Sustaining Heritage Patterns in Mining Towns of the North American West: A Historico-Geographical Approach

Urban morphology provides essential methodologies to inform processes for heritage preservation and design intervention in historic places. Among principal research methods used by urban morphologists, the historico-geographical approach is particularly helpful for interpreting formative and transformative processes and for identifying key elements that define the physical structure of historic contexts at a town or neighbourhood scale. This article will discuss applications of an adapted historico-geographical approach to analyse heritage patterns in 19th-century mining towns located in mountainous regions of the western United States. Profiled case studies are part of an ongoing study intended to inform design and revitalization processes by architects, planners and community stakeholders in the region.

Borderlands in the Silver Mines of New Spain, 1540–1660

From the sixteenth century onward, mining towns in New Spain produced more than silver; they also led to the creation of new colonial communities and societies. The founding of mining towns outside of central Mexico served as catalysts for northern exploration, becoming and creating new borderlands in their wake. This chapter considers how mining towns constituted both geographical and social borderlands. It focuses on the roles and experience of indigenous, Spanish, African, and ethnically mixed descent individuals (castas) in Mexico’s northern silver mining district from 1540 to 1660. The colonization of the mining borderlands created new economic, social, and ethnic patterns shaped by population scarcity and instability, the labor needs of production, the incentives of the money economy, the lifeways and practices of indigenous populations, imbalanced sex ratios, and under-developed colonial institutions. Ultimately, the chapter argues that mining towns remained borderlands, sites of fluid cultural exchanges and social boundaries.