The Plazas of New Mexico documents the rich heritage of New Mexico’s public plazas and the everyday life and community celebrations that help sustain them. It traces three distinct design traditions—the Native American center place with kiva and terraced residential blocks, the Hispanic plaza with church and courtyard houses, and the Anglo square with courthouse and business areas.

New Mexico’s plazas, like urban spaces everywhere, are gaining renewed attention at a time when the challenges of sustainability have sparked the New Urbanism and Smart Growth movements, urban revitalization, and intensified interest in historic preservation. This book brings to life three valuable urban design traditions while profiling recent plaza renovation projects and newly designed community plazas.

The Plazas of New Mexico is about the past but for the future. Plaza site plans, elevation drawings, bird’s-eye views, concise community histories, vivid historic photos, and compelling documentary photographs bring to life the history, physical setting, and social life of twenty-two communities. Contributors include a distinguished array of historians, architects, and preservationists, an anthropologist, a geographer, and a planner.

The book is valuable for community leaders, politicians, designers, planners, and developers facing similar issues elsewhere in the country and the world. But even where the climate or mixture of cultures is significantly different, The Plazas of New Mexico provides a model for other studies of urban design tradition and practice. The result is a landmark study of these historic plazas and their 1,000-year history.