THE URBAN IDEA

Like much of Spanish American colonial history, the region's urban development has two prehistories: one indigenous, the other peninsular Spanish. The conquistadores found many populous urban centres in Mesoamerica and, less markedly, in the central Andes. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán, with at least 150,000 and perhaps 300,000 inhabitants, became a Spanish viceregal capital. Eight more cities surrounded Lake Texcoco, while outlying centres of regional importance included Cholula, Tlaxcala, Tzin Tzun Tzan, Cempoala, and various sites in Yucatán and Guatemala. In the Inca realm the capital at Cuzco, while lacking the commercial importance of Tenochtitlán, had more than 100,000 inhabitants and exercised political sway over various centres along the Incaic camino real, some of pre-Incaic origin: Quito, Cajamarca, Jauja, Vilcas, Huánuco, and Bonbón. These urban hierarchies, in turn, were successors to earlier settlement complexes oriented towards centres at Teotihuacán, Monte Albán, Taj´n, the Maya cities, Chan Chan, and Tiahuanaco.

Although the Spaniards converted some Indian cities like Tenochtitlán, Cholula, and Cuzco to their own uses, more pervasive influences on the European settlement scheme were the spatial distribution and village structure of the Indian populations. Indeed, if one were to carry the urban history of Spanish America only up to the late sixteenth century, the continuities with pre-conquest society would deserve a dominant emphasis. On a longer view, however, the political, social, and economic determinations of European rule, taken with the detribalization, relocation, and severe mortality of the Indian population, introduced many new vectors of change.