SOURCES FOR THE STUDY OF THE CONFORMATION OF THE METROPOLITAN AREA OF SALTILLO - RAMOS ARIZPE - ARTEAGA: A GEOGRAPHICAL-HISTORICAL APPROACH IN LANDSCAPE PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

The adoption of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) makes it necessary to reflect on the incidence of human action on the Earth’s surface. SDG 11, Sustainable Cities and Communities, underlines the importance and timeliness of urban studies. It is important to have an historical overview of the urban phenomenon in its complexity and of the processes that compose it, for an adequate implementation of the New Urban Agenda (NUA).
The same situation applies for the elaboration of the Vision 2030 at the municipal or metropolitan scale. This reflection cannot be the produced by a single discipline, be it urbanism, history, or geography. It must respond to the breadth and complexity required by the production of knowledge about the city as an object of study. Historical Geography can help in the field of urban and territorial planning through the elaboration of an explanatory model of the urban phenomenon, while its current
configuration is the result of a long-term cumulative process. The use of landscape as a multidisciplinary perspective concept, opens the range of theoretical and methodological possibilities to tackle a phenomenon of such complexity. By articulating a discourse that covers different areas on different spatiotemporal scales, it is possible to draw from a wide range of documentary sources. This ability to move the focus between different scales makes it possible to identify the interrelationships between the different urban processes and their two related scales: the architectural and the regional. This text exemplifies the way in which a model based on the multidisciplinary perspective of landscape provides a discursive coherence to a wide variety of documentary sources to study the historical conformation of a metropolitan area. In this way, it is possible to review the bibliography from a historical perspective, as well as the use of documents in different supports of diverse origins. Thus, the possibility of coherently articulating the consultation of documents such as the earth sciences' technical reports, and from the documents traditionally approached by social studies and the humanities, is open.