Guadeloupe is a French Overseas Department situated in the Caribbean. The direct heritage of its specific history as a tropical colony with an economy based on slavery and on large-scale export crops, is perceptible in the way urban forms have been created and developed. The contemporary urban growth is a more recent issue and significant debate, not only touching the main cities of the island but also its smaller towns. The aim of this work was to describe and to analyze the urban modernization processes of two town centers (Gosier & Trois-Rivières) in light of their historical context. The changes of urban forms and building types from 1928 to 2003 were here considered against the emergence of modernism. Using one of the major concepts developed by Conzen for the general morphological analysis (burgage-cycle concept), and using the concept of typological process from Caniggia, this study assumes that spatial and social entities are nourished by a back-and-forth relationship. After a presentation of the theoretical approach and of the empirical object, the work is divided into three parts. In the first part, a historical background provides a glimpse of the social context in Guadeloupe shortly before its devastation by the 1928 hurricane. The impact of the hurricane and the assessment of the reconstruction in 1935 are also discussed. In Part II, the two case studies are presented in their local context and then analyzed as morphological case studies. Finally, Part III presents the analysis of the understanding of modernization by colonial and post-colonial authorities prior to the analysis of the modernization process in the two towns from the typological viewpoint.