Santiago en 1910, París en América. Notas a propósito del Primer Centenario

Abstract

This article reviews the public and urban opinions on the celebration of the first centenary of the Republic in Santiago in 1910. It is a remembrance of visions of the city given by public leaders and the media that represent a part of society that is satisfied by the notable progress of the country by the end of the nineteenth century and early twentieth century, but that failed to include the workers’ movement and the expressions of social disappointment that were starting to grow during those years.

The city as a vast, complex and hybrid construction in space, built through decades by hundreds and mostly anonymous builders, represents the biggest human construction accumulated over time, where each generation contributes to providing housing, spaces, infrastructure and monuments that reflect their particular time and way of life.

Certainly, each city is history and memory of itself; a permanent testimony of the continuity of man and human society with its own past. In that sense, we are inheritors of our history and of the men and women that built the cities where we now live. It is important to rescue those cultural, social, architectural and urban values as a way of visualising the passage of time that materialises, turns into object and makes itself visible in the city that “tells” us something.