Rama argues that the Spanish American colonial city was founded twice: once as a gridded settlement on the ground, and once in the ordinances, charters, maps and chronicles that produced it on paper. A caste of letrados - notaries, clerics, jurists, poets, later technocrats - monopolised writing and thereby monopolised the power to name, classify and order urban space, insulating the 'lettered city' from the oral, mestizo and popular city around it. The rational checkerboard of the Laws of the Indies is read as the diagram of that textual authority, imposed on the New World as pure sign before it was ever inhabited. Rama traces the caste's mutation from colonial scribe to nineteenth-century modernising elite and twentieth-century planner.
It gave Latin America its own foundational theory of urbanism, showing the grid as an instrument of colonial power and literacy rather than a neutral survey technique, and linking planning to the politics of who may write the city. The book became a cornerstone of postcolonial and subaltern urban studies, and a standing critique of expert-authored plans that render informal and indigenous city-making illegible.
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