Dynamics of Urban St. George

At the time of writing what is known to have been written about St. Georges, the capital of Grenada, treats mainly of its origin as a French outpost in the Caribbean about 1650, then came the wars of succession between France, England and Spain in the 17 th and 18th centuries, and much later in 1985 when Wilfred Redhead publishedA CITY ON A HILL, then George Brizans Grenada: Fortitude and Human Condition, Beverley Steeles Grenada: A HISTORY OF ITS People and Raymond Devas The History of the Island of Grenada, not forgetting the Grenada Handbook.It was also mentioned by the Georgian Society of England in the 1930s and again in the 1950s as a charming Georgian town in the Caribbean; and more recently in 2004, St. Georges-the prettiest little town in the Caribbean by George Brizan, which was a limited publication for Zublins promotional thrust for his proposed St. Georges Renaissance Project, which appears to be out of circulation.All of the above dealt mainly with its historical, political, social and cultural evolution,but in 1988, at the celebration of the 500th year of the coming of Columbus to the New World, CARIMOSthe cultural arm of the Organisation of American States (OAS), sponsored a technical report by the Faculty of Architecture of the University of Florida to mark the occasion, when St. Georges was described as a Monument of the wider Caribbean. A few years later in 1991 the Physical Planning Unit prepared the St. Georges Development Plan under the direction of the then Planning OfficerMr. Carlton Frederick, assisted by a United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) Consultant.The Dynamics of Urban St. George seeks therefore to complement the technical deficitby further looking, examining and analysing the town mainly from a Architectural and Urban Planning perspective, and is therefore a document biased towards technology, which it is hoped will complement the previous publications on its historical and cultural assets, if that is at all subjectively possible while contemplating the synthesis of holistic communities.There is some confusion, misunderstanding or just mere semantics in the argument as to whether St. Georges is a town or a city; for the purpose of this discourse however, the designation is neither here nor there, what is germaine at this juncture is, that it is a relatively small urban centre with a population of about four thousand, which is rapidly declining, but with unique physical characteristics which influence the dynamics of a small Caribbean Society, within the confines of a limited land space with outstanding and dramatic natural features.