Colonial Cities: Urban 1

 

    By zooming into the map above, you will find key features at the following places: Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Mexico City, Mexico, Lima, Peru, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and Buenos Aires, Argentina. In these cities, you will find color coded polygon. Red indicates a church or religious building, yellow indicates a palace or government building, and green indicated commercial buildings. 

Image 1: Figure 12.5 from Latin America and the Caribbean

    If you look closely at the areas listed above, you will find similar land features to those in Figure 12.5.  Each of the cities has a colonial plaza. This plaza is centered between Commercial buildings,  a Church, and a Palacio Municipal. Each city is organized in a gridded pattern. All the cities we mentioned show great similarity to this figure, despite slight differences. 

    The reason that all of these cities show similarity is because there were rules governing how the cities were built. The rules were called "The Laws of the Indies Ordinances of Discovery, The Population and Pacification of the Indies." Most of the ordinances listed in the rules were followed by the cities. For example, Rule #122 states that the plaza should be the center and starting point of the town. Rule #126 states that around the plaza, there should be no building used for residential use. When going through the streets on Google Earth Pro, it is apparent that the cities mentioned above follow these rules. Not all the rules were followed perfectly. For example, around the plaza, Lima has two government buildings instead of one, unlike the uniform example. Also, Santo Domingo has two large churches in the plaza rather than one.