The latin American city and the symbolic impact of built environment

Cities as crystalisations of civilizations represent symbolic impact in their layout and architecture. Built environment in this sense has an symbolic impact. Intending to understand a civilization it can be helpful to look at these symbols. This article tries to demonstrate the changing symbols in different historic periods of Latin America. Symbols were to be found in the urban morphology of even the precolumbian cities. They changed within the colonial era, and again during the different influences of French, British or North American domination. Today there can be noticed a decline of the traditional symbolic elements of towns. On the other hand there are certain symptoms of a crisis of self-identity of the Latin Americans. So even the diverse ideas how to define a new image are to be seen in the built environment of main cities of various states. shortened version of a presentation to the Meeting of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers at Eugene, Oregon, September 12, 1986 I wish to thank my friend William S. Preston, Department of Geography, Calif. Polytechnic State Univ. San Luis Obispo, for his patience helping me to translate this article. It was a pleasure to have a competent translater and partner of discussion.