Abstract

LEYTON ROBINSON, César  and  HUERTAS, Rafael. Urban reform and social hygiene in Santiago de Chile: The liberal techno-utopianism of Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna (1872-1875). Dynamis [online]. 2012, vol.32, n.1, pp.21-44. ISSN 2340-7948.  https://dx.doi.org/10.4321/S0211-95362012000100002.

This paper aims to present and analyze the hygiene education project of Belisario Penna (1868-1939). This physician took part in the public health movement that sought, through This paper analyzes the main features of the urban reforms by Benjamin Vicuña Mackenna in Santiago de Chile between 1872 and 1875. We pay special attention to the origin of the objectives of modernization, closely related to the political agenda of Latin American elites to create an urban culture (civilization). We also analyze the strategies of social defence that these reforms implied. The influence of French positivism and the Haussmann project in Paris was very important in the Vicuña Mackenna project and its model of a segregated city: the "European city" itself, -bourgeois, civilized and hygienic-, which should be protected, and the "African township", -lower-class feral and unhygienic-, whose population must be regenerated and colonized.

Keywords : Hygiene; urbanism; modernization; social defense; Latin America; Chile; 19th century.

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