The building of water supply and lighting infrastructures - a fundamental factor
in the urban modernisation process - was a common subject in Portuguese political
rhetoric in the first half of the 20th century.
Given that during that time Portugal went form a liberal regime (the First
Republic) to authoritarian rule (the New State), the aims of this paper are to:
- review the arguments, which were used by both regimes to appropriate the
discourse on infrastructures;~
- identify the technical and technological options and the business models
employed to build and manage the networks;
- establish the rate at which they were implemented.
The paper also attempts to fit the Portuguese case into the models and
innovation processes followed in other countries
