The “script” of a new urban layout: mobility, environment, and embellishment in Lisbon’s streets (1850–1910)

This article is at the crossroads of two scholarly traditions: the
history of technology studying urban infrastructures and the history of urban planning. Using the Actor Network Theory’s concept of “script,” it analyzes the strategic role played by the street to overcome nineteenth-century
urban problems. The street was simultaneously the epicenter of the “urban
question” and the key to its solution. This role explains why urban planning
played a unifying part in the agenda of urban improvements, as a response
to mobility, environment, and embellishment problems. However, urban
planners did not dictate the evolution of Lisbon. This article argues that Lisbon’s transformation was the result of tensions and compromises between
different actors (public authorities, technicians, businessmen), and of diverse impulses (sanitary, economic, and emulative). Moreover, it argues that
the heterogeneous character of nineteenth-century Lisbon demonstrates the
need to zoom in on the street. ANT provides the heuristic framework for understanding these interactions.