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This article analyzes the origin and transformation of three streets south of the Alameda, from when they were first roads until they became "modern" streets at the end of the nineteenth century. This process was documented in different types of sources of traditional urban historiography that have allowed the elaboration of detailed chronologies. Notwithstanding today we have access to exceptional historical cartographic registers that complement and enhances our ability to know about this process. To have an accurate account of this transformation, the streets whose origin go back to pre-existing roads have been distinguished from those that originated as streets. This distinction has led us to a deeper understanding of the problem where it's not only possible to establish the nature of each street in itself but also allows us to understand the purpose of the section of the city of which they belong to and the role that they filled in their definitive forms. This paper understands that the street, consequently the public space, is the chief configuring element of the city; first, as a "geographic accident" that adjusts to the space, and later, as an operation which requires there to be a project capable of establishing a new functional as well as environmental order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]