ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the constants in Quito's pre-industrial urban morphology, and to relate these natural constraints to the lines of social demarcation within the city, and to the relationship of the urban center to its rural—and semi-rural—periphery. Although urban growth had involved the partial filling-in of some ravines during the mid-colonial period, the difficulties of Quito's natural environment were largely unchanged by the late eighteenth century, and it is therefore possible to examine certain continuities in the organization of the urban space. The chapter discusses the immediate rural hinterland of the common lands and the city's administrative district, while the wider region of the Ecuadorian Highlands. It describes in accordance with the larger theme and discusses the progressively less detailed as the focus shifts away from the city. Although the corregimiento produced a wide variety of agricultural products, the city also participated in a more long-range circuit of supply.
