The map of the city: Urban forms and technical cultures during the early modernization of Buenos Aires (1750-1870)

This book is a turning point in the urban history of Buenos Aires, since it offers a renewal in our understanding the city based in our own way of looking at it as architects, urban planners and fundamentally as urban historians. It brings together ideas, techniques, institutions, mental images, concrete practices and diverse intentions, whose periodization is explained on the basis of the differences and observable shifts in the conceptions of city government, in the administration processes and in the forms of intervention and control. This rich set of historiographic and documental instruments is the complete opposite of customary research practice based on a limited set of sources, and allows us to see urban phenomena in their own technical specificity as well as explain, without disregarding the interpretations of cultural history, that many of the decisions regarding city form had to do, to a large extent and during the period covered by the book, with the evolution of technical and scientific paradigms that converged in a growing rationalization that accompanied the formation of the modern state.

Excerpt from the foreword by Fernando Aliata