«o Planning Latin America’s Capital Cities, 1850-1950 cs edited by Arturo Almandoz First published 2002 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge, 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2002 Selection and editorial matter: Arturo Almandoz; individual chapters: the contributors Typeset in Garamond by PNR Design, Didcot, Oxfordshire Printed and bound in Great Britain by St Edmundsbury Press, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk This book was commissioned and edited by Alexandrine Press, Oxford All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any informa­ tion storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. The publisher makes no representation, express or implied, with regard to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and cannot accept legal responsibility or liability for any errors or omissions that may be made. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library o f Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN 0-415-27265-3 ca Contents *o Foreword by Anthony Sutcliffe vii The Contributors ix Acknowledgements xi 1 Introduction 1 Arturo Almandoz 2 Urbanization and Urbanism in Latin America: from Haussmann to CIAM 13 Arturo Almandoz I CAPITALS OF THE BOOMING ECONOMIES 3 Buenos Aires, A Great European City 45 Ramón Gutiérrez 4 The Time of the Capitals. Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo: Words, Actors and Plans 75 Margaretb da Silva Pereira 5 Cities within the City: Urban and Architectural Transfers in Santiago de Chile, 1840-1940 109 Fernando Pérez Oyarzun and José Rosas Vera II EARLY VICEREGAL CAPITALS 6 The Urban Development of Mexico City, 1850-1930 139 Carol McMichael Reese 7 The Script of Urban Surgery: Lima, 1850-1940 170 Gabriel Ramón III THE CARIBBEAN RIM AND CENTRAL AMERICA 8 Havana, from Tacón to Forestier 193 Roberto Segre 9 Caracas: Territory, Architecture and Urban Space 214 Lorenzo González Casas 10 Urbanism, Architecture, and Cultural Transformations in San José, Costa Rica, 1850-1930 241 Florencia Quesada 11 Conclusions 271 Arturo Almandoz Index 275 Chapter 6 The Urban Development of Mexico City, 1850-1930 Carol McMichael Reese The eminent Argentine urban historian Jorge the analysis of historically specific circum­ Enrique Hardoy wrote in 1992 of the lack of stances would yield differing assessments of a ‘general history of urban planning in Latin urban pasts, which might promote more ben­ America [and] of any urban history of any eficial approaches to contemporary urban individual country during the decades of the problems.1 great transformation of the cities’. The cen­ This chapter takes the urban development tral hypothesis of Hardoy’s essay, which of Mexico City between about 1850 and appeared shortly before his untimely death in 1930 as its subject and responds to Hardoy’s 1993, was that those who led the dramatic challenge regarding not only the lacuna of development of Latin American cities between Latin American urban histories but also his about 1850 and 1930 adopted ‘changing atti­ argument regarding European influence. tude [s] . toward the city and its needs’, Elsewhere I have written about the burgeon­ which cannot be separated from the cultural ing international profile of the capital during shift that accompanied Latin America’s its first period of significant expansion, the increasing involvement in international Porfiriato or the Presidency of Porfirio Díaz finance and trade. Hardoy analysed the broad (1830-1915), who served as Mexico’s head contours of European urban theory and prac­ of state for more than thirty years, from 1876 tice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth to 1880 and from 1884 to 1911.2 I have centuries that appear to have influenced Latin argued that those who were most influential American urbanization as connections with in the development of Porfirian Mexico City Europe proliferated and promoted unprece­ sought to create a modern capital whose dented flows of imports, exports, migrants, character would be both international and and capital. Hardoy identified the ‘transfers’ Mexican. This desired city would provide a of European urban ideas, and he argued that comfortable, healthy, and even familiar base they were ‘not imposed voluntarily’ but, rather, of operations for foreign capitalists whose were adopted selectively. He suggested that investment in Mexico’s industrialization was crucial for the nation’s entry into the interna­ ipal services, such as potable water, street tional market economy. However, Porfirian paving and lighting, and drainage and sewer politicians, municipal administrators, archi­ systems that were responsible for sanitary and tects, engineers, capitalists and other citizens safe living conditions, following Hardoy’s who directed the capital’s modernization also recommendation for ‘solid research . into desired that the progressive city would be an working-class housing and the evolution of emblem of the nation - of its particular his­ the urban infrastructure [as well as] the his­ torical circumstance as the complex product tory of the building and administration of of the Spanish colonization of indigenous cities’.7 peoples, or of its cultural ‘hybridity’, to refer Mexico City was undoubtedly the crucible to the concept borrowed from contemporary in which modern, industrial Mexico was cultural studies.3 forged. From its founding as a Spanish colo­ Historians and analysts of Mexico City’s nial city in 1521 on the rubble of the Aztec development during the Porfiriato have often capital Tenochtitlan, after Hernán Cortés’s written that the model that guided the capi­ defeat of the last Aztec general Cuauhtémoc, tal’s growth was ‘French’.4 Their arguments Mexico City was the largest urban centre in have depended, in part, on the cultural New Spain and the Viceroyalty’s administra­ embrace of the Porfirian elite - the ‘científi­ tive hub - its religious, commercial, and polit­ cos’ - of all things French, whether educa­ ical capital. With the Independence of tion, manners, clothing, food, and styles of Mexico from Spain in 1821, the capital of the residences and furnishings.5 Such descriptions new republic maintained that primacy within neglect not only the persistence of Mexican the nation throughout the nineteenth cen­ tradition in guiding urban growth but also the tury. Although the growth rates of other role of other sources of influence in Mexico Mexican cities sometimes exceeded that of City’s modernization and expansion, especially the capital’s during the twentieth century, as after 1900, when capitalists from England, Ger­ regional industrial centres developed, these many, and, prominently, the United States rapidly urbanizing cities never challenged lived, worked, and invested in the capital.6 Mexico City’s size or function as the coun­ The interplay of tradition and innovation try’s political and economic nerve centre. in Mexico City’s new urban patterns comes Indeed, Mexico City’s staggering expansion into relief, however, when the fabric of its after 1940 made it a global megalopolis, new late nineteenth- and early twentieth-cen­ attaining the status of the world’s largest city.8 tury neighbourhoods or colonias is the focus This study examines the physical forma­ of inquiry. Therefore, I emphasize the histo­ tion of early modern Mexico City during an ries of neighbourhoods as the basis for writ­ initial period of industrialization, in which an ing the capital’s urban history. I establish a set urban real estate market was developed and of typologies based on the clientele to whom the physical and social characteristics of the districts were marketed, and I analyse not colonial city changed dramatically. Historians only their two-dimensional forms, as estab­ of Mexican and Latin American urbanism lished in their plot plans, but also their pro­ commonly parse this historical era as two files as developed in their housing. In periods: the first beginning after the War of addition, I trace the crucial delivery of munic­ Independence, in the 1820s, and the second beginning about 1900, by which time a grow­ ished - supported the city’s highest real estate ing bourgeoisie comprised of commercial and values and, in the late nineteenth century, industrial elites had superseded the landed residential enclaves of the middle and upper aristocracy as national power brokers. For classes. Colonial governmental structures also Mexico City, this periodization has yielded established spatial segregation of class and consideration of the ‘city of independence’ race beyond the city centre. The two indige­ and the ‘republican or nationalist city’. More­ nous districts - Santiago Tlatelolco on the over, scholars often identify the latter period north and San Juan Tenochtitlán on the south chronologically with the Porfiriato.9 For the - which answered to Spanish authorities but purposes of this chapter, however, we will maintained jurisdiction over Indian lands out­ consider as contiguous the period from the side the city limits, developed as nodes of mid-1850s, when petitions were first filed for poverty. While social heterogeneity had largely initial subdivisions, to the late 1920s, when characterized the