When dealing with the history of the First Portuguese Republic one must take into consideration that, in that particular short period of time (1910-1926), there was a huge discrepancy between the ideals held and their incipient realisation. These ideals were inspired by democratic convictions and aimed at modernising society through education for all, economic improvement and the affirmation of Portugal in the context of an ambitious colonial policy. As far as the insufficient levels of moving from principles to implemented policies is concerned, one has to bear in mind the negative internal impact of the party divisions and, externally, the advent of the First World War, which led to greater suffering, impoverishment and serious social conflicts. This context of instability had a damper effect on consistent policies in diverse sectors.
At the urban development level, there is extremely little that one can attribute to the First Republic in the way of implementation of innovative strategies. However, if we move away from the limited context determined by the political events and look at a longer period in history, and include the final years of the constitutional monarchy more or less from the 1870s onwards (a decade marked, amongst other things, by the exceptionalism of the ‘70s Generation’), then one does have a very diverse scenario characterised by intense levels of innovation. When the Republic came about in 1910, Lisbon and Porto were already equipped with basic urban renovation infrastructures which, at around 1900, represented a veritable revolution. The construction workers belonged to a social and cultural elite with a political voice that also fostered Republican beliefs and organisation. Some were already committed Republicans, others were to become so later, while others still remained royalists. As is always the case when history is not reduced to mere political issues, the reality was complex and multi-directional. In the case of the urban policies, as indeed in many other areas, one can say that the specific revolutions that took place paved the way for the Revolution itself. This is by no means a determinist view of history, nor the establishment of a one-way causality, but confirmation of something that is present in all revolutionary periods: the political factology superimposes itself, through simplistic but convenient schematization on the technological and cultural transformations that went before.
To evoke some of the fundamental elements of that pre-revolution, I will concentrate on the case of Lisbon, which I know particularly well. It took place in an extraordinary European context that was marked by successive technological and industrial advances that made it possible to define the infrastructures of modern urbanism, at the precise time in which urbanism was born as a discipline in Barcelona through the figure of Ildefons Cerdà, laying claim to recognition as a science1. The essential mechanisms had to do with the renovation and extendability of a number of networks, including sewage and water supply as well as, at the turn of the century, electricity and telephone. The question of sanitation — an unachievable goal in the old city — now became, at least in the order of principles, a kind of optimistic synonym for the lot of the citizen. On top of an increasingly complex underground city, another modern network was established: that of public transportation, which, before the advent of the automobile, primarily consisted of an efficient tram system. The economic and financial context of late 19th-century capitalism, which was highly competitive and expansionist, goes some way to explaining why the railway only arrived in Portugal in the 1860s (thirty years later than most European countries), but electric trams arrived only a few years after they appeared elsewhere and the automobile appeared on the scene practically at the same time as elsewhere.
The cleaner, quicker, more efficient city — adjectives that at the time were understood as characteristic of modernity — was above all the bourgeois city. And the bourgeois city was represented not so much in the old neighbourhoods with their cramped buildings divided into small units, where sanitation was to arrive much later, but in the areas of urban expansion, which, in most European capitals, followed, with varying degrees of proficiency, the international model of the Paris of the Second Empire designed under the programmatic control of Baron Haussmann. The new system was orthogonal urban planning — large avenues laid out in checkerboard grids that were surgically dissected by funcional diagonal thoroughfares. It was in these new districts that the network of urban infrastructures was more easily installed and distributed beneath and on top of the elongated avenues for which the name boulevard became common throughout Europe.
In Portugal, the closest we came to such international models was the work carried out in Lisbon by the team of Frederico Ressano Garcia, who studied at the Parisian École Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées2, where he gained note as a brilliant student. As chief engineer at Lisbon City Council from 1874 to 1909, he was responsible for the profound restructuring of the council’s engineering and architecture departments in the service of a project whose ambition matched that of the military engineers who rebuilt the capital after the earthquake of 1755. The most visible phase in the building of this new city was the Avenidas Novas district, which includes the Avenida da Liberdade and adjacent neighbourhoods, Praça do Marquês de Pombal and Parque Eduardo VII and, further north-eastwards, Avenida Fontes Pereira de Melo, Praça do Saldanha and the checkerboard grid of streets centred on Avenida da República, which was known as Avenida Ressano Garcia until 1910. The design having been approved in 1889, the main infrastructures were completed in 1900, the year in which construction work began from Saldanha northwards, almost coinciding with the inauguration of the first electric tram lines in 19013.
The new Lisbon spread over an ample plain that had once been a farming suburb run through by ‘beaten tracks’ that led to the production sites from whence came the fresh produce and domestic labour for the city. Although construction work continued at a steady pace, the assertion of the “Avenidas Novas” as a residential district was slow. One only has to recall, for example, that it did not have its own church until the 1930s, other than the old 17th-century church of São Sebastião da Pedreira that is situated alongside one of the old roads out of the city to Palhavã and Benfica. Inaugurated in 1938 (designed in 1934), the new Church of Nossa Senhora de Fátima [Our Lady of Fatima], designed by Pardal Monteiro and directly commissioned by the then Cardinal Patriarch of Lisbon, marked the end of construction of the last sections of the Avenidas Novas, district just as, under the oversight of Duarte Pacheco, work had begun on the expansion of the city to the east, beyond Avenida Almirante Reis.
The work of Ressano Garcia’s team was not limited to the Avenidas Novas. In the last decades of the 19th century Avenida 24 de Julho was extended from Santos to Alcântara; Avenida D. Carlos I was opened, linking Santos and São Bento; the Estefânia and Campo de Ourique neighbourhoods were built (both of which can be considered prototypes for the Avenidas Novas); and northwards from Rua da Palma the new Avenida dos Anjos was laid out, which was later named as Avenida Dona Amélia and then, following the establishment of the Republic, as Avenida Almirante Reis. Estefânia and Picoas (where Miguel Ventura Terra designed the Liceu Camões grammar school in 1906) developed to the west of this avenue, and to the east rose a number of neighbourhoods built by private companies owned by the so-called “wild ducks”, who were building contractors who originally had no specialised training but came to dominate urban construction in Lisbon, particularly during the Great War.
Lisbon more than doubled in size as a result of the pragmatism and quality of Ressano Garcia’s exceptional team, which included the architect José Luís Monteiro (who was also the most important professor of architecture at the Lisbon School of Fine Arts) and the engineer António Maria Avelar (who oversaw the design plans for tree plantation on the central islands and footpaths on the main avenues). There were two interesting aspects to this expansion: on the one hand, it left intact the old city that had survived the Great Earthquake, with the development proceeding, as if naturally, from the already modern Pombaline Lisbon; and on the other, it broke with the centuries of growth from the east westwards along the River Tagus, replacing it with a thrust northwards, thus defunctionalising the river as an “urban path” (in the centre of the city that function was given to the Avenida 24 de Julho, which was laid out on a large landfill in the 1860s). In 1903 this urban planning approach led the same team to propose a new expansion plan for the city, which included the opening of a number of arteries linking the city to the surrounding territory. A closer look at this plan reveals pragmatic ideas that were only revisited in the 1930s when Lisbon once again had a strategy for expansion under the authoritarian oversight of Duarte Pacheco in the context of the most dynamic period of the Estado Novo [New State authoritarian regime].
However, the bourgeois city did not come up with a solution to the question of housing for the working classes. While it is evident that the moroseness and restrictions of the Portuguese industrial process explain why the problem never reached the grave conditions it did in other cities, there were nevertheless worrying indications of the over-occupation of the older neighbourhoods and the insufficient number of vilas operárias — worker housing built by factory owners or by the considerable power of the building contractors. In this area, the legislation in the First Republic sought to address the growing demands. Examples of this are the granting of a loan to the Government by the Caixa Geral de Depósitos in 1919 for the “construction of five worker residential neighbourhoods”, two in Lisbon, two in Porto and one in Covilhã4. In the case of Lisbon, work was begun on the Arco do Cego neighbourhood only, according to designs by Edmundo Tavares and Frederico Machado. The building work was to drag on, meaning that completion and inauguration (1935) only took place during the Estado Novo. But the same happened here that had happened in the 1880s with the Calvário neighbourhood in Alcântara: while they were designed to house the working class (in single-family homes in Arco do Cego and large collective housing blocks in Alcântara), from the outset these new neighbourhoods were occupied by other social groups such as the petit bourgeoisie working in services and small-scale traders and manufacturers — in other words, those who most fervently supported and benefited from the First Republic.
Despite the shortcomings in terms of actual implementation, Lisbon at the time was by no means lacking in a utopian desire for more modernity. On the basis of daring proposals put forward by the engineer Miguel Correia Pais, the architect Ventura Terra (one of the foremost designers of the new city, his work including apartment blocks, single-family homes, a bank, schools, the maternity hospital, in addition to the noteworthy modernisation project for the Portuguese Parliament) drew up a plan to widen Rua do Arsenal, giving it cosmopolitan arcades. Further underlining the importance of the city’s riverfront, he submitted another very daring proposal that advocated progressive occupation of the south bank of the Tagus, “where, in a more distant future, everything that may destroy its beauty should disappear, transforming it into a truly modern city and annexing the slopes on the other riverbank”5. One side effect of this utopian view was that the need to build a bridge across the Tagus6 once again became an object of reflection. In Ventura Terra’s view, the bridge was to be a “monumental avenue bridge”, which, beginning at “what is now Praça do Rio de Janeiro” (Príncipe Real), connected to “Alto de Santa Catarina by means of an avenue that will transform and improve the Bairro Alto” and end “at Almada Fortress”7.
The passage of time has not been favourable to the modern vision of Ventura Terra, who in the same period also drew up the urbanisation plan for Funchal (Madeira); the quality of the latter plan leaving a mark on the future development of the city8. On the outskirts of Lisbon the desire for expansion meanwhile saw a noteworthy realisation: the invention of Estoril, driven by Fausto de Figeiredo, an important figure who rose through the ranks in the First Republic to affirm himself in the Estado Novo. In 1914 he presented an ostentatious project designed by the architect Martinet in the eclectic taste of the period that saw the establishment and consecration of the first grand European international tourist resorts9. Paradoxically, the nationalist First Republic opened itself to a cosmopolitanism that was strange to it; and the same was to happen during the Estado Novo. For both regimes the Estoril dreamt up by Fausto Figueiredo was a tolerated interruption in the urban planning discourse in which the main sign of modernity, in most Portuguese cities, were the “station avenues” that were designed in this period and linked the old small towns with the only national transportation network there was: the railway.
[1] See Françoise Choay. La Règle et le Modèle. Sur la théorie d el’architecture et de l’urbanisme. Paris : Seuil, 1996. 1st ed. 1980.
[2] See Raquel Henriques da Silva. As Avenidas Novas de Lisboa, 1900-1930. Lisboa : 1985. Master’s thesis presented to the FCSH/UNL (Multicopied document); Lisboa de Frederico Ressano Garcia, 1874-1909. Lisboa : Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian; Câmara Municipal de Lisboa, 1989. Catalogue of an exhibition curated by Raquel Henriques da Silva.
[3] For a more in-depth look at these matters see Lisboa em movimento: 1850-1920. Lisboa : Livros Horizonte, 1994. Catalogue of an exhibition curated by José Manuel Fernandes and Maria de Lurdes Janeira.
[4] In Júlia Ferreira. O Bairro do Arco do cego. Análise Social. Vol. 29, nº127 (1994). In the same volume, see Fátima Loureiro Dias. Os bairros sociais no espaço urbano do Porto.
[5] Sessão de 3 de Dezembro de 1908 e 8 de Junho de 1911. Actas das Sessões da Câmara Municipal de Lisboa. For a more detailed analysis of these projects see Raquel Henriques da Silva. Ventura Terra em contexto. in Miguel Ventura Terra : a arquitectura como projecto de vida. Esposende: Câmara Municipal de Esposende, 2006. Exhibition catalogue coordinated by Ana Isabel Ribeiro.
[6] For a summary of this matter see Teresa Rodrigues. Ponte sobre o Tejo in Dicionário da História de Lisboa (ed. by Francisco Santana and Eduardo Sucena). Lisboa : Carlos Quintas & Associados, 1994.
[7] See note 5, idem, ibidem.
[8] See José Manuel Fernandes. Da Sé ao Casino: o eixo histórico de crescimento do Funchal. Monumentos: Revista Semestral de Edifícios e Monumentos. Nº 19 (1994).
[9] See Raquel Henriques da Silva. Estoril, Estação Marítima, Climática, Thermal e Sportiva: as etapas de um projecto: 1914-1932. Arquivo de Cascais: Boletim Cultural do Município. Nº 10 (1991).