During much of the nineteenth century, Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian capital, was under a selective curfew that made it a crime to be in the city's public spaces after dark. The curfew bent normal rules and attenuated supposedly universal rights, overtly discriminating between people on the basis of class and race. Rules that legally defined the nighttime did not come from any national statute, or from newly independent Brazil's liberal Constitution (1824) or its Criminal Code (1830). Instead, Rio's nocturnal sociolegal world was the product of police edicts, on-the-ground policing practice, and city ordinances. In other words, this is a phenomenon of urban governance that allows, and indeed forces us to look beyond the nineteenth-century nation-state to understand the exercise of power at a local level. 

Urban government and the foundation of new towns are fundamental to understanding Castilian expansion from the eleventh-century conquest of Toledo to the sixteenth-century conquest of Tenochtitlan. The economic, social, religious and military connections between town and territory relied on a broad framework of institutions and laws as well as monarchical intervention. The result in Castile was the emergence of an original urban model of secular construction and proven political success to ensure control of territory and to govern heterogeneous populations. This Castilian model influenced the America’s urban systems, given its proven ability to control and defend territories.  [Access the article here]