Models of the City in the Hispanic Monarchy (16th–17th Centuries): Foundational Discourses and Urban Imagination

Quim Solias, M.A.

This project examines how cities of the Hispanic Monarchy were conceptualized through textual and visual representations between the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It argues that chronicles, city views, maps, and monumental images did not merely describe urban spaces but actively proposed normative models of what a city was and ought to be. These representations  articulated  the  city  simultaneously  as  “urbs”  (its  physical  form)  and  “civitas”  (its  political  and  moral community),  producing  models  that  rendered  urban  space  thinkable,  comparable,  and  reproducible  across  imperial  contexts. Focusing on cities such as Barcelona, Naples, Seville, Lima, and Cuzco, the project analyzes how discourses of  foundation and refoundation interacted with urban imagination to shape debates on policy, authority, memory, and order within the polycentric structure of the Hispanic Monarchy.