URBANIZATION.Urbanization is the process of becoming urban. Living together in villages, towns, and cities is a natural condition of human life that has obtained since the beginning of civilization 10,000 years ago. Cities, for better or worse, have been deeply involved in developing the main characteristics of civilization-literacy, government, high arts, commerce, technology. Urban places have been focal points for action and ideas, and gateways for trade and migration. The future of humanity is to become urban; about half of the world's population will be living in cities in 2000. Texas shares this human legacy, for in the 1990s more than 80 percent of its citizens live within city limits. For Texas, therefore, urbanization is practically complete. Although often unrecognized, the history of city building is one of the most significant themes in Lone Star history. The urbanization of Texas is mainly the result of European settlement and culture. The Indian contribution is slight, since there is little in modern Texas cities that can be traced to Indian origins except perhaps genetic matter in segments of the population. This physical heritage has had very little discernible influence upon the constructed environment. Nevertheless, Indians were in some sense forerunners of urbanization in Texas. The Caddos of East Texas lived in permanent villages and may have descended from the Mound Builders of the Mississippi and Ohio River basins. Evidence at Cahokia, Illinois, suggests that these Indians possessed an urban instinct. The Pueblo Indians of Arizona and New Mexico can also be seen as village people. They contributed adobe architecture and art motifs to the Southwest. Some Indian names, moreover, remain in the language and on the maps. Places like Waco and Nacogdoches take their names from local tribes and village sites. The word Texas, of course, was adopted by the Spanish from a Caddo Indian word for "friend." Depending upon their degree of hostility or receptivity, Indians also influenced the location of Spanish missions and presidios as well as Anglo-American forts.
Main Plaza
Main Plaza and San Fernando Cathedral in San Antonio. Courtesy of the San Antonio Conservation Society and the Portal to Texas History. Image available on the Internet and included in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107.
Mission San Antonio de Valero (later known as the Alamo).
Mission San Antonio de Valero (later known as the Alamo). Courtesy of Texas Highways and Texas A&M University. Image available on the Internet and included in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C.
Church of San Fernando
Church of San Fernando. Image available on the Internet and included in accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107.
Town building in a modern sense, however, resulted primarily from Spanish and Anglo-American efforts. After the entrada of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado the Spanish settled into a slow, deliberate northward movement out of Mexico. Pueblos (towns), presidios (garrisons), and missions (churches) were a part of this as well as ranches and farms. The monarchs ruled through these urban institutions. The Laws of the Indies (1573), moreover, prescribed town planning by dictating an elevated location, central plaza, street pattern, and sites for church, shops, government buildings, hospitals, and slaughterhouses. Today this is most clearly seen in downtown San Antonio, where the Spanish Governor's Palace borders Military Plaza and San Fernando Cathedral fronts Main Plaza. The plazas were built to the specifications of the old laws and have persisted to the present in shape and form. The city began as a supply depot for Spanish missions in East Texas and Louisiana in 1718. The post shortly expanded. Priests established missions, farmed irrigated fields, and laid the cornerstone of the Alamo chapel in 1744. In 1731 a small group of Canary Islanders settled nearby, started farms, parceled out town lots, and established the first official municipality in Texas, San Fernando de Béxar. San Antonio de Béxar became the provincial capital in 1772 with a ten-room, adobe Governor's Palace as headquarters for Spanish rule in Texas. San Antonio was the largest Spanish settlement in provincial Texas, with an early-nineteenth-century population of 2,500. Its success came from its central location in the province, fresh water from the spring-fed San Antonio River, remoteness from the fierce Comanches, and Spanish persistence. Hope this helps! :)
