less coincident, according to the programmatic specificity and the relationship established with the pre-existence. The dynamic surrounding the house, the settlements and territory assume relevance for this recognition.

The social structures that support an almost autonomous organization, the formalization of the space of the collectivity, the linguistic dichotomy arising from a modernity that emerges in a context of a claim rurality, arise as a reflection of a type of urbanization.

From the correlation between the Coutos Mineiros and the agricultural colonies, it will be searched an understanding of these productive spaces as producers (also) of social space.