The colonial city by definition and Origin
Chapter 1
The urban paradigm
What is urban? Size and administrative status are not essential criteria of true urban character.
Function and form are the essentials of the matter.
Urban centers share a number of similar characteristics, not necessarily all of them. Urbanites
are dependent upon other people to produce their food. In return, urban dwellers produce
manufactured foods or acquire cash for exchange. Classes develop in urban centers. A wide
range of crafts and stores evolve. People specialize in their economic activities; this division
of labor means that urban dwellers produce goods and services for each other and for export.
It’s a marketplace in its most defining characteristic. Schools, religious institutions,
professionals of various types, bureaucrats. Provide social, economic, geographical
opportunities.
Rural societies are commonly more traditional because they are almost always
ascriptive which means the son of a peasant will likely become a peasant, the son of the rich
agrarian will likely become a rich agrarian. Urban centers are not. More opportunities.
How many people does it take to constitute an urban habitat?
Rural: almost all residents are engaged primarily in agricultural pursuits.
In early Europe, some produced a surplus that could be exchanged for goods produced in
other households. By the early modern era in Europe such production and exchange, as well
as expanded markets, became more intense, layered and widespread. The village was
essentially the agricultural habitat. 10 or 20 primitive peasants.
Although the functional distinction between the agricultural village and the urban town
or city is occupation in agriculture, in Iberia the urban process remained vestigial, still heavily
rooted in agriculture. Urbanism did not mature in Spain as early as in northern Europe
because trade and industry were less well developed. This also happened in Spanish America.
The biggest difference is that the economy is centered in nonagricultural activities in urban
centers.
,When function and form coincide, an urban habitat comes into existence. “Town and city are
merely aspects of the same thing, and the small country town with some 1,000 inhabitants has
all the same elementary functions, with their corresponding structures, that the large town or
city possesses.”
But there was, and still is, no real difference in essential functions between the urban
settlement in the country with 1,000 inhabitants and the urban agglomeration with several
millions.
Spain embraced urban development form an almost entirely different perspective.
Urban settlements during the Reconquista against the Moors were conceived politically rather
than economically. There were names applied to habitats varying of size. These were later
transferred to the empire in the New World.
Town (pueblo): 500 – 2,000 inhabitants
Villa (does not translate well as village): 2,000 – 4,000 inhabitants
City (ciudad): 4,000 or more inhabitants
Municipality (municipalidad): generally, the largest city of the realm
Municipal: a term that describes all urban settlements
Spanish-American urban habitats were founded by the conquistadors, later by natural
occurrence near water of land routes for the exchange of goods and services, or by official
decree. These urban habitats could be quite artificial and fragile, and many failed.
(devestaciones in Santo Domingo)
Towns that did thrive and perhaps grow in size and regional influence throughout the
colonies all shared a similar origin in the commercial revolution that begin in Europe several
hundred years before Spain’s imperium in the New World got under way.
Prior to the slow and sporadic revival of trade in Europe during the tenth century, small urban
centers began to evolve around the walled episcopal and administrative cities, none of which
were urban. European international trade expanded to the East, also throughout the continent.
Paris, Amsterdam, Venice, Barcelona were symbolic of the new economy and growth in
urbanization. Spain was different, because in political and economic reality there existed
several Spains until 1469 and the marriage of Isabel of Castile and Ferdinand of Aragón and
because what became known as Spain had carried out a war of Reconquest against the Moors
since their invasion of the Iberian Peninsula. Isabel created a national army that reduced her
dependence on the feudal nobility, which she proceeded to dispossess of privileges and
power. Kings mandated the founding of towns of various size to hold and defend newly
,reconquered lands. But the war effort could lead to an unexpected urban need, and a perfect
example is Ciudad Real in La Mancha, kingdom of Castile.
It was founded by King Alfonso X. The city did not grow very well. Although Spain’s
economy was not as urbanized or commercially and industrially advanced as many countries
in northern Europe, it was more so than the overburdened metaphor of Don Quixote of La
Mancha manages to suggest to new generations of readers. By the fourteenth century Castile
was the premier producer of merino sheep and Europe’s leading exporter of wool, but such
pastoral and commercial activity can never be a one-way street.
By about 1500 the commercial development of Spain had not produced a bourgeoisie
as large or as mature as the bourgeoisies to the north, but this beclouds rather than clarifies the
Spanish urban reality. This includes import/export merchants, bankers, smaller wholesalers, a
whole range of retailers, and sometimes even artisans.
The urbanization that had occurred in Spain during the last decades prior to the
discovery of the New World was not subject to what is generally referred to as in urban or
town planning. The Spanish kings had no formal policy toward the physical side of town
planning. Several of Spain’s most important cities had a deeply Moorish character. The urban
habitats grew spontaneously. In this realm the Spanish kings had evolved a rational and
precise scheme for the administrative apparatus of urban habitats. Form the municipal council
to the organization of the local economy, those who would establish a town or city had very
clear and, one might say, restricting guidelines to follow.
Santo Domingo and New World urbanization
Santo Domingo had to be moved. The new Santo Domingo was constructed on the bank of
the Ozama River. With geometric grid pattern, sometimes called the checkerboard pattern
(Sistema de demero).
Nearly ten years after the discovery of the New World, the Catholic kings maintained
no formal plan for the physical organization of urban settlements. Santo Domingo also got the
grid pattern.
The urban protocol
De steden kregen uiteindelijk wel een protocol. Het moest het schaakbord systeem zijn en het
liefst bij water en makkelijk bereikbaar.
Chapter 2
, The Pre-Columbian City
There were cities in the Western Hemisphere centuries before the Europeans arrived. This
was not the case in the Caribbean. The Taino Arawaks, the largest Indian culture in the
Caribbean, resident on all the islands of the Greater and Lesser Antilles, frequently lived in
towns with a few to several hundred or even a thousand houses and as many as several
thousand inhabitants. Straw-roofed huts were grouped around a ceremonial ball court. No
streets, nor central marketplace. Agricultural pursuits. Rural rather than urban towns.
On the mainland it was different. The great cities of pre-Columbian America grew
spontaneously from origins as agricultural communities or ceremonial centers.
Teotihuacán
The first great urban center. Thirty miles northeast of Mexico City in the Valley of Mexico. A
ceremonial center situated in a densely populated agricultural valley capable of providing
products and visitors. The political and commercial center of a large geographical area, with a
trading network that reached the Gulf coast and Central America. It was hierarchical,
heterogeneous and specialized in a way none of its predecessors had been.
Two pyramids.
Tenochtitlán
The other great city was the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, founded in 1325 on a small islet in
the southwestern part of Lake Texcoco, also in the Valley of Mexico.
The plaza was central to pre-Columbian urban life; and the larger and more densely populated
the settlement, the greater the likelihood that there would be more than one plaza, each
differentiated by use. The larger or largest plaza: administrative and also the religious center.
Others would be markets.
The markets were very advanced and had almost everything, just as the cities.
The fine houses of the many rich citizens would have been located as close to the seat of
power and status as possible. Those of less affluence and status resided farther away from the
city’s center. It was a city with large and varied housing stock. The Spaniards destroyed the
urbanization of the Americas.
The Incas
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