As the last issue in 2010, the year in which we celebrate the first centennial of the establishment of the Portuguese Republic, JA 241, has decided to mark the event in the context of the topics that make up its editorial line.

Thus, this issue of the magazine comes with this special insert, Viva a República! (Long Live the Republic!), in which we take a look at the impulse the period of the 1^st Republic gave to architecture, the design of the our cities and critical thought on the profession itself and also examine what Portuguese architects have given the country in the opportunities created by the fledgling regime.

The insert is divided into three sections (City, Architecture and Critique in the 1st Republic). For each section we have invited a “specialist” to pen an article on the theme in question: Raquel Henriques da Silva writes about urban infrastructures and transportation; José António Bandeirinha looks at facilities and housing; and Marieta Dá Mesquita reviews architectural and construction publications.

All three authors faced the same problem: being able to make a rigorous separation between before and after 5^th October 1910 [date of proclamation of the Republic]. The matter we work with, our thought, the examples that inspire us, the maturity of the architects available, even the assumptions in which our experiences are anchored, together with the varying degrees of the various powers, depending on political decisions and ideological options, also constitute an air du temps that sometimes anticipated and announced changes or, conversely, prolonged, beyond the desire for the new, the reactive trajectory of dispossessed power.

Many iniquities have remained; but October 1910 confirmed for Portugal, even if only for a short period (in 1928 things were to become dense once more), the possibilities of salubrity, literacy, civic participation, freedom of information, urban and interurban mobility and constructive rationality that heralded in the 20^th century and are at the roots of the wealth that we can still find today in the first urban, architectural and critical heritage that is republican in its roots.