Sometimes it is possible to capture the soul of a people in the way they live as well as how they relate to one another and their immediate environment. In this age of rapidly increasing urbanisation, the city has become a sort of DNA of collective history and identity. In the case of the Caribbean and the Americas, both the indigenous population and the invading Europeans brought together traditions of urban living that varied considerably and which had an impact on the rise of cities.

While not all peoples espoused an urban complex, city living constituted an integral part of the histories of many of the pre-European residents of the Americas. About five per cent of the indigenous American population lived in cities at the time of the conquest. Some of those cities were quite impressive. The Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán spread over about eight square miles and had a population of approximately 250,000 when Hernán Cortés arrived there in 1519. Other earlier cities such as Teotihuacán, Monte Alban and El Tajín might have had populations reaching nearly 100,000. Among the ancient Maya the cities of Chichen Itzá, Uxmal, Tulum, Copan, and Palenque might also have attained a similar size. The Incan cities of Chan Chan, Tiahuanaco, Quito, Cuzco, and Cajamarca were probably smaller with populations less than 100,000 and were in many cases ceremonial centres rather than true cities.

The Spanish and the English, the two dominant European states that eventually controlled most of the Americas, had two quite different approaches to cities and urban living. For the Spanish in the Americas urban living was an essential characteristic of identity. The city represented a community of corporate interests, and the entire corporation belonged to the monarchs of Castile. Not everyone was equal, but each vecino or resident enjoyed particular benefits and the protection of the monarch. Not surprisingly, therefore, urban construction remained a strong feature of the initial Spanish occupation of the Americas. By the time the other Europeans started to chip away at the Spanish near-monopoly, there were more than 330 Spanish towns of various sizes across the Americas. Moreover, in the Spanish sphere, the cities appropriated the surrounding rural territory. The community was inclusive and had priority.

Initially, the English were not especially fond of building cities. Instead, they created a number of small functional port towns and used the surrounding rural territory as zones of exploitation. The towns were subdivided into neighbourhoods, sometimes based on racial and class designations. Neighbourhoods tended to be exclusive. English-American towns seldom generated the aspect of permanence that visitors noted in the Spanish and French towns.

James Anthony Froude (1818-1894), the controversial and opinionated English historian, noted some of these differences in his travels through the Caribbean in 1888. He wrote that Kingston, which he considered at the time the best British West Indian town, did not have a single fine building while Havana was a “city of palaces, a city of streets and plazas, of colonnades and towers, and churches and monasteries.” He observed: “We English have built in those islands as if we were passing visitors, wanting only tenements to be occupied for a time… the palaces of the nobles in Havana, the residents of the governor, the convents, the cathedral are a reproduction of Burgos or Valladolid…”

Urban living or the concept of the city has had, and continues to have an impact on its citizens. Among many descendants of the English in the Americas, and especially in the United States of America, the idea prevails of society as a constantly negotiated transitional experience generating a disposable mentality. Neighbourhoods change rapidly for a variety of reasons. Consumer durables are not designed for durability but rather for their immediate short-term need. Buildings are constructed to last merely for a single lifetime rather than for centuries. In the 1960s Chrysler Motors discontinued two models of its cars because owners refused to trade them in for newer models after two years. Even the political system spurns the majority of the population for subordination to wealthy special interests capable of hiring expensive lobbyists. It is not people-oriented.

Iberians have always been more sensitive to the complete urban community rather than neighbourhoods. Part of that wider sensitivity derived from the genesis of the city as the centre of living. Cities are designed to enhance a sense of community, with public plazas and promenades for general commingling of the entire population. Part of the enforced urbanity derived from the danger of isolation, so the walled city has long antecedence in Spain and in Spanish America. Havana, San Juan, Santo Domingo, Cartagena, Porto Bello, Vera Cruz, and Campeche have fortifications that reflect the historic buccaneer challenges to the Spanish during the 16th and 17th centuries.

When Jaime Lerner, the progressive mayor of the Brazilian city of Curitiba in Paraná state, reconstructed the city beginning in the 1970s, he emphasised that it would be a livable entity sensitive to the environment. Curitiba rapidly became one of the most innovative cities in the world. Even Argentines travelled there to observe how well the city worked. Much of the downtown is devoted to pedestrians, and the city opened Brazil’s first pedestrian mall in 1971. As historian Hugh Schwartz points out, Curitiba is “an attractive, prosperous, ecologically conscious and highly successful example of urban planning”. While the city has spread outwards, more than 70 per cent of the city is open common space.

Few countries have succeeded as well as Spain in urban renewal. Wrecked by a disastrous civil war in the late 1930s and isolated from most of the world until the mid-1960s, the Spanish have restored their cities to rank among the most beautiful and livable anywhere in the world. With a shrewd combination of public and private sources, the newly reconstructed cities reflect a focus on people rather than on corporate profits, on community rather than on neighbourhoods. Anyone wanting to rebuild Caribbean cities should first take a trip to Curitiba or Cadiz, or Valencia, or Barcelona.