Infrastrutures and politics in Portugal in the first half of the 20th century: innovation in lighting and water supply

Abstract

The building of water supply and lighting infrastructures - a fundamental factor in the urban modernisation process - was a common subject in Portuguese political rhetoric in the first half of the 20th century. Given that during that time Portugal went form a liberal regime (the First Republic) to authoritarian rule (the New State), the aims of this paper are to: - review the arguments, which were used by both regimes to appropriate the discourse on infrastructures;~ - identify the technical and technological options and the business models employed to build and manage the networks; - establish the rate at which they were implemented. The paper also attempts to fit the Portuguese case into the models and innovation processes followed in other countries.