ABSTRACT
This chapter will review the history of urban planning and the evolution of urban morphology in Latin America and the Caribbean with a journey through historical cartography. It will examine the formal outcomes of the Law of the Indies; the urban transformations of many cities by the nineteenth-century process of haussmannisation; the rapid expansion experienced by several major cities in the twentieth century fuelled by external and internal migration in the context of industrialisation; the emergence and growth of informal settlements; and the more recent proliferation of gated communities, shopping malls and other urban artefacts of neoliberalism and socio-spatial segregation. In this way, it will be possible to understand the urban form of Latin American and Caribbean cities by analysing six case studies: La Habana, Cartagena de Indias, México City, São Paulo, La Plata and Brasilia.
