Urban Evolution of Ponce (Puerto Rico), According to the Historical Cartography

Abstract

The city of Ponce has had a historical development sui generis and parallel to the capital city of Puerto Rico, San Juan, attending to the morphology of the physical-geographic space where it is located. All the information gathered and raised for the present article comes from the project of investigation of Doctorate Thesis on impacts caused by the tourism in the historical cities of Ponce and San Juan and impacts caused in these spaces by the extreme meteorological events. Contemporary cities are a juxtaposition between the modern and the ancient, between modernity and tradition, a reality that overlaps landscapes that correspond to different urban models. Urban spaces are an arrangement that varies depending on culture and time, cities are re-elaborated from how it is appreciated when contemplating a certain space, is a recreation of reality conditioned by Aesthetic appreciation, experiences, mode of life or the shortcomings they have at any given time.
The historical center of Ponce is a subsystem within the city, it is the organic and complete representation of the subsystems that constitute it, and so historical growth is analyzed from all points of view (urbanism, mobility, commerce, public spaces, Architecture). It is possible to discover the intrinsic heritage value that it possesses, which guarantees the morphology and the urban image of that area, adding the sector of the Beach and the Avenue of Hostos that unites both urban centers. Ponce and its historical center have evolved and should continue to evolve if they want to survive. The symbiosis between the historical and the contemporary must be natural and not imposed, the historical center, as well as the subsystems that compose it, must be accepted as an integral part of the city and not try to manage it and understand it as something isolated. Its personality has it from its integrality with the metropolitan area that contains it, and seeing the historical and the contemporary in isolation will always be to the detriment of the city as a single and indivisible territory.