CONICET | Buscador de Institutos y Recursos Humanos

Interest concerning the connections between urban government and police science and practices established during the XVIII century has recently shown a steady increase, mainly in France, Italy and to a lesser extent in Spain. The issue has received less attention in Latin America and current research about police history focus especially in its modernization as an armed force committed to fight crime, from the last decades of the XIX century on. Previous literature addressed the issue from the perspective of administrative and judicial history, while the relationship between the adoption of police principles of government and the drive towards well-ordered cities since the end of the ancién regime in the region has been given less consideration. The present paper studies some aspects of this problem, especially in relation to urban history. Four moments of the history of the police rule and control of a Hispanic American city are presented, from the colonial times to the independent period. During this time governing and controlling the city implied not only ordering the people, but also their activities and space, increasingly seen as tools to promote a civilized society. The main topic presents the correlations between urban cartography, police knowledge (savoirs policiers) and technical skills, and their effects on urban and territorial thinking. These connections are present in Buenos Aires at several moments; its analysis makes possible a study of their varying connotations. When first introduced in 1738, the police impulse was mainly centered on population control, and particularly the disruption of the then flourishing illicit commerce. In a second moment, it shifted to the organization of public works, as well as to the movements of inhabitants and newcomers. The police organization of the city implemented since the 1790 (a structure of urban districts and minor authorities directly subordinated to the viceroy and other delegated authorities of the Spanish monarchy) was adopted, transformed and then passed down during the crucial years of the revolution and independence. Many of the instruments, skills and notions introduced served, during what is known as the republican phase (roughly the 1820s), to lay the foundations of a modern police system. In this third stage the wide range of functions assigned to the former ancien police was gradually divided into what was termed "high police" (related to the judicial system and law inforcement) and another "low police" in charge of retrieving and transferring the traditional urban concerns to a modern local administration which -fourthly- began to take shape in the second half of the XIX century with the creation of a new municipal government in 1856.Along this time cartography was produced and used, as issues of urban control arose regarding the establishment of proper frontiers between public and private spaces, deciding the city limits and its jurisdiction, the complex processes of public works such as nivelation, pavements or drainages, or the formation of a cadaster, essential to establish a municipal tax system. Thus were produced topographical maps, street maps and cadastral maps, all requiring measurements, drawings and printing in technical offices created by the authorities. Provisional, biased, incomplete, flawed or accurate, those maps were undoubtedly a central part of the construction of the city. As we shall discuss, accuracy was just one of many other concerns regarding the city. Ultimately, the diverse stages in the processes of construction of a police system, and its relations to cartographic representation arose not only through political institutions and legal texts as has been most commonly studied. It is also worthy to examine the various technical and graphical skills that were distinctive of the military and polytechnic engineers that arrived in the Rio de la Plata during this period and contributed to the installation of modern government offices along the XIX century.

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