The Metropolis in Latin America is a beautiful object to be treasured as a true Wunderkammer extracted from the Getty Research Institute's outstanding collection of historical maps and images of such cities as Buenos Aires, Havana, Mexico City, Santiago, and Lima. It is handsomely produced, with reproductions of hard-to-find daguerreotypes and lithographs. The book is organized into six albums: “Capital Cities,” “Colonial Cities and National Heroes,” “Leisure,” “Infrastructures,” “Debates,” and, finally, “Toward Modernism.” “Capital Cities” includes, for instance, a revealing French color lithograph: an aerial view of Havana in the mid-1850s. In it, the city's traza is clearly distinguishable, as are the plazas and the busy port, and buildings appear with wonderful three-dimensional detail—in a fashion akin to those maps by German American cartographer and lithographer Henry Wellge, who, from the late 1880s to the 1900s, made similar aerial maps of US cities and even Mexico City. The reader will...

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