Sanitation and embellishment in the spatial defi nition of the town. Mar del Plata in the fi rst half of the XXth century

Abstract

Sanitation and embellishment make up the harmonic sides into the urban transformation. In order for sanitation to thrive and insert itself into the social ensemble, the argumentative complement of urban embellishment is resorted to as its associated and natural consequence. It is at this point when, united with different collective representations, the sanitation device is made up, both as an ordering instrument of the health of the town, as well as part of a machine, of its aesthetic or formal dimension and, consequently, in a key element of the confi guration and characterization of urban sectors. Thus, besides the order and health of the urban ensemble, sanitation would also entail the urban embellishment and parceling; it brings together while it characterizes and divides. These conditions allow the start of a historic research work to be proposed here, where the formal resultants and aesthetic transformations of certain sanitation components become relevant urban interventions and, mainly, it is tried here to develop, with new interpretative elements, alternative hypothesis about its logics in the town.