Picturing Havana: The Early Modern City in Plans and Maps

Once one of the most important port cities in the New World, Havana became a model of Spanish imperial rule and an example for the planning of early Spanish colonial cities. This paper examines the debates around colonial urban planning directives through a visual and material lens. It looks closely at debates that engaged the tensions between the natural and built environment of the early modern Caribbean. Tensions between natural and built environments shaped the discursive and visual articulation of the early modern town. Maps and plans of Havana provide a unique opportunity to examine a projection of the city that emerged with colonialism and that, unlike the royal directives of the era, allow us to consider how water, wind, fire, and other elements shaped the physical construction of the city beyond the security needs associated with protecting the port from competing empires. Considering the visual presentations of Havana alongside the material and built environment of the early modern era challenges the theoretical margins of Latin American urban history. Far from viewing the cities of the early modern Caribbean as a tabula rasa for urban, European colonization, this paper seeks to interrogate the epistemologies of the field by reinterpreting sources through a visual lens. It explores the various ways in which administrators were forced to reimagine the “blank” and “uncivilized” areas of European maps and illustrates how the tensions between natural and built environment were foundational elements of empire and intimately connected to the centuries-long processes of urban change.