The "Script" of a New Urban Layout Mobility, Environment, and Embellishment in Lisbon's Streets (1850–1910)

Abstract

This article is at the crossroads of two scholarly traditions: the history of technology studying urban infrastructures and the history of urban planning. Using Actor Network Theory's concept of "script," it analyzes the strategic role played by the street to overcome nineteenth-century urban problems. The street was simultaneously the epicenter of the "urban question" and the key to its solution. This role explains why urban planning played a unifying part in the agenda of urban improvements, as a response to mobility, environment, and embellishment problems. However, urban planners did not dictate the evolution of Lisbon. This article argues that Lisbon's transformation was the result of tensions and compromises between different actors (public authorities, technicians, businessmen), and of diverse impulses (sanitary, economic, and emulative). Moreover, it argues that the heterogeneous character of nineteenth-century Lisbon demonstrates the need to zoom in on the street. ANT provides the heuristic framework for understanding these interactions.

Introduction

Mid-nineteenth-century European metropolises faced common problems. Simon Szreter synthesized the "urban question" into the four "Ds": death, disease, deprivation, and disruption.¹ The rapid increase in urban population exacerbated the pressures on the urban environment, creating congestion, pollution, overcrowding, and problems in sanitation. These environmental challenges were so acute because urban growth occurred without any appreciable change in urban infrastructures.² To deal with these challenges, technological innovations and increased public intervention started to change the face of cities. The modernization of sanitary equipment epitomized technological change.³ Major initiatives in urban layout increased public intervention, replacing the usual fragmentary and small-scale interventions.⁴

Two scholarly traditions emerged in the study of the nineteenth-century "urban question." The first probed into the rise of urban planning that disciplined atomistic and uncoordinated intervention over urban layout. It traced the origins of public regulation over the physical environment, the role of engineers and town bureaucracy, and the impact on actual urban design.⁵ The other stream of literature dealt with the evolution of urban infrastructures and its impact on the rise of the modern city.⁶ The ground-breaking article published by Konvitz, Rose, and Tarr in 1990 examined the relationship between technology and the city as an interactive process, denying any technological determinism, in which the urban landscape was the scenario for the demiurgic impact of networked technologies.⁷ These two scholarly approaches have not often converged or conversed.⁸ Blending the history of technology and the history of city planning in order to understand the stresses and solutions behind the "urban question" has been intermittent, and generally lacks a well-defined theoretical framework combining agency, technology, and space.

This article aims to combine those two approaches and focus on the street, which polarized the multiple challenges of the urban question. As a physical object the street is usually interpreted as a self-evident entity, without questioning its conceptual status.⁹ Zooming in on the street has heuristic advantages. It provides a deeper understanding of the interaction between space, technologies, and envisioned uses of both. It also depends on the agency of different interests, from policy-makers, planners, and engineers to developers, utility companies, and residents. The street was simultaneously the result of this interaction, the multi-scope leverage to solve the nineteenth-century "urban question," and thus also the primary element of city planning.

Putting the street in the spotlight goes handily with actor-network theory (ANT): a remarkably plastic theoretical approach to capture the interaction between space, technologies, and the multipolar intervention of human agency. ANT frames our understanding of changes in the street's role, and particularly in the street's script, as defined both by public and private interests. We use the range of vocabulary that Madeleine Akrich and Bruno Latour created around the concept of the script and inscription.¹⁰ The act of inscribing comprises envisioned uses, namely the future relationships between the technical object and its surrounding actors and space.¹¹ Therefore, we follow the scribes, who inscribed certain assumptions in the street about its envisioned users and uses. In this sense, the heterogeneous street emerged as a network that binds together social and technical elements, including policy-makers, engineers, users, private entrepreneurs, financial constraints, underground networks such as sanitation and power lines, and ground level infrastructures (for example, tramways' rails and poles, pavements and sidewalks), buildings, and terrain.

Designing the city provided solutions to both its mobility and environmental problems, simultaneously regulating and changing street uses. Studying what was inscribed in the street and its previous design reveals the tensions, competition, and ultimate compromises between multiple scribes and alternative inscriptions. During the late nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, the street's script was far from stable. It would take time to stabilize and naturalize the new script, making it a particularly illuminating period to disclose the indecisions, conflicts, and concessions between scribes. The heterogeneous character of late nineteenth-century Lisbon—a declining and peripheral imperial city in a poor country, cyclically on the edge of financial difficulties and facing major state-building challenges over the nineteenth century—demonstrates the need to zoom in on the street.¹² Notwithstanding, and even without the demographic pressures borne by European metropolises, a process of urban modernization took place in Lisbon. It was inconsistent and slow going, partly due to the imported models of urban intervention, but mostly because of the contradictions and tensions in this process.

The existing scholarship on the urban and technological development of Lisbon tends to ascribe a leading role to policy makers and experts (engineers, chemists, physicians), but this is inadequate to explain the inscription of Lisbon's streets in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹³ The interaction between top-down administrative scribes (policy makers and engineers) on the one hand, and private entrepreneurs in the construction industry on the other, constitutes a focal issue in this study. It elucidates a broad range of agents, as Alexia Yates in a similar way refocuses the narrative of the built landscape of fin de siècle Paris from the "spectacle of the boulevards" and "monumental urbanism" ("the view from above") to the role of landowners, real estate brokers, and speculative builders.¹⁴ The new script for the street faced two potential sources of conflict or constraints to administrative agency: public financial shortcomings and the atomistic private initiatives concerning urban layout. The new infrastructures also created greater instability by bringing new pressures to the street, which was continuously facing tensions brought on by the new networked technologies and the introduction of new modes of mobility, implying a constant negotiation between scribes.

Using the concept of script, this article argues that a unified perspective for the study of the urban question, merging town planning history with the history of technology in the city, provides clues for understanding the nuanced and contradictory evolution of a nineteenth-century peripheral city. In this sense, it fulfills the ambitions drafted by Bert De Munck when he proposed the use of ANT in urban history.¹⁵ It probes the heuristic power of ANT to understand the transformation of the city in the late nineteenth century, but also the special status of the street as simultaneously an object of analysis and theoretical construct. The next section analyzes the new script of the street proposed by urban planning and how it represented a new means of public control over urban layout. In the third section, the argument moves to understanding the way private building developers defined the street's script. The fourth section deals with how urban infrastructures (sanitation and mobility) interacted with the script defined by urban planning. The fifth section addresses the tensions between public and private scribes and reviews their consequences in the script of the streets in three different areas of Lisbon. Finally, the contribution of this study is summarized.

Setting the New Street Script: the Role of Policy Makers and Engineers

In the 1850s, a sanitary crisis exposed the appalling environmental problems faced by Lisbon.¹⁶ The outbreaks of cholera, yellow fever, and diphtheria between 1854 and 1859 influenced public attitudes and political decisions about sanitation. The exceptionally deadly character of these diseases was attributed to the condition of the existing water supply and sewage equipment. The old sewer pipes were a focus of contagion, preventing drainage and accumulating "corrupted masses blocking up the sewers, and [they] continuously exhaled a stream of miasmas," as stated by the president of the municipality, Júlio Máximo de Oliveira Pimentel (1809–84), who was also a chemist and professor at the Lisbon Polytechnic School.¹⁷ He constituted one of the examples of heterogeneous experts, crossing the boundaries between academy and power. He moved swiftly into politics, as did other engineers, scientists, and physicians, either at local or governmental levels, and played an influential role in putting the hygienist discourse on the political agenda.¹⁸

This crisis created the consciousness that the city needed transformation to become a modern capital. Lisbon seems an improbable candidate to side with other European capital cities in experiencing radical change. Its population stagnated for much of the nineteenth century, an exception among the European capital cities.¹⁹ For this reason, the case of Lisbon acquires greater significance in understanding the diverse impulses for urban intervention. As the head of the oldest European empire, Lisbon had recently lost its eighteenth-century importance in the Atlantic trade network because of the economic effects of the Napoleonic Wars and the subsequent independence of Brazil.²⁰ Lisbon's municipality sought to use urban improvements to leverage a program of modernization and revival, in much the same way that the central government was trying to leverage economic modernization through the construction of a railway and road infrastructure²¹ (table 1).

Table 1.

Population in Lisbon (1801–1911)

Source: Álvaro Ferreira da Silva, "Crescimento urbano, regulação e oportunidades empresariais: a construção residencial em Lisboa, 1860–1930," p. 35.

Besides modernization and revival, another reason for urban transformation was emulation.²² Watching Haussmann's transformations in Paris or the development of urban sanitation in London might have been an incentive for change in a capital city just as critical as the impact of cholera or overcrowding. This process of emulation raises another issue, running sotto voce throughout this article: the role of the circulation of people, artifacts, and knowledge, as well as the efforts of local appropriation of new technologies, critical to any innovation adoption and domestication, but even more forceful when site-specific technologies are considered. Engineers played an important role in this emulation process, bringing in new urban technologies,²³ working in the central state administration or in the municipality of Lisbon, and becoming involved in the technical education and the construction of the liberal state.²⁴ The chief engineers of Lisbon's municipality in this period, Pierre-Joseph Pézerat (1801–72) and his successor Frederico Ressano Garcia (1847–1911), were influenced by their experience and training in France and in turn influenced other (state) engineers through their teaching at the main technical education institutions of the liberal state, the Lisbon Polytechnic School, the Lisbon Industrial Institute, and the Army School, respectively.²⁵

Confronting the sanitary crisis, Pézerat identified the most urgent problems and submitted a plan for tackling them in 1858.²⁶ Sewage disposal and slum clearance were critical issues in this plan. New streets should also be opened within the city and into its periphery. The functions of the new streets were multi-faceted: they would improve circulation, but also sanitation and living conditions. In the process, the new public intervention would also embellish the city. In the same year, a commission established at the Lisbon Academy of Sciences' Sanitary Congress, formed by physicians and engineers (including Pézerat), published a report on preventive and hygienic measures to respond to the epidemic crises of cholera and yellow fever of 1856 and 1857.²⁷

Despite the construction of the embankment on the riverside of Lisbon (see 6 on fig. 1) to remove sludge, improve the harbor, and take the railway, there were few other traces left in the city by these programs.²⁸ This was the result of the weakness of financial, administrative, and technical resources, eloquently expressed in the many requests the city council addressed to the central government in the late 1850s and 1860s.²⁹ However, these programs did usher in a new perspective on public intervention, which adhered to the matrix of urban improvements followed in other European cities that had been proposed by the French engineering school in the mid-nineteenth century.³⁰ The differences between Lisbon and Paris were significant for the fate of the urban renewal projects. The commercial and administrative center of Lisbon had been reconstructed following the 1755 earthquake, which reduced some of the stronger incentives toward urban renewal in central areas on the part of business interests and public authorities.

Fig 1.

The image displays an important part of the 1903 general plan for Lisbon's improvements, which included previously planned projects. (Source: Frederico Ressano Garcia, "Planta Geral da Cidade de Lisboa. Minuta Indicando a Divisão e Numeração das Folhas da Planta de Lisboa," 1903, PT/AMLSB/CMLSB/UROB-PU/11/393, in AML.) Legend: (1) Avenida da Liberdade; (2) Avenida dos Anjos; (3) Projecto das zonas; (4) Bairro Andrade; (5) Parque da Liberdade; (6) Avenida 24 de Julho and riverside development; (7) Horse-racing facility; (8) Campo de Ourique; (9) Bairro Camões.

A further step came at the initiative of the central government, assuming a regulatory role that the municipal administration of the largest Portuguese city missed. The first law inaugurating modern urban planning in Portugal was issued on 31 December 1864.³¹ This law was signed by the minister of Public Works, the engineer João Crisóstomo de Abreu e Sousa (1811–95), a strong supporter of the material improvements program carried out by the central government based on the construction of transport and communication infrastructures—and another case of an heterogeneous expert.³² The 1864 law was, on the one hand, framed in terms of a broader effort of making these infrastructures (railways, telegraphs, roads, canals, harbors) essential tools for the territory's management; on the other hand, it was framed as a way of preparing the expansion of the main Portuguese cities.³³ Furthermore, the 1864 law had evident links to the environmental challenges erupting in the mid-nineteenth century, and to the solutions proposed in the 1858 report on hygienic measures (mentioned above), as well as the petitions that municipal authorities had presented to the central government.³⁴ It gave public authorities the regulatory power over urban layout and required the establishment, for the first time, of improvement and expansion plans for the cities of Lisbon and Porto, the largest Portuguese cities.

The preamble of the 1864 law mentioned the need for a unified vision of urban growth, which entailed the regulation of road and building construction, and the critical place of the street in "the decoration of the cities, the easing of traffic, the convenience and safety for the inhabitants, the public health and the need to prevent the congestion of population."³⁵ It presented a clear set of new inscriptions dealing with embellishment, mobility, and environmental concerns.

All the issues common to any critical thinking about or intervention in the nineteenth-century city were present in the inscriptions justified by the new law.³⁶ The "decoration of the cities" (or embellishment) expressed the importance placed upon the aesthetic and architectural features of the city, and to modern amenities and comfort. Intervention and control over the street should also improve circulation, enlarging and straightening out thoroughfares, establishing the minimum width and declivity of the new streets, and bringing solutions to the traffic between built-up areas and the hinterland. Public health, however, was the main preoccupation of public authorities, and the law stated the intention to introduce a general sewerage system, as well as to create building codes and a regulatory framework for development projects. Population overcrowding—common in the medieval and popular districts of the city—was also addressed. Before the 1864 law, urban expansion had mainly developed through the construction of "private streets" not integrated in the public street network, and thus not ruled by local ordinances. The new law stated a critical assumption for the success of urban planning: the claim to public monopoly over the existing and future thoroughfares within the city of Lisbon. This claim, together with the defense by this law of property expropriation for public interest, can be rightly characterized as the foundational step toward the introduction of urban planning in Portugal.

The 1864 law proposed the creation of a special committee, nominated by the government, which would work on a general plan for Lisbon improvements (Plano Geral dos Melhoramentos da Capital) based on the preparatory work developed by the municipal engineer Pierre-Joseph Pézerat.³⁷ The plan was never delivered.³⁸ But the late 1860s and early 1870s witnessed a series of public interventions dealing with some of the major problems faced by the city, opening up new access routes in the inner city and to the outskirts, and intervening on the waterfront. When a second committee was gathered in 1876, it was able to benefit from projects developed by the municipal Technical Office and the Ministry of Public Works over the previous twenty years and deliver the first renewal and expansion plan (1880–81). For instance, two of the most representative works in Lisbon in the years immediately following the approval of the 1880–81 plan—the opening of the two fundamental exits to the northern outskirts, the Avenida da Liberdade and Avenida dos Anjos (figs. 1 and 3)—had already been planned. The case of Avenida da Liberdade is particularly revealing. The municipal council approved its opening in 1859, as part of the first urban transformation project mentioned above. The municipal engineering services drew up different projects for the avenue until the works started in 1878, before the 1880–81 plan.³⁹ The 1877 preliminary project of the Avenida dos Anjos also predated the plan.

Both avenues showed the importance given to the communication between the old city center and the outskirts, and the incorporation of new areas within the urban space. Until the mid-nineteenth century, Lisbon did not develop to the north, but mainly along the river. After the 1870s, every expansion plan looked toward the northern hinterland of the city. Both these new avenues signaled the new trend, as they were planned according to the city's orography and followed the natural exit routes along two valleys to the sparsely populated northern outskirts (fig. 1).

The timing of administrative decision-making had missed the urgency of the environmental problems, as well as the municipal rhetoric. The decades following the mid-nineteenth century had been a period of financial difficulties for the Portuguese liberal regime, just emerging from endemic civil war.⁴⁰ Only in the 1870s did the institutions stabilize, increasing state revenues and easing access to international financial markets, which started to invest in Portuguese sovereign debt.⁴¹ After 1873 municipal loans emerged regularly in the city council's budget. From 1879 and for about a dozen years they became one of the most important sources of municipal revenue, with some of the debt placed in international financial institutions, such as the Comptoir d'Escompte of Paris and the Bank für Handel und Industrie (Berlin).⁴²

The approval of the so-called projecto das zonas in 1887–89 (figs. 1 and 2) represented the highest point that nineteenth-century urban planning had reached in Lisbon, supported by a favorable economic, political, and social environment.⁴³ It signaled the birth of a new concept of urban development, shaping inscriptions on the urban layout differently from the past. It shared some continuity with the persistent expansion into the northern outskirts, represented by the plans to open the Avenida da Liberdade. Nevertheless, it denoted a radical novelty, discernible in two characteristics. In contrast to previous urban renewal projects dedicated to the inner city or to opening new exits, the projecto das zonas was more like plans then in vogue to extend other European capitals.⁴⁴ Secondly, in Lisbon, the whole land was expropriated beforehand and later submitted to a process of public urban development, which was uncommon in other international cases (fig. 2).⁴⁵ The resulting land lots were eventually sold to private builders.

The favorable background for urban transformation withered with the financial crisis in 1891, which threw the Portuguese state into bankruptcy and caused the funds needed for urban improvement projects to evaporate.⁴⁶ It was a particularly critical moment in the expansion of the city, amid the rapid growth in population since the late 1870s (table 1), and the growing ambitions for public intervention in regulating urban layout.

Ten years later (1901), the government charged the city council with elaborating a general plan for Lisbon's improvements (Plano Geral dos Melhoramentos da Capital). Many parts of the plan presented in 1903 had appeared in earlier projects (the projecto das zonas, Bairro Camões, Parque da Liberdade—see figure 1).⁴⁷ The plan maintained a clear orientation to the northern central axis opened by the Avenida da Liberdade and continued by the projecto das zonas.

Fig 2.

The image displays a section of the projecto das zonas (represented in the 1903 plan of Lisbon, in fig. 1). It is possible to see the built-up streets, mostly without any buildings, with lateral and central sidewalks, lined with planted trees. In the underground of these streets, sewer, water, and gas pipes were already installed. The upper, right, and left parts of this figure show areas not yet expropriated and infrastructured. (Source: Júlio António Vieira da Silva Pinto, "[Plantas Topográfica de Lisboa]: 10 L, 10 M," 1908, PT/AMLSB/CMLSB/UROB-PU/05/03/115;PT/AMLSB/CMLSB/UROB-PU/05/03/128, in AML.)

The most important objective of the 1903 plan was to crystallize the area previously designated the projecto das zonas, an object of radical urban intervention. At a time when financial resources were rather scarce to set up strict public control and initiative concerning urban layout, this minimalist solution preserved the paradigmatic area of urban reform. Future development following the expansion axes sketched by the new communication lines (namely Avenida dos Anjos) was left to private initiative—a clear setback compared with the projecto das zonas. Developers could build the streets that Lisbon's urban planners did not consider "arteries" (main mobility axes), contradicting the public monopoly on urban development assumed in the projecto das zonas.⁴⁸

To summarize, there had been tension between two decisive forces polarizing urban development. On the one hand, public authorities wanted to assume a critical role in defining urban design. Since the law of 1864, this perspective stood behind all public intervention over the layout of Lisbon. The multifunctional character of the street stands behind this new attitude. Public monopoly over urban design through planning would reconcile health, circulation, and ornamentation of the city, which altogether provided both general and concrete inscriptions to Lisbon's streets. These were, at a macro level, the priorities that policy makers and engineers inscribed for Lisbon's urban planning in this period. On the other hand, the inscriptions foreseen by this law and successive municipal plans were only partially achieved. The endemic financial incapacity of Lisbon's city council prevented projects from becoming reality until the late 1870s. The subsequent 1880s bonanza was halted by the 1891–92 financial crisis, which affected urban economic activity, namely real estate development and construction.⁴⁹ This tension explained the swinging chronology, the sluggish process, and the contradictory movements in the evolution of the city during the period analyzed here. However important might have been the role of public scribes, they were not the only agents in outlining the expansion of the city. Other scribes (estate owners, developers, builders, and utility companies) decisively influenced this process.

Atomistic Inscriptions: the Role of Private Developers

In a city council meeting on 17 August 1923, a report of the Public Works Committee on the building of private quarters called attention to the "great problem of Lisbon's urban growth."⁵⁰ It accused the city council of passivity in dealing with the builders of private quarters.⁵¹ The city streets were too narrow and steep in some places, resulting from an evident under-investment by private developers in complying with the minimum of 10 meters of width and the maximum of 7 percent of declivity as required by the 1864 law. Such streets presented a great cost to the city council when integrated into the public roads' network. The report also contrasted this sort

Table 2.

Distribution of Developers by the Number of Building Permits, in Percentage (Lisbon)

of unplanned urban development with the projecto das zonas, praised as a case of successful public intervention and "an example of Lisbon's modernization."⁵² The urban planning proposals developed throughout the second half of the nineteenth century by the public scribes faced the hard reality of other actors in urban development, such as developers and builders.

Entrepreneurial initiatives in residential building in Lisbon reveal a scenario of extreme dispersion during the whole period (table 2). In ten years of uninterrupted activity, only 22 percent of builders at most applied for more than one building permit or, in simpler but less accurate terms, carried out the construction of more than one building. Those with four or more permits comprised a tiny 4 percent of builders.

Comparison with other cities emphasizes the atomistic character of building development in Lisbon. In late nineteenth-century London, about 40 percent of developers were involved in more than seven buildings in only one year.⁵³ The British Midlands suburb of Birmingham, studied by Cannadine, is presented as a paragon of dispersion in building activity, but also reveals a far greater concentration of building and urban development.⁵⁴ Geographically closer to Lisbon, Barcelona has been characterized as a unique case of "democratization" of building entrepreneurship.⁵⁵ Between 1860 and 1896, about 60 percent of builders had one building permit, and 19 percent obtained four or more. Lisbon clearly has a higher level of atomization in the housing market.

Lack of specialization is the hallmark of these developers and builders, very different from the "speculative builders" presented by Dyos or Rodger, who built for sale and in anticipation of demand.⁵⁶ In Lisbon, the vast majority of buildings were built by landowners or small operators who bought a parcel of land and erected a building. These were opportunistic initiatives, explaining the high number of individuals with only one building permit over ten years. Sometimes the building was for their own residence, renting some remaining floors. At other times, they erected a "revenue building," transforming their landowner status exclusively into a source of rents. In both cases, they represented one-off initiatives peripheral to other professional activities, a safe placement of savings, and a means of ensuring a stable source of income or a store of value.

In France during the Second Empire, real estate companies were important agents of the urban development efforts in Paris and other French cities.⁵⁷ These companies had strong connections with both financial institutions and urban transport companies, in addition to special relationships with those in political power. In Lisbon, real estate companies did not constitute an investment agent in the same way. Several proposals tried to emulate the French experience, but without success. Some were rapidly refused by the city council.⁵⁸ Others did not succeed in the process of negotiation with municipal and governmental authorities.⁵⁹ Henri Burnay, a financier of Belgian origin and one of the richest men in Portugal, launched a more successful initiative, the Sindicato de Terrenos de Santa Marta to develop the Bairro Camões, an area at the top of the Avenida da Liberdade (see fig. 1).⁶⁰ This firm, however, acted only as a landowner, placing building lots on the market after the municipality built the streets, and not building or developing the land. The action of real estate companies was thus almost nonexistent.

Some individuals stand out in the residential building business by holding four or more permits in one decade. Their entrepreneurial activity was concentrated in peripheral areas, away from the most emblematic zones of the city. Some examples may clarify the characteristics of these actors. In Campo de Ourique (see fig. 1) the partnership Silva, Esteves, Lopes e Companhia had in 1879 permits to build eight buildings, after developing a rural area for urban use. In a similar way, the owner of two

Fig 3.

The image displays the project of Avenida dos Anjos and its adjacent streets (represented in the 1903 plan of Lisbon, in fig. 1). The area closest to the city center was densely populated and with important preexisting structures. The opening of the avenue was dependent of compromises between the municipality and private entrepreneurs, who owned the private quarters flanking it. Most of these adjacent streets were initially built as private streets, in need of significant improvement when transferred to public domain. (Source: "Planta Junta ao Ofício Nº 4764 do Engenheiro Director-Geral. Planta com o Traçado Completo da Avenida dos Anjos e das Ruas Adjacentes, as já Construídas, e em Projecto," 1900, PT/AMLSB/CMLSB/UROB-E/23/0719, in AML.)

farms, Manuel Gonçalves Pereira de Andrade, developed the Bairro Andrade (figs. 1 and 3), which flanked Avenida dos Anjos. Buildings in Bairro Andrade, as in other similar urban developments, were modest two- or three-story houses aimed to meet popular demand from tenants who could afford to live outside urban courtyards and slums. Some of these developers promoted even more modest housing in other places.⁶¹

Fragmentation of entrepreneurial initiatives characterized residential construction in Lisbon during this period. A larger intervention in this sector was the prerogative of only a handful of individuals, mainly concentrated in peripheral areas of the city with modest housing, and some did not even comply with the inscriptions of the 1864 law. For the overwhelming majority of developers and builders, investment in housing was a marginal activity in which they invested some savings, looking for a source of long-term income through rent. The low population growth until the 1880s prevented more concentration in the building industry. The difficulty in securing credit was a structural constraint to any rise of the "speculative builders" and concentration in the building industry. Specialized institutions like the building societies in Britain or the crédit immobiliers in France did not emerge in Portugal at the time. The one firm that could emulate this function (Companhia Geral do Crédito Predial Português) invested primarily in state and municipal bonds.⁶²

Networked Technologies: Sanitation, Mobility, and the New Inscriptions for Lisbon Streets

This peculiar housing market was the site of growing public intervention in urban layout, and identical processes of competition, negotiation, and compromise can be discerned when looking at the impact of the new technologies in sanitation and transport. The inscriptions foreseen by the urban plans constituted a template for new inscriptions to be added, namely those provided by the building entrepreneurs and by the introduction of networked technologies, such as the water carriage system of waste disposal, and mechanized public transport. Both technologies were closely interrelated with urban planning. The law of 1864 created the pattern for introducing the networked technologies within a new urban layout of reticulated, wider streets and regularly aligned buildings. This law and the subsequent development plans explicitly mentioned water supply and sewerage. The installation of tracks for horse-drawn trams was not mentioned, but it was implicitly contemplated when a certain street width, slope, alignment, or pavement or a sidewalk was considered.

The synchrony between the public intervention of modern urban planning and the technological changes in sanitation and transport is evident. The 1850s sanitary crisis remained the trigger for sanitary reform, as it had been for the first attempts to increase public intervention in the layout of the city. The technological answer to disease outbreaks was the replacement of labor-intensive and decentralized methods of water supply and waste disposal by capital-intensive and centralized ones.⁶³ In Lisbon, it was the midcentury sanitary crisis that promoted the first comprehensive initiative to modernize sewage disposal. It also created the context for the formation of a private company in order to supply piped water to households.⁶⁴

The sinuous, slow-moving pace of urban planning in Lisbon was similar to the slow pace and contradictory process in the city's introduction of technological novelties in sanitation and transportation. The first water company was created in 1858, but only after two decades did the water supply in Lisbon surpass the per capita quantities provided by the eighteenth-century aqueduct. Despite the rhetoric of public authorities, technological continuity characterized the sanitation of the city until the 1880s. Only in 1880 did the committee created to reform sewage disposal propose a systemic solution, which was based on the water carriage system of sewage disposal.⁶⁵ This system was introduced for the first time on a large scale after 1890 in the new urban area opened in the northern part of Lisbon (projecto das zonas), which was planned as part of the installation of modern infrastructures, such as a combined sewerage system, public lighting, and piped water.⁶⁶

The relationship between the street as public space and sanitary problems was also present in other issues. The increased pressure on using the street demanded a more stringent approach to cleaning public thoroughfares. This was achieved by exerting more control over the habits of residents who emptied used domestic water and filth into the streets, as well as by imposing a rule that any building should have pipes to drain stormwater or domestic wastewater into the sewers. The increase in the number of horses, for both private and public transport, compelled stricter municipal instructions to avoid the accumulation of droppings.⁶⁷ In line with the miasmatic theory, it was believed that epidemics were caused by the accumulation of filth, putrefying waste, and contaminated air in alleys and backyards, as well as from exhalations from swamps and stagnant pools. During the second half of the nineteenth century, municipal bylaws reinforced previous regulations or prohibited some of these practices. Municipal enforcement also paid much more attention than before to those breaking the law.⁶⁸ This increasing attention to sanitary problems and to technological innovation as a solution set up new uses and a new layout to the street.

The new script was applied to the transport innovations, which were offered as a solution to mobility problems within the congested old quarters and in the difficult exits of the city. Mobility within Lisbon was limited to walking or using animal traction, and there was no public transportation until the 1830s, as in other European countries.⁶⁹ The first horse-drawn tram lines of the Companhia Carris de Ferro de Lisboa (Lisbon Iron Rails Company) were introduced in Lisbon between 1873 and 1881, in streets that by their slope and alignment made it feasible. This was the case of the recently constructed riverside avenue (Avenida 24 de Julho), made possible by the construction of the embankment, where trams competed with omnibuses and steamboats on the river. Meanwhile, there were several experiments with alternatives to animal traction, such as steam and electric power.⁷⁰ Electric traction was eventually installed in 1901.

The interplay between public authorities and private operators in transport was clearly demonstrated in 1883, when the municipal engineer Ressano Garcia examined the streets that had concessions for laying tracks for horse-drawn trams, or that could receive this infrastructure. Several streets would require no change; others should be improved (widened, curves corrected, etc.), and some streets or avenues would have to be built from scratch.⁷¹ Garcia's report was the result of negotiations between the municipal authorities, who were simultaneously working on the plans for municipal works and improvements, and horse-drawn tramway companies, who were claiming concessions for public transport in several of Lisbon's streets. In some cases, these companies even initiated changes in layout or the construction of new streets and avenues, which were later considered in the municipal plans. For example, at least two of the major avenues opened in Lisbon in this period had Companhia Carris as one of its main promoters, as was the case of Avenida 24 de Julho, by the riverside, and Avenida dos Anjos.⁷² This demonstrates the interest and expectations that the opening of major thoroughfares raised, as well as the fact that the relationships between public and private interests in urban layout were much more complex than the stated ambition for public monopoly, or a top-down script coming from municipal engineers.

The street space underwent other interventions in its mobility function. The introduction of omnibuses and horse-drawn tramways contributed to the need to create lateral and central sidewalks, which produced a functional division of the space.⁷³ This division sought not only to protect pedestrians from vehicles, but also to start to discipline the users of the street. The "Portuguese" style of sidewalk, with basalt and limestone tesserae, was mandatory at least since 1895.⁷⁴ Rare in Lisbon in the mid-nineteenth century, the construction of these sidewalks, together with public gardens, created new spaces for socialization and leisure and contributed to the re-definition of the street's script, as it was losing older and unregulated leisure functions.⁷⁵ Together with the conditions for the circulation of vehicles in the roadway, the circulation of pedestrians on the sidewalks was also being negotiated, and tensions in the street's script emerged accordingly, regarding such multiple uses.

The construction of sidewalks was followed by their overcrowding with urban furniture, such as street lamps, fountains, kiosks, advertising placards, urinals, mail pillar boxes, and also telegraphic, telephone, and tramway poles. The latter clustered different signs at the same place, providing a new order to urban space and time, to both tramway and street users, with fixed stops and regular timetables.⁷⁶ This great increase in urban furniture was becoming problematic in the early twentieth century. The Lisbon City Council authorized several petitions from store owners who requested either to use part of the sidewalk (for exhibiting their products, or to place tables and chairs), or the removal of an advertising pole from the front of the store.⁷⁷ The municipal architect, Miguel Ventura Terra (1866–1919), tried to find solutions to decrease the occupation of the sidewalks that encumbered pedestrian mobility and forced people, again, into the roadway, exposing them to the danger of accidents. There were some measures taken, such as limiting municipal concessions for using public space, using building façades to place electric traction wires and, generally, studying a way to decrease the number of poles.⁷⁸ For example, in 1912 municipal concessions for advertisement posts were denied in several places in Lisbon, namely Avenida dos Anjos, on the basis of the overcrowding of the street space.⁷⁹

Criticism of street overcrowding was also aesthetically based. For instance, although electric tramways were also praised for the new experiences they provided,⁸⁰ the option to use the aerial conductor cable instead of the underground cable, which was much more expensive, was criticized.⁸¹ For the critics, the aerial conductor cables contradicted the concept of the city's embellishment, filled the sidewalks with posts, and turned Lisbon's sky into a "web of threads."⁸² It also competed with the posts and wires of telephones, telegraphs, and electricity that were being installed in the city.⁸³

Trees also began to be included in all urban planning projects during the final decades of the nineteenth century, mostly in wider streets, avenues, and squares. Planting them along the main avenues, as in the cases of projecto das zonas (see fig. 2) and Avenida dos Anjos, and creating public gardens in the city were municipal "improvements," which aimed both at embellishment and hygiene, because they were considered to be air purifiers.⁸⁴

To summarize, the street space in this period was constantly negotiated and redefined. It was the basic element of planning and also the subject for negotiations between different actors and users. There were tensions between old and new uses, the result of new pressures on the street brought by solutions to sanitation and circulation problems. What was inscribed in the street space was sometimes being reinforced and sometimes contradicted by the negotiations between different actors, revealing that the street script was still in a process of being stabilized.

Tensions and Compromises between Scribes

The tensions between public and private scribes caused by urban development, building activity, and infrastructure setting defined the way that Lisbon's urban layout evolved from the 1850s to the 1900s. The impact these tensions had in the definition of the street script was exacerbated in the early 1890s. On the one side, late nineteenth-century population growth increased pressure on housing (see mean household size in table 1) in a fragmented building market and, on the other hand, the 1891–92 financial crisis, caused by imbalances in foreign and public accounts, halted access to credit by the municipality that simultaneously lost part of its financial autonomy, which was replaced by a stricter financial control by the central state. These municipal financial difficulties prevented public investment from securing a monopoly over urban expansion and renewal through planning. Developers and builders, homeowners, and landowners were increasingly asking for building or rebuilding permits in the context of rising population, arguing that the market should not be constrained by strict administrative regulation. Facing increasing complaints about delays in the approval of building projects, on 6 April 1892 the executive committee of the city council approved the end of the improvements plan as an instrument for controlling urban expansion, wherever the administration would not be able to carry out necessary works.⁸⁵

This solution to the tensions between scribes led to different types of public intervention, according to the different areas of the city, which crystalized in three different scripts. The projecto das zonas epitomized the most paradigmatic case in terms of both urban planning and technological change. The exemplary character of public intervention in this project was assumed by the contemporary political leaders and technical officials.⁸⁶ In this area, the mechanism of compulsory purchase of the land for development was used to expropriate the whole area. The municipality would develop the entire street network before the actual building (see fig. 2). The land lots that would later be sold by the municipal council to private builders were already fully equipped with several infrastructures: with built streets, which allowed for tramway lines to be set, with lateral and central sidewalks, lined with planted trees, with public lighting, and underground networks like sewer, water, and gas pipes. The public scribes' aspirations regarding environmental, mobility and ornamentation concerns, previewed in the 1864 law, were completely materialized in the script. One of the structuring axes of projecto das zonas was Avenida Ressano Garcia (see the wider avenue in fig. 2),⁸⁷ an avenue of 60 m width, with two central sidewalks, allowing both leisure and mobility functions to be fulfilled, sided by secondary streets, with narrower widths, but equipped with the same networked technologies, which matched the public scribes' inscriptions.⁸⁸

The second most important area for the extension of the city planned at the end of the nineteenth century, the project for Avenida dos Anjos and adjacent streets (see figs. 1 and 3), did not assume a radical program of public monopoly over urban layout and development. It was always considered to be secondary in relation to that of the northwestern axis (Avenida da Liberdade and projecto das zonas). The municipal Technical Office planned the opening of the Avenida dos Anjos and some secondary streets, but compulsory purchase affected only the land needed for the avenue itself and some of the adjacent street construction. The building of this northeastern thoroughfare also had to consider preexisting neighborhoods (some unauthorized, others not conforming to building bylaws). The result was a longer and less regulated process of expansion than the one represented in the projecto das zonas (fig. 3).

Although the Avenida dos Anjos and adjacent streets' draft project dated from 1877 and referred explicitly to the "urgency" of opening this avenue to serve the crowded quarters and improve mobility, only in 1892 was the final project concluded.⁸⁹ This area of the city was much more populated and had important preexisting structures, leading to a complex and costly process of expropriations, as well as a higher level of competition between public and private scribes. The outcome reflected the tensions and eventual compromises: slow and more erratic public intervention and the ultimate renouncement of public monopoly over urban expansion beyond the main avenue. Construction of several sections of the avenue was successively postponed or even abandoned, such as the reconstruction of the old square, Largo do Intendente. The works were extended in such a way that when the avenue was finally inaugurated in 1903, the pressure of private investors had already conditioned the planning of the adjacent areas of the new avenue, and some parts of the avenue were still to be opened.⁹⁰ Unplanned scattered developments along the way prevented coherent expansion.

The expansion through this northeastern axis illustrates how the aforementioned tensions definitively affected urban development. Public financial problems left urban development to private initiative, multiplying cases of conflict and negotiation between developers and municipality after private quarters started to flank the avenue. The Bairro Andrade neighborhood exemplifies the case. The developer of this quarter opened five private streets and built six houses, selling the remaining building lots to other builders.⁹¹ Opening private streets was a refuge to avoid more coercive municipal bylaws and escape the slower street construction and infrastructure by the municipality. Developers built these private streets with dimensions that did not meet the criteria established in the 1864 law, and their maintenance, cleaning, and lighting remained the responsibility of private developers instead of the city council. Sooner or later they moved into the public domain and the city council found itself saddled with streets poorly sized and cared for, and often hardly articulated with the existing network, as was denounced in the 1923 report. This case is typical: on 11 September 1890, the promoter of Bairro Andrade asked to include private streets in the public domain. He signed a deed with the city council on 25 September 1890 giving the terrains of the five recently opened streets to the city council which, in compensation, would plumb, pave, and illuminate them.⁹² Other private quarters flanking Avenida dos Anjos also exemplify this tension between public and private interests, leading to a compromise between urban growth and the minimum public guidance, placing circulation through the avenue as the lowest common denominator.⁹³ The emphasis in the circulatory inscription of Avenida dos Anjos is related both to the fact that this exit of Lisbon had been identified as a critical one at least since the 1850s, as well as the fact that the final impulse for its planning was given by a tramway company's proposal. The project of the avenue allowed the installation of tramway tracks because of its width (of 25 m), alignment, and declivity, and also previewed other infrastructures and amenities, like central and lateral sidewalks, trees, and a sewerage system, which, however, were not set up by the private developers in the private streets that sided the avenue.⁹⁴ The inscriptions of the 1864 law were only applied in the central axis of that project, the Avenida dos Anjos, but even there with several delays.

The Avenida dos Anjos and its adjacent streets represented a model of less regulated urban expansion, different from the strict public control over land development typical of the projecto das zonas. In poor and more peripheral areas of the city the situation was worse, presenting yet a third model to solve the existing tensions. Urban expansion was based on the uncontrolled activity by real estate developers and builders. Slums and other forms of squalid housing for industrial workers emerged from this third model, which generally were not connected to public streets.⁹⁵ According to a survey on slum housing in early twentieth-century Lisbon conducted by the Sanitary Improvements Council, it did not afford a salubrious life, and generally the houses hardly complied with the minimum sanitary regulations.⁹⁶ The blocks where this kind of housing proliferated ignored the inscriptions set by public scribes in the 1864 law.

Public control over the street was claimed, but this space was open to dispute, and to other types of intervention from different actors. Public monopoly over the organization of urban space was more an aspiration than a reality. Urban layout became the complex result of different inscriptions for solving the tensions between scribes, in a context characterized by demographic growth and municipal financial difficulties.

Conclusion

The inscriptions made in the street script in this unstable and volatile period would last into the twentieth century. Changes induced by the new orthogonal design and urban infrastructures represented in general more rigid marks in the territory than earlier city-building processes.⁹⁷ However, different gradations of obduracy characterized the three types of script synthesized in the previous section: public monopoly over urban layout in the projecto das zonas, less regulated urban expansion in the areas adjacent to the Avenida dos Anjos, and uncontrolled urban expansion in poor areas.

This article highlights the strategic character of the street in creating the practice of urban planning. The street simultaneously became the heart of urban problems, such as environmental and mobility issues, and also the key to solving the nineteenth-century urban question in its multifarious expressions, epitomized in Gustave Doré's gloomy illustrations of London. The solutions were as manifold as the urban troubles and included, most significantly, technological innovations in sanitation and transport, wider and cleaner streets, new thoroughfares, orthogonal design that mirrored the geometry of new transport and underground networks, regulation of street use, and new housing with improved standards of comfort.

These multiple solutions focused on the street as the main framework and platform for action. They were simultaneously dialoguing, pressing, and disrupting the street space and traditional functions. The installation of piped water and sewerage systems used the street as a template and dramatically increased pressure on it. The introduction of new means of transportation, such as omnibuses and horse-drawn trams, together with the creation of sidewalks, changed the perspective on street functions, disciplined the use of the space, and promoted its functional specialization. The solutions found to solve mobility problems involved multiple actors, such as private companies and building developers.

The greater role assumed by the street was particularly attractive in the late nineteenth-century intellectual framework. Circulation as a concept and metaphor provides the clue to understanding the critical role attributed to the street. Circulation was implied in the mobility of people, goods, and vehicles ushered in by the enhanced street network. However, the street was becoming increasingly multidimensional, in addition to its basic circulatory role. It was also instrumental in maintaining the constant flow of water, sewage, and air, essential to nineteenth-century sanitary reformers to cope with the imminent risk of disease outbreaks. This alternate sense of "circulation" was unmistakably evident in the most important technological innovation to improve sanitary conditions in the nineteenth-century city: the water carriage system for sewage removal. In Portugal it was known as circulação contínua (continuous circulation).⁹⁸ The use of water as the element of sewage drainage presented the attractive image of a clean city, as a body where the circulation of water appeared as an element of life: Edwin Chadwick called it "an arterial-venous system," a very persuasive metaphor within the nineteenth-century intellectual environment which implied that blockages to traffic and the accumulation of waste, sewage, and impure air in urban arteries were potential causes of strokes, responsible for the paralysis of urban life, as in the human circulatory system.⁹⁹

The street was, thus, the place in which the main problems and solutions of urban life converged. The intervention in the city's design, in which the street represented its nuclear unit, merged a kaleidoscopic program of urban improvements. This explains why urban planning played a unifying role in such a program. It constituted a multi-faceted and holistic solution in contrast to previous atomistic interventions. This role assumed by urban planning, and the critical place the street came to possess, are largely absent from the literature.

Pointing out the prominent position assumed by urban planning may imply that political decision-makers and technical experts had a vital and unrivaled role as scribes in the urban territory. This article argues that a top-down, technocratic approach is a fatally flawed understanding of the evolution of Lisbon's urban changes in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.¹⁰⁰ The transformations inscribed in the urban territory were the result of a complex and non-linear process, with tensions and compromises between different actors (public authorities, technicians, businessmen).¹⁰¹

However, not every technological, entrepreneurial, and administrative solution stood open to the free will of human actors. This article also highlights the limited nature of the potential choices open to the different scribes. The peculiar administrative and fiscal structures of Lisbon inhibited the municipal capacity for action. Orographic constraints or physical preexisting structures limited the range of solutions open to urban planners or entrepreneurial initiatives. Therefore, the competition between scribes was not the only limitation to a top-down, technocratic approach. Physical constraints and economic and administrative structures also hindered free demiurgic action by municipal rulers, officials, technocrats, and entrepreneurs. The heuristic framework provided by actor-network theory remains critical to any understanding of these different types of interactions.¹⁰²