La Fundación de Georgetown 1771. Patrick Mackellar y el Urbanísmo Militar Británico

Abstract

The doctoral thesis refers to the foundation process quite unknown, as the first sources are in the archives of London and Paris of the Minorcas town before named Georgetown, nowadays known as Es Castell, planned by the Scottish military Engineer Patrick Mackellar in Mahon's harbour during the second british domination on the island (1763-1782). It is a research work and is structured in 3 parts. First part, its an approximation to a source of military urbanism developed by Great Britain during the XVII and XVIII centuries, coinciding with the increase of war artillery. This is shown by the influence in the theoretical survey, of Frances military supremacy and above all, the versatile labour of Vauban revealed, apart from other issues, by the Guides of Fortifications which were of compulsory study, for the british military engineers during their training. Until the XVIII century, the engineers round about the Board Ordnance had few occasions to create new towns, basically for two reasons. The first, is that England didnt begin its colonial expansion until it had solved its own internal problems, which came to an end with the annexation of Ireland and Scotland. The second, that its insular status obliged it to base its defence of its territories in the development of a powerful navy. Nevertheless, the english colonial model, based on the commercial companies playing the main part, helped the intervention of the military engineers in the work of verifying and planning the new settlement in North Ireland, the Coromandel Coast, the east part of North America and the Antilles. The second line of research attacked the life of the planner of Georgetown, emphasising his war experience on the american front during the Seven-Year War (1756-1763). Thanks to his partaking in the military campaigns, Patrick Mackellar found out himself the characteristics of English and French development overseas, and he endowed himself with an important cultural knowledge which he revealed when, in his last post as Chief Engineer in Minorca, he undertook the designing and planning of a new town. The third research is centred in the foundational process of Georgetown. The transaction based on defensive reasons consisted in demolishing a settlement at the foot of the main fort of the island, and moves the homes of its almost 4.000 inhabitants to a more prudential area, away from the fort. Named Villa Jordi by its first inhabitants, Georgetown was an excellent example of city planning pragmatism. The central square or genesis of the settlement, was built on a small portside plateau which had already been chosen by a french military engineer during the Frances domination of the island and, an old communicating land route, was made use of as an essential longitudinal part of the new urban unit. In the same manner the distribution of the ground was made according to the size of the existing plots in the old village. Nevertheless, the attention to the people and the geographical situation, marked by the port coastland, didnt stop Mackellar developing an urban unit with straight roads, parallel hierarchical layout from a central space, almost exactly like the buildings of a baroque military fortress. After a formal comparison with other populations under study, finally the thesis development analyses the principal elements of the population, like the length and the distance of the streets, the barrack buildings and other notable constructions, the residential types and the history of the population over the last two centuries. Concluding, the author considers that Mackellar's project for Georgetown, succeeds in combining the empirical bases that maintains it with a variation of the urban prototype applied in the colonization of New Scotland as a guarantee of satisfaction for the demand and regularity of a military planning as well as eighteenth century urbanism. Born between the agony of the Old Regime and the outburst of the american and French revolutions, daughter of the Baroque and mother of nineteenth century development, this town planning exploitation financed by the English Crown, was the result of a commitment, a design of the transitional period.