Abstract

In order to prove the condition of pre-urbanized city of Santiago towards the last quarter of the XIX century and its way leading to an urbanized city in the early XX century, we have researched and restituted the wall blueprint of the city of Santiago completely, scale 1:5000, on the basis of the streets assessment, scale 7:200 done firstly by the engineer Alejandro Bertrand in 1890. This has enabled, for the first time, the recording of the detailed status of the urban factory and has set the basis for various readings on the streets topology by the assessment date. In fact, this process of streets recording constitutes an intellectual creation as well as an unprecedented technical operation in the history of cartographies in Santiago since it allows us to know, according to Sola-Morales, of what urban things the nineteenth century city was qualified and just until now have been unveiled, something that enables the critical reflection in relation to the present city, more detailed historic studies on the urban transformations in a time with limited information plus some teaching of more than 120 years in the comprehension and intelligibility of the urban reality. The readings done, from the analytical disaggregation of the information included in the called Bertrand rolls, that is: the tree planting program, the ditch system and streets breadth among other dimensions have made possible to prove not only a rigorous study and a comprehension methodology, but reveal the status and projection of an spatial organization starting from the street, street intersections, street block and layout.