| This dissertation is a study of the politics and technology of urban development in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Latin America, and of the implications of urbanization for the process of state formation. Using archival, print, and iconographic sources, it traces the most important attempts to use regulation and technology to make Valparaiso into a safe, healthy, pleasant city, from the first glimmer of centralized street lighting in 1843 to the state-led recovery from the devastating earthquake of 1906. Through analysis of these undertakings, it reconstructs the changing and often contradictory notions of what a modern city should be like, who should make it that way, and how.; The municipal government's expansion of city planning, safety regulations, and public utilities provided a precedent and a foundation for the central government's intervention in commercial and private affairs in the early twentieth century. Thus, local politics contributed directly to the formation of the kind of state familiar to twentieth-century Chileans. However, until late in the period, state-controlled projects and foreign investment, upon which most Latin American urban historiography has focused, were far less important than the ideas, abilities, and limitations of local business and municipal government. The benefits and evils often attributed to foreign and state enterprises existed from the early nineteenth century and were simply expanded by the more sweeping projects that came later. Moreover, the adoption or rejection of new technology depended more on municipal relations with concessionaires, intra-elite conflict, and potential city revenue, than on opportunities for private profit or social control. |
