During the end of the nineteenth and at the beginning of the twentieth century, the city of Santiago, Chile experienced an important process of transformation in which the city and the urban started to assume socio-economic and discursive prominence. Using evidence gathered from parliamentary and municipal debates, legislative text, the press, scientific literature from the era and business archives this paper shows that the construction of Santiago's sewage system was a phenomenon that condensed the economic, the technical, political and the discursive in the exercise of power and the administration of the public during that time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]