Cerda as a Bridge between. Two Cultural Periods

Abstract

The author maintains that there is nothing to make it impossible to see Cerda as being at one and the same time heir to the thinking behind the Roman centuriato or that behind the new-founded cities of the Middle Ages or even our own. His debt to the cities of the Spanish Colonising of South and Central America is often remarked upon but the paper calls attention to a similar debt he might be said to have to those of the North such as Philadelphia, Savannah or New Ebenezer where concepts dear to Cerda's urban model such as homogeneity, regularity, absorption potential and nuclearity are also much in evidence. The author also sees Cerda 's thought as falling within the terms of that of the Enlightenment when the latter is evidenced by projects such as the Lisboa Baixa, Edinborough's New Town or Berlin's Friedrichstadt or when it comes to an urging of new city growth founded upon a regular and independent plan owing nothing to the dense windings of the parent city. While arguing the fore-going, the author likewise holds that Cerda is a true herald of modern Town and Country Planning. His obsession with Territorial Scale, with a balance between built up and open space are close to those of the Modernist Movement. Cerda is also here said to have shunned the rhetoric of the «Great» undertaking beloved by eclectics to rather seek an urban structure where nothing stood out at another's cost but where all was to have a common role within the general composition. What most still binds us to Cerda is, however,the concept still shared with him of the city as a project for the support of a human living space in harmony with the proper culture of its age.