Modernizing Macao: public works and urban planning in the imperial network, 1856-1919

Abstract

Tese realisada em cotutela com a Université de Lorraine, França. ; Tese de Doutoramento em Patrimónios de Influência Portuguesa, ramo Arquitectura e Urbanismo apresentada ao Instituto de Investigação Interdisciplinar da Universidade de Coimbra. ; The 1850s saw the beginning of the planned transformation and expansion of the Macanese urban landscape, unprecedented in its accelerated pace as in its wide territorial scope, in many ways setting the tone for present-day urban development in the Chinese Special Administrative Region (SAR). The present thesis seeks to document and analyze this process in its early stage, through original research into public works and other government-sponsored urban interventions under the influence of the Portuguese administration, with the purpose of interpreting how the city's changing built environment both represented and conditioned the province's economic, social and political dynamics, thus filling a gap in the current knowledge on the history of the Portuguese province's transition into a modern urban landscape. It is set in the broader context of Portuguese overseas action and administration in the long nineteenth century's so-called age of imperialism and its bourgeoning world urban system, where the major cities of the world became increasingly interconnected, trading in people, knowledge, images and ideas, but also in capital, labor and goods between them. As if the world had become, through the influence of the Western network of empires, one large, interdependent city, mainly fostered by the progress of transport and communication infrastructures. Stemming from these considerations, a main focus of this research is the idea of the globalizing impact of modernization at the scale of this imperial network. In other words, how the modernization of these urban hubs became a global process through the expansion of the industrial revolution techno-scientific advancements, but also of progressive cultural constructs, such as hygiene and public health, and of the new governance ...