European Urbanisation in the Colonial Americas

European urbanism in the Americas cannot be extricated from the diverse processes of conquest and colonisation that agents of Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English and French imperial expansion executed over land, water, peoples and natural and mineral resources. European urbanisms in the New World were neither manifested uniformly across the entire continent nor a product of a social consensus among Europeans of what a city was and what it was supposed to look like. Desire and ability to direct urban settlement were also unequally distributed; best endowed with both were the Spanish monarchs. Among both Hispanics and Indians, they deployed the municipality as an ‘instrument of colonisation’. Sometimes subsuming indigenous urban centers, new towns and cities were laid out with straight streets arranged in orthogonal patterns around preferably symmetrical main squares where secular, ecclesiastical and commercial functions were housed and exercised. Urban geometry and hierarchy assisted in the systematisation of rule.