Re-imagining Public Space

Square is the principal square Spanish Town, the former capital of Jamaica. Today's square is re-used space: formally, that two of its sides are carried over from the original Spanish ground plan of 1534; physically, as it is still surrounded by an architectural display erected rich, brutal, sugar island between 1740 and 1820. result is an impressive place shot through with messages whose significance can appear downright alien forty-five years after Jamaican Independence. Tracing when and why its surrounding buildings were constructed, or how they and the square they surround was used, can illuminate changing understandings of an inherited space and the architectural ensemble surrounding it (e.g. UNESCO, 1983; Cote, 2000): as Spanish square an English-ruled town; then space reconstructed after the 1692 earthquake; the square was rebuilt again the eighteenth century when surrounding buildings replaced earlier structures, re-using older building lines. Its utility as public space remained, providing monument to planter confidence but also serving as the square where was proclaimed 1834 and, some thirty years later, where the Jamaica Assembly surrendered its powers 1865. Exploring the historical development of site highlights the opportunities for architectural historians and archaeologists to reconsider the same site. Spanish Town was Jamaica's capital city between 1534 and 1872. It provided monumental as well as an administrative centre for very rich colony. history of the town and its principal square are not just framed, but punctuated, by the public buildings surrounding it (Robertson, 2005b). Contextualizing the buildings around this square allows us to explore several key changes the ways that the island's government was presented. square has undergone succession of re-castings from the area in front of the cabilde, the Spanish-era municipal centre, on to the first English settlers' coinage of The Parade - as one visitor recalled it, a large perrad [parade], whereon 5,000 men may performe their exercise at arms; here are the guards drawn up, and keep their cheife corps du garde this part of the city... (Buisseret, 2008, 244); then, after its splendid mid-eighteenth-century reconstruction, to its role as the King's House Square, where key proclamations were announced; later the late nineteenth-century as stopping-off place for tourists and today's Emancipation Square, shortcut for traffic backed up on the town's ring road, but also as the potential heart for UNESCO World Heritage site. Here I focus on three shifts: that between 1655 and 1740, from Spanish to an English space; then the architectural commissions between 1740 and 1820 that still shape today's square and finally the square's re-establishment as local showpiece from low point the late 1860s before the passengers embarking on the fleets of Jamaica-bound banana boats for tropical holidays produced new wave of tourists. How were these changes understood and what memories did the resulting constructs redefine or suppress (compare Dean, 1998)? Today's square is one of two original squares Spanish Town. town has grown since it was laid out as new administrative centre for the island 1534, but its central area retains much of its original ground plan. Villa de la Vega's streets were organized around two squares (Figure 1). One, on the southern edge of the town, was oriented on the Dominican friary; the other, on the town's western side was the Plaza Maior, with the Abbot of Jamaica's church (Robertson, forthcoming). Even if this plan was less elaborate than those of the mid-and late sixteenth-century cities that Spanish colonists built on the South American mainland, it was still far more complicated than the townships English settlers had laid out Ireland, North America or the eastern Caribbean (Robertson, 2001a; Early, 2004; Breen, 2007; Bowden, 2003)

Architectural engineering · Geometry · Public space · Sociology · Space (punctuation) · Square (algebra · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Computer Science · Engineering · Mathematics

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