Environmental Microanalysis of a City in New Spain: Puebla de los Angeles, 1777-1835

By applying a model of spatial microanalysis, this article attempts to demonstrate a viable way of studying the urban and environ­mental functioning of a city in New Spain. The author suggests an inventory of the natural, demographic, and urban elements that interacted in the city’s conformation, in order to offer a new way of territorial reading, based on ecological similarities and on the racial, social, and economic mechanisms for the assignation and appropriation of space and natural resources. The results obtai­ned through this set of interrelations allow us to understand the coexistence of different patterns of intraurban cohesion and their different degrees of biological vulnerability