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"Plazas"
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Urban lessons of the Venetian squares
\"The first part of the book is both an homage to the nature and appeal of the squares of Venice and an analysis of their physical qualities in urbanistic terms. The Venetian settings were chosen for their freedom from auto traffic, streets, or peculiarities of topography. The narrative then takes those insights and applies them in a corresponding examination of a wide variety of modern-day urban spaces in America, to determine which are being emulated today and which less so. As a test case of sorts to help inform the successes and failings of modern urban open space, a useful strategy would be to somehow remove the cars and streets from the equation: not as a realistic goal for urbanism today, but as a lens through which to identify a family of attributes that could realistically contribute to successful urban places. The only city in the Western world where this condition actually prevails in reality is Venice, Italy. Alone among the Old World's cities and towns that are the USA's urban patrimony, Venice has the unique distinction of being a truly pedestrian urban environment. With this in mind, it seems reasonable to see if Venice could call across the centuries with some insights for modern-day urbanism.\" --Provided by publisher.
Book
Mesoamerican Plazas
Until now, archaeological and historical studies of Mesoamerican plazas have been scarce compared to studies of the surrounding monumental architecture such as pyramidal temples and palaces. Many scholars have assumed that ancient Mesoamericans invested their labor, wealth, and symbolic value in pyramids and other prominent buildings, viewing plazas as by-products of these buildings. Even when researchers have recognized the potential significance of plazas, they have thought that plazas as vacant spaces could offer few clues about their cultural and political roles.Mesoamerican Plazaschallenges both of these assumptions.The primary question that has motivated the contributors is how Mesoamerican plazas became arenas for the creation and negotiation of social relations and values in a community. The thirteen contributions stress the significance of interplay between power relations and embodied practices set in specific historical and material settings, as outlined by practice theory and performance theory. This approach allows the contributors to explore broader anthropological issues, such as the negotiation of power relations, community making, and the constitution of political authorities.Overall, the contributions establish that physical interactions among people in communal events were not the outcomes of political machinations held behind the scenes, but were the actual political processes through which people created, negotiated, and subverted social realities. If so, spacious plazas that were arguably designed for interactions among a large number of individuals must have also provided critical arenas for the constitution and transformation of society.
eBook
Ancient Origins of the Mexican Plaza
The plaza has been a defining feature of Mexican urban
architecture and culture for at least 4,000 years. Ancient
Mesoamericans conducted most of their communal life in outdoor
public spaces, and today the plaza is still the public living room
in every Mexican neighborhood, town, and city-the place where
friends meet, news is shared, and personal and communal rituals and
celebrations happen. The site of a community's most important
architecture-church, government buildings, and marketplace-the
plaza is both sacred and secular space and thus the very heart of
the community.
This extensively illustrated book traces the evolution of the
Mexican plaza from Mesoamerican sacred space to modern public
gathering place. The authors led teams of volunteers who measured
and documented nearly one hundred traditional Mexican town centers.
The resulting plans reveal the layers of Mesoamerican and European
history that underlie the contemporary plaza. The authors describe
how Mesoamericans designed their ceremonial centers as embodiments
of creation myths-the plaza as the primordial sea from which the
earth emerged. They discuss how Europeans, even though they sought
to eradicate native culture, actually preserved it as they overlaid
the Mesoamerican sacred plaza with the Renaissance urban concept of
an orthogonal grid with a central open space. The authors also show
how the plaza's historic, architectural, social, and economic
qualities can contribute to mainstream urban design and
architecture today.
eBook
Urban Space as Heritage in Late Colonial Cuba
According to national legend, Havana, Cuba, was founded under the shade of a ceiba tree whose branches sheltered the island's first Catholic mass and meeting of the town council (cabildo) in 1519. The founding site was first memorialized in 1754 by the erection of a baroque monument in Havana's central Plaza de Armas, which was reconfigured in 1828 by the addition of a neoclassical work, El Templete. Viewing the transformation of the Plaza de Armas from the new perspective of heritage studies, this book investigates how late colonial Cuban society narrated Havana's founding to valorize Spanish imperial power and used the monuments to underpin a local sense of place and cultural authenticity, civic achievement, and social order.Paul Niell analyzes how Cubans produced heritage at the site of the symbolic ceiba tree by endowing the collective urban space of the plaza with a cultural authority that used the past to validate various place identities in the present. Niell's close examination of the extant forms of the 1754 and 1828 civic monuments, which include academic history paintings, neoclassical architecture, and idealized sculpture in tandem with period documents and printed texts, reveals a \"dissonance of heritage\"—in other words, a lack of agreement as to the works' significance and use. He considers the implications of this dissonance with respect to a wide array of interests in late colonial Havana, showing how heritage as a dominant cultural discourse was used to manage and even disinherit certain sectors of the colonial population.
eBook
From Survival to Solidarity: Reclaiming Santiago’s Streets and Plazas Through Food, Care, and Collective Resistance in Ollas Comunes
Lefebvre conceptualises streets as spaces imbued with political meaning, where mobility, everyday life, and resistance dynamically converge. This conceptualisation was vividly manifested during the 2019 social revolt in Santiago, Chile, when citizens appropriated streets and plazas as territories of collective struggle against entrenched inequalities. In this context—and subsequently amplified during the Covid‐19 pandemic—ollas comunes (community‐led survival kitchens) appeared as grassroots responses addressing food insecurity. Historically spearheaded by women from marginalised urban communities, these initiatives embody not only immediate survival strategies but also profound acts of spatial and political resistance. By providing free communal meals, ollas comunes actively disrupt the prevailing neoliberal governance of urban space, reclaiming streets as arenas of collective care, mobility, and embodied everyday democracy. Whilst scholarship identifies food struggles within public spaces as integral to asserting the right to the city (Purcell & Tyman, 2015), it has primarily focused on urban agriculture. Conversely, initiatives centred on collective food consumption remain significantly understudied. Framed by Lefebvre’s dialectics and drawing on qualitative data from interviews, focus groups, and participant observations, this article examines how ollas comunes in Santiago contest the dominant logic of neoliberal governance and ownership within public space. Findings demonstrate that cooking and eating in the street not only transform physical streetscapes and mobility patterns but also produce emergent publics, meanings, and solidarities. By foregrounding these practices, this article enriches scholarly understandings of streets as contested platforms where food solidarity, care, and resistance converge to challenge neoliberal urban imaginaries.
Journal Article
Effect of outdoor thermal comfort condition on visit of tourists in historical urban plazas of Sevilla and Madrid
The tourism plays a significant role in economics and development of any country through revenue generation from multiple sources. Spain has been tourist place and host million foreign tourist. The tourism is highly depended on climate and thermal comfortness of the visiting place. This present research aimed to analyze the outdoor thermal comfort conditions in microclimates of the urban ancient plazas of the two important cities of Spain, namely Sevilla and Madrid on a hot humid stress day of the year. The microclimatic measurement, questionnaire survey, and simulation results were examined to evaluate the thermal comfort condition of six different urban plazas in Sevilla and Madrid to distinguish the supreme time to visit each ancient site. The results have suggested that the outdoor thermal comfort range for the tourist in the historical plazas of Sevilla and Madrid varies from 28.42 to 30.87 °C and 24.5 to 29.82 °C in the hot summer. Despite the high heat stress condition, the result of questionnaires survey shows that about 38.11% and 28.09% of tourists in Sevilla and Madrid, respectively, were satisfied with the thermal conditions. As witnessed from the result of the Envi-met simulation, Plaza de Santa Ana of Madrid and Plaza Nueva of Sevilla is the best place for visitors in the early morning hours. Additionally, during the peak hours, the thermal comfort of Alameda de Hercules of Sevilla and Plaza de Santa Ana of Madrid is the most suitable historical places for visitors, whereas in the evening hours, Plaza Nueva of Sevilla and Plaza de Mayor of Madrid with wider semi-open spaces and relatively suitable vegetation bring more favorable conditions for visitors. The comparison of the simulation result with the questionnaire reveals that the urban plazas with relatively high thermal stresses have a higher rate of thermal dissatisfaction.
Journal Article