The Evolution of the Concepts, Theories and Neologisms in the Work of Cerda on City and Territorial Planning

Abstract

The paper proposes a philological and semantic interpreting of the changes in the titles that Cerda made for his five basic theories namely, his Theory as to the Building of Cities (1859), his Theory as to Urban Webs (1861), his General Theory of Urbanization (1863) -the only one published in his lifetime- and his sketched out General Theory of [Land) Colonization which was to have subsumed his previous G.T.U and his General Theory of Ruralization. This work aims at showing that these descriptions rather then being proper to five different and developing theories are but part of a single common process of evolving investigation with its discoveries, blinds, hypotheses and re-workings by which Cerda fought his way on towards an ever tighter narrowing down upon the essential and total core material of the new discipline that he was bringing forth, this and a correlative differentiation of the sub-systematic parts of this whole. Within this rapid process of analytic concretion and building up of syntheses, the author sees Cerda as having created a systematizing of the component parts of the synthetic whole by bringing to bear on this an ever greater precision, dissegregation and aggregation of the neological significants he was creating. This process of differentiation of concepts and universes of significance taxed Cerda between 1844-75, years here held to have been the first true thirty years of that discipline that has become known as Urbanism, Urbanistics or, otherwise, Town and Country Planning.