Although the word “plaza” square derives from “platea” plateau (expansion), it is always used to indicate a space surrounded by buildings that define and limit it, this word therefore bears within social, manner, and philosophical order considerations, and others more related to the urban and architectural.

Squares have been during a lot of time closed spaces with an encircling continuous and only toward the end of the XIX century, with the progressive opening of the building backdrop, the word changes meaning, mixing itself with expansion, open or clear.

At the beginning and during mid last century the modern movement is substantially indifferent to the square topic, being more worried in the expansion of the cities toward the peripheries, following similar patterns in the entire world, hardly distinguishable and without identity, conditioned all them to the appearance of a new constant in the urban planning: the automobile whose vertiginous increment in the last decades opened the way to cities based in it and for its scale, resembling more to "parking lots" than to spaces thought for people.

The square, as projective topic, has again been brought up to date in the last thirty years, as symbol of a new attention to the quality of life. The diversity, inherent to any human manifestation, characterizes the design of these spaces that, in general, become architectural signs of the identity of the inhabitants of the town or city that delimits them. As consequence of this the first condition today for a place can to be defined as square, is its becoming pedestrian; accesses, trails, and limited uses to people.

The Urban Regeneration plan carried out by the Municipality of the city of Guayaquil, has as one of its objectives, the dignifying of the urban environment, granting a human dimension to the city, transforming the citizen into the main character. This intervention in the mere “heart" of the city it seeks to revalue and revitalize pre-existent infrastructures, recovering not only the city’s main cultural referent, but also the self-esteem of their citizens.

In the process of regenerating Guayaquil city’s 3 more emblematic squares of the city it was important to identify the context in which each one of them was inserted, keeping in mind the differences that distinguish the contemporary square from the historical one, and the recovery and restoration interventions of those that tend to define those “new squares". This process implied the search for elements of local history, symbols, intellectual references and also sculptures, fountains, architecture, trees, etc.

The concept of historical square was clearly represented in the Rocafuerte and La Merced Squares, since being traditional squares, they had an endogenous function, defined in the formation process and they were subjected to a building (church, government building, palace, etc.). The contemporary square doesn't have a function it hardly ever specifies nor does it depend, in strict sense, of a building or a monument. Its purpose is the one of constituting an attractive place of encounter or meeting, thus the objective of the project is now the square in itself.

The projecting of the squares expresses a dialectic between the encircling factor and the floor. The project affects the encircling factor only when new squares are carried out, on the other hand, in the restoration of the historical squares they were only acted upon at floor level, with reference to the context, as it happens in La Merced and Rocafuerte.