The urban landscape of the hispanic-american cities and their transformations in the 18th century

Abstract

When analysing the conformation of the cities founded by the Spaniards in the America from the beginning of the sixteenth century, the impressive process of elaborating a regular typology of the city is latent: a tendency of ordering referring to the plan that generated human settlements repeated over and over again, in the most diverse regions of the vast territory under the dominion of the peninsular metropolis – culminating in the realization of a model of city that would present an absolutely Cartesian organization. In opposition to the first two centuries of colonization, the urban scene in the Seventeenth century aim at a dramatic urban landscape – allied with baroque poetics –, hardly expressed in the damero. Therefore, ordered cities should accept on interventions – urbanistic, but especially architectural scale – that act "against" the grid. That is, through the corruption of the rigid scheme of the Hispano-American traza and the inclusion of exuberant examples of religious architecture, colonial settlements could be transfigured for the sake of exaltation of scenographically dramatic events.