Historic Urbanism, Urban Morphology, and Urban Design in Latin America and the Caribbean

Zusammenfassung

This chapter will review the history of urban planning and the evolution of urban morphology in Latin America and the Caribbean with a journey through historical cartography. It will examine the formal outcomes of the Law of the Indies; the urban transformations of many cities by the nineteenth-century process of haussmannisation; the rapid expansion experienced by several major cities in the twentieth century fuelled by external and internal migration in the context of industrialisation; the emergence and growth of informal settlements; and the more recent proliferation of gated communities, shopping malls and other urban artefacts of neoliberalism and socio-spatial segregation. In this way, it will be possible to understand the urban form of Latin American and Caribbean cities by analysing six case studies: La Habana, Cartagena de Indias, México City, São Paulo, La Plata and Brasilia.