Planning the new city to the west of Lisbon. Crossing urban and transport expertise in the project of the coastal road (1931-1948)

Draft version of the submitted articleThe construction of the coastal road from Lisbon to Cascais, promoted by the public works program of the Portuguese nationalistic Centennial Commemorations (1940), was one of the “old aspirations of the capital of the Empire”: it structured urban sprawl in the area to the west of Lisbon, as part of urban planning of Lisbon and its neighbouring regions; it materialized an agenda for the promotion of tourism, the “great facade of nationality,” and finally, it contributed to the propaganda of the work of the Estado Novo (New State) dictatorship and its makers. This chapter follows how the expertise of foreign urban planners inspired by the garden-city model and of Portuguese road engineers influenced by the recent European motorways (built in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany) were brought together and interchanged to plan the “new Lisbon” designed along the axis of the river mouth of Tagus and to foster new (auto)mobilities. The implantation of this road in the riverside area, starting in Belém, one of the most emblematic spaces of the nationality celebrations and of the empire reinforced the imperial mystique of the dictatorship, by materializing the “work of historical continuity of the Estado Novo” that the Centennial Commemorations intended to celebrate.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Automobility in Portugal. The construction of the sociotechnical system, 1920-1950

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Constructing (auto)mobility system in a peripheral European country in the 1930s: visions and realities of the authoritarian Portugal

This paper was originally presented at the Final ESF EUROCORES Program Inventing Europe and Fourth Tensions of Europe Plenary Conference, “Technology & East-West relations: Transfers, parallel histories, and the European laboratory”, 17-20 June 2010 Sofia University, Sofia, BulgariaThe 1930s watched two simultaneous and apparently opposed trends: the rising of authoritarian regimes in several European countries and an intensive cooperation between international governmental and non-governmental organizations in settling common standards and policies. Reflecting automobile’s main use in the first decades of the twentieth century, leisure (and not transport in a strictly utilitarian sense), even in developed/central countries, one cannot ignore the roles of non-governmental organisations related to tourism (AIT – Alliance International du Tourisme) or to automobile sports (AIACR – Association Internationale des Automobiles-Clubs Reconnus) in establishing standards for elements of the ‘automobile system’ in issues such as road signs and international circulation (the issuing of documents such as the ‘carnet de passage en douane’). There were also other important transnational organizations, governmental and non-governmental, which contributed to the construction of this system, such as a more technical organization on roads (AIPCR, Association Internationale Permanente des Congrès de la Route) (Schipper, 2008). The 1930s in Portugal was a period of institutionalization of the dictatorship that would last more than 40 years, particularly with the issuing of its corporatist legal basis. The Automobile Club of Portugal (ACP), which had had, at least since 1911, an important role in Portuguese automobile system construction, reclaimed keeping the main role, namely as being the Portuguese member at AIT and therefore the organization that issued the documents for international circulation. There were rivalries between Automobile and Touring Clubs in Europe on this matter, which also happened in Portugal. It is at the level of the mediators (Oldenziel et al., 2005) that the analysis will be made. The visions of the construction of the automobile system were produced both by organizations that preceded the dictatorship and those that were created after the 1926 coup d’État that began it, such as corporatist organizations (for instance of commercial companies that sold automobiles) and of State agencies related to roads or fuel. These visions of how automobility, tourism and road construction should evolve were discussed in several national congresses such as the first and second National Congresses of Automobility and Civil Aviation (1935 and 1937), the first National Congress of Tourism (1936) and the first National Congress of Transports (1939). One finds also ‘imported’ visions on automobility from other European countries, such as Germany, in the specialized press, namely the ACP journal. The reality of automobile use, tourism and road construction was somehow different as the statistics of the modal split or the special statistics made on the religious pilgrimage to Fatima show.publishersversionpublishe

Technology as a social collective experience of nation building: David Nye’s American Technological Sublime

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Gijs Mom, Atlantic Automobilism. Emergence and Persistence of the Car, 1895–1940. Explorations in Mobility. New York; Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2015. 751 PP ISBN 978-1-78238-377-2

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Characterization of oxygen uptake and mass transfer in flocculent yeast cell cultures with or without a flocculent additive

The effect of solids concentration and the presence of the charged polymeric additive Magna Floc LT25 on gas-liquid oxygen transfer and oxygen consumption rates have been evaluated for flocculent yeast cells grown in batch fermentations. No significant differences were found for oxygen consumption due to the presence of the additive. Low biomass concentrations have a positive effect on oxygen transfer rate, when the additive was present in the medium. For biomass concentrations above 1 g/L, an increase in biomass concentration leads to a reduction on oxygen transfer rates regardless of the presence of the additive

Influence of operational parameters on the start-up of a flocculation airlift bioreactor

The evolution of the fermentation parameters of a flocculating Saccharomyces yeast strain started up in a continuously operated internal loop airlift bioreactor was compared at different aeration rates (0.02 and 0.1 v.v.m., where v.v.m. represents the volume of air per volume of fermenter per minute and has the units 11−1 min−1) and dilution rates (0.1 and 0.2 h−1). The floc size distributions obtained were found to be different. The operating parameters do not seem to affect the glucose consumption rates, but instead affect the stoichiometry of its conversion to either ethanol or biomass, suggesting a shift in the metabolic mechanisms as biomass builds up. Oxygen availability was not uniform in the fermenter, according to the global volumetric mass transfer coefficients determined. The subsequent results establish a strong influence of the dilution and aeration rates on the measured variables (glucose, ethanol and biomass concentrations) and the calculated kinetic parameters (specific rates of glucose consumption, ethanol production and biomass growth)

In search of the urban variable : Understanding the roots of urban planning in Portugal

This article demonstrates how public control over the street was at the origin of modern urban planning in Lisbon. The increased pressure over the street in the nineteenth-century city demanded increased public intervention, which was at the roots of urban planning as practice and as a body of theory. The strategic character assumed by urban planning derived from the fact that it was at the crossroads of the most important problems that nineteenth-century cities experienced: sanitation, circulation, and beautification. The preparation of the first Portuguese law on urban planning (1864) and the first improvement plan (1881) resulted from this need to exercise public monopoly over the use of the city streets. However, the financial, political, and technical conditions defined the scope of possibilities for the programme of improvement and beautification of the Portuguese capital. This article analyses the compromises between the forces driving modernisation and the limits of the possibilities.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Maria Paula Diogo and Tiago Saraiva, Inventing a European Na¬tion: Engineers for Portugal, from Baroque to Fascism, San Rafael, CA, Morgan & Claypool Publishers, 2021, 159 páginas

Inventing a European Nation: Engineers for Portugal, from Baroque to Fascismis the most recent (and the sixth) volume of Morgan & Clay-pool Publishers (San Rafael, California, USA) Synthesis Lectures on Global Engineering, which aims at presenting “short manuscripts” of “high-quality scholarship,” “making visible the experiences of engineers and engineering students (...) to help them improve engineering work through critical self-analysis and listening” (p. ii). (...)publishersversionpublishe

As estradas das Comemorações dos Centenários: materialização de uma 'capacidade realizadora' e de uma nova cultura de turismo automóvel

A estrada marginal Lisboa-Cascais e o lanço da autoestrada Lisboa-Estádio Nacional cumpriram a sua função de fazer parte da “capacidade realizadora de Portugal”, ou seja, foram obras de carácter excecional onde a tecnologia e a materialidade foram postas ao serviço da construção de um sublime tecnológico realizado pelo Homem, o que seria amplamente celebrado e evocado (e descontextualizado do resto da realidade do país) nas várias publicações de celebração da obra do Estado Novo, incluindo os relatórios plurianuais e outras publicações da Junta Autónoma de Estradas. Estas foram obras que serviram uma classe privilegiada e que se destacaram pelo seu carácter excecional, também no quadro da engenharia rodoviária portuguesa. O facto de estas estradas de turismo terem sido construídas como obras icónicas do regime, integradas no programa das Comemorações dos Centenários de 1940, levou a obras caracterizadas pelo excesso, pela arbitrariedade e pelo improviso, que, contudo, mantiveram e reforçaram o objetivo de servirem uma nova cultura de turismo automóvel e de permitirem a aplicação de novas técnicas pelos engenheiros rodoviários portugueses.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio