Becoming urban : a historical ethnography of Puerto Rico's development/planning ensemble and its spatial production in Santurce (1940-1960)

This study analyzes how historical political forces and development/planning processes that occurred in the 1940s and 1960s laid the foundation for the uneven landscape that persists today in Santurce, one of the oldest barrios of the capital of Puerto Rico (San Juan), and how these processes contributed to the emergence of Hato Rey as the core business center. Through an historical ethnography, this study reveals the relationships between political struggles and development/planning ideologies and illuminate the spatial implications of these struggles. In doing so, I describe the key institutions, political actors and practices that have molded the distinctive development/planning institutional ensemble of Puerto Rico over time. I also consider how certain spatial strategies and colonial political interventions in San Juan have been deeply tied to economic growth policies designed to attract US investors and to uphold US hegemony and the Colonial state. My study traces how pivotal political changes, including the expansion of federal regulations, new funding opportunities, and the appearance of new institutional forms and agents have structured San Juan’s urban space under the shifting, often contradictory conditions of capitalism and colonialism. Different from previous studies on Puerto Rico’s development and industrialization experiences, I developed the analytical concept of the Puerto Rico’s development/planning ensemble to better explore the pivotal engagements of a wide array of colonial and metropolitan agents, at multiple scales, without obscuring their individual or collective roles in the production of space. The study aims to provide additional insight on how a critical framework can be arranged to account for the historical experiences (colonial and neocolonial) of communities in the Global South when forecasts and traditional models fail. More broadly, this study aims to contribute to new ways of engaging in planning praxis. Furthermore, I propose to explore the urban as a social construction, shedding light on what the “urban” means in the case of Puerto Rico (especially in San Juan) and how this idea has been constructed by multiple pivotal development and planning state-led maneuvers (i.e., the Colonial state and the Metropolitan state ) that produce uneven geographies and contestation.Community and Regional Plannin