The social construction of the urbam form from the historical perspective of the districts of Guanajuato

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to reconstruct from a qualitative exercise the urban form of traditional settlements of the city of Guanajuato, Guanajuato. For this, documentary and content analysis is used, which, due to the small amount of information available, has been triangulated with first-hand information, specifically with historic documents found in municipal and state archives. To perform this reconstruction three dimensions are identified-morphological, functional and semiological-, in which a distinction is made between the processes that seek to analyze the space through its tangible elements and those with which it is explained how it is endowed with a meaning to space, for this purpose, we seek to reconstruct the physical context transformed from the identification of the processes implicit in the construction and evolution of the urban form; the conception, composition, materialization, perception and use (Munizaga, 2014). The results suggest that the studied districts are born from a common productive scheme, but their physical manifestations have generated a divergence that accounts for how the acquisition and maintenance of personal and social relationships define the architectural forms that build the city.