Regina Campinho
PhD on “Heritages of Portuguese Influence: Architecture and Urbanism,” Institute for Interdisciplinary Research (IIR), University of Coimbra, Portugal, and Laboratoire d'Histoire de l'Architecture Contemporaine (Ecole Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture de Nancy), Université de Lorraine, France. Thesis: “Modernizing Macao: Public Works and Urban Planning in the Imperial Network, 1856-1919”. My research focuses on Portuguese urban history, particularly in the 19th and 20th centuries’ European imperial context. Graduate of the Porto School of Architecture, I hold a post-graduate degree in Architectural and Urban Heritage from the Centre des Hautes Études de Chaillot in Paris, France. I am currently working as State Architect and Urbanist for the French Ministry of Culture.
Supervisors: Prof. Doutora Luísa Trindade, Instituto de Investigação Interdisciplinar da Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal, Professeur Hélène Vacher, Laboratoire d'Histoire de l'Architecture Contemporaine, École d'Architecture de Nancy, Université de Lorraine, France, and Prof. Doutora Marta Oliveira, Centro de Estudos em Arquitectura e Urbanismo da Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade do Porto
Supervisors: Prof. Doutora Luísa Trindade, Instituto de Investigação Interdisciplinar da Universidade de Coimbra, Portugal, Professeur Hélène Vacher, Laboratoire d'Histoire de l'Architecture Contemporaine, École d'Architecture de Nancy, Université de Lorraine, France, and Prof. Doutora Marta Oliveira, Centro de Estudos em Arquitectura e Urbanismo da Faculdade de Arquitectura da Universidade do Porto
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Papers by Regina Campinho
The 1877 riverfront reclamation would be the first urban extension to be carried out under the supervision of the newly created Public Works Department. From the early 1870s on, a new generation of engineers, coming both from the metropolitan schools and from the military schools of the Portuguese State of India, promoted a modern European model of urban governance throughout the Empire. In Macao, this meant favoring the Portuguese government’s claim of full control over the territory to upgrade both the city’s insalubrious additive pattern and its inhabitants’ autonomous practices of appropriating space.
However, Silva’s blatant disregard for government regulations in the construction process, as well as the ensuing succession of patched up settlements, resonated profoundly with Macao’s old-fashioned and informal methods of city-building. By focusing on Silva’s approach to the 1877 reclamation project, this essay looks at the transition from century-old bottom-up practices to the Public Works top-down model, a contested process that reflected both the ambitions and the contradictions of modern Macao.
https://journal.eahn.org/articles/10.5334/ah.413/
This would be the first urban extension plan to be carried out under the supervision of the newly-appointed Public Works Department, commissioned to bring order, regularity and elegance to the city. From 1870 on, the Public Works engineers sought to implement the Portuguese government’s claim of full sovereignty over Macao, by managing the urban landscape to effectively end the ancient practice of ‘divided sovereignty’ between Portuguese and Chinese local authorities. This division, from the modern point of view, had resulted in a disorganised organic pattern and an insalubrious city.
However, Silva’s blatant disregard for government regulations in the construction process, as well as the patch-up settlement reached after the work was completed, resonated profoundly with Macao’s century-old tradition of autonomous space appropriation. Through the analysis of the project’s plans, as well as related contemporary Public Works reports, this study demonstrates that the transition from bottom-up city building to the nineteenth century top-to-bottom model was indeed quite a contested process, reflecting both the ambitions and the contradictions of colonial Macao.
The World Heritage property bears witness to Macao’s exceptional history, placing the peaceful encounter of cultures and intertwining of influences between East and West at the heart of its outstanding universal value declaration. Macao is, by these criteria, the quintessential “in between city”, as it has throughout its history developed in between cultures, identities, empires and, more importantly, in between autonomous spatial appropriation and centralized urban planning.
Putting it in a schematic way, Macao has known essentially two very different forms of urban development, closely related to the official settlement strategy deployed by the Portuguese imperial administration which, in its turn, reflected how it was coping and adapting to the changing geopolitical circumstances in the Pearl River Delta region.
From the early settlement to the mid-19th century, the city follows an “organic” pattern, meaning that it grew with no predetermined geometrical regularity in the configuration of the urban structure and the built space. Instead, it developed adapting itself morphologically and functionally to the site, while establishing strong military and religious visual elements in the urban landscape.
We may interpret this irregularity of the urban form as the result of an absence of political or colonizing purpose during these first three centuries: the occupation of the territory and the spatial organization of the city were the product of relatively free individual appropriation and shaping of the built space by the different communities that inhabited it, combined with an absence or relative debility of a centralizing authority. For example, it was only in the 1620s that the first Portuguese governors were appointed to Macao, the matters relating to the town government being treated up until the 1850s by the local Senate, a group of elected representatives among the resident Portuguese merchants. It was them who established with the Chinese local authorities the practice of a “divided sovereignty”, which in effect meant that the Chinese dictated the rules (or rather the restrictions) namely in what concerned land usage, as well as construction and urban renovation. Given this case-by-case and extremely negotiated management scheme, no global urban planning could prevail.
This state of affairs is radically overthrown in the years following the 1st Opium War. Even though Portugal had chosen not to take part in the western offensive against China, when it was time to negotiate its terms of surrender, the Lisbon authorities lost no time in taking their place beside de winning party, thus trying to secure the recognition of Portuguese sovereignty over Macao. This meant the end by 1844 of the “divided sovereignty” system, with both the Chinese authorities expelled from the territory and their restrictions overruled, and the Portuguese Senate’s prerogatives reduced to those of a municipal council. The Governor had the upper hand now and at long last the Portuguese metropolitan grasp was reaching as far as China.
In terms of the urban form, this political change brought about a revolution in the development strategy paradigm. Determinately conveying the new colonial enterprise, and borrowing on the European hygienist trend of the 1800s, a new set of urban extensions started to materialize, outside of the old city walls, but also towards the River and the sea, through a vast land reclamation program. The same modern principles were used to reflect on the renovation of the old city itself, namely the Chinese Bazaar which was, in the eyes of the new administration, the perfect symbol of everything that was wrong with the permissive (and submissive) old system. A project of opening a grand avenue through it, directly connecting the inner river harbor to the outer sea coast, is then suggested by a group of intellectuals, as means to reorganize this “messy” and “dirty” district.
The plan for this New Avenue clearly represents the new vision of the territory by the central government, as do all its contemporary urban extension plans. From this moment, the will of the Government and its definition of public interest, public health, modernity and progress are placed above any other institution or social group. The city becomes a wholly politically submitted territory. Thus, space appropriation ceases to be a free and autonomous process, but a completely centralized one, controlled by judicial and economical instruments that aim to regulate the urban practice in all its aspects.
Based on the analysis of city plans dated from the 18th to the 20th centuries, and particularly focusing on the Chinese Bazaar New Avenue project, we will look at the contrast between these two great geopolitical paradigms that have presided over the destinies of Macao, how they have influenced its territorial administration throughout the centuries, and how finally they have produced two opposite urban development models and two essentially different urban structures: the first, a bottom-up process, resulting in an “organic” appropriation of the built space and urban form by its inhabitants, the second a top-to-bottom process, resulting in a more controlled urban environment and a more geometrically “regular” urban form, meant to stage the dominion of the built space by the centralizing power.
Doctoral Thesis by Regina Campinho
Il se situe dans le contexte plus large de l’action et de l’administration portugaises dans l’outremer pendant le long 19ème siècle, son âge de l’impérialisme et le correspondant système urbain mondial, au sein duquel les principales villes du monde sont devenues progressivement
interconnectées, échangeant en personnes, savoirs, images et idées, mais aussi en capital, en travail et en biens entre elles. Comme si le monde était devenu, grâce à l’influence du réseau des empires occidentaux, une vaste cité interdépendante, stimulée par le progrès des infrastructures de
transports et communications.
Dans ce sens, un des axes principaux de ma recherche est l’idée de l’impact globalisant de la modernisation à l’échelle de ce réseau impérial. Autrement dit, comment la modernisation de ces centres urbains est devenue un processus global à travers l’expansion des avancées technoscientifiques de la révolution industrielle, mais aussi de concepts culturels progressistes, tels que l’hygiène et la santé publiques, ou bien de nouveau modèles de gouvernance et d’administration territoriale, tout comme des nouveaux instruments juridiques nécessaires à la mise en œuvre, par les états occidentaux, de toute cette panoplie d’intérêts matériels. Aussi, et même si en différentes mesures, ces transformations affectaient tous ces territoires interconnectés, indépendamment de
leur situation géographique ou de leur prépondérance dans la hiérarchie coloniale de chaque état, qu’ils fussent des capitales, des villes provinciales métropolitaines ou des villes provinciales de l’outremer. Elles se tenaient au même moment, matérialisant les mêmes philosophies et utilisant les mêmes instruments techniques, scientifiques et juridiques, entrainant les caractéristiques reconnaissables de la ville moderne.
Même si je me positionne dans la ligne de récents études post-coloniales essayant de problématiser les mécanismes de l’impérialisme à travers l’architecture et l’urbanisme, mon objectif, cependant, n’est pas tant de montrer encore un exemple de modernisation dans le contexte colonial, ou d’illustrer un cas de modernité indigène chinoise, mais plutôt de présenter un cas d’étude local dans une perspective globale afin que, à son tour, cette analyse puisse contribuer à nourrir une narrative globale mieux informée des processus de modernisation urbaine.
A titre complémentaire, ma thèse espère pourvoir contribuer également à renforcer les liens entre la recherche historique, résolument basée sur des sources primaires, sur le sujet de la modernité urbaine occidentale dans le long 19ème siècle, et la réévaluation de sa valeur patrimoniale. Il s’agit
d’une ambition plutôt opérationnelle, qui voit dans l’histoire de l’aménagement urbain moderne une ressource précieuse à l’élaboration de stratégies mieux informées et plus intégrées de conservation et de gestion des paysages urbains, que ce soit en rapport avec le Centre Historique de Macao, classé à l’UNESCO, ou avec n’importe quel autre contexte similaire à travers le monde européen où, par manque de connaissances sur le paysage urbain moderne, celui-ci puisse être victime de pressions diverses et irréversibles avec de graves dégâts patrimoniaux.
http://www.theses.fr/s285721
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 and territorial management models, as well as the new legislative instruments enabling Western states to implement this panoply of ‘material improvements’. As such, and although in necessarily different measures, these transformations were affecting all the interconnected territories, regardless of their geographical situation, or of their preponderance in the colonial hierarchy of each state, be they capitals, metropolitan provincial cities or overseas provincial cities. They were happening at the same time, materializing the same philosophies and using the same technical, scientific and legal tools, resulting in the recognizable features of the modern city.
While in line with recent post-colonial studies working on the connections between architecture and urbanism and the imperial machineries, the purpose of this study is less to give an insight on modernization in the colonial context, or a look into an example of a Chinese indigenous modernity, but rather to present a globally aware case study which, in turn, may contribute to nurture a better-informed, more locally aware, global narrative of the urban modernization process.
On a related note, this thesis also hopes to contribute to strengthening the ties between primary-source-based historical research on the long nineteenth century Western urban modernity, and the reassessment of its heritage value. This is a more operational sort of ambition, which sees in the history of modern urban planning a valuable resource for devising better informed, more integrated strategies of urban landscape conservation and management, whether regarding the Historic Center of Macao UNESCO-classified property, or any other similar context throughout the European world, where the under-researched modern urban landscape may be falling prey to several irreversible pressures with significant loss of cultural heritage.
The 1877 riverfront reclamation would be the first urban extension to be carried out under the supervision of the newly created Public Works Department. From the early 1870s on, a new generation of engineers, coming both from the metropolitan schools and from the military schools of the Portuguese State of India, promoted a modern European model of urban governance throughout the Empire. In Macao, this meant favoring the Portuguese government’s claim of full control over the territory to upgrade both the city’s insalubrious additive pattern and its inhabitants’ autonomous practices of appropriating space.
However, Silva’s blatant disregard for government regulations in the construction process, as well as the ensuing succession of patched up settlements, resonated profoundly with Macao’s old-fashioned and informal methods of city-building. By focusing on Silva’s approach to the 1877 reclamation project, this essay looks at the transition from century-old bottom-up practices to the Public Works top-down model, a contested process that reflected both the ambitions and the contradictions of modern Macao.
https://journal.eahn.org/articles/10.5334/ah.413/
This would be the first urban extension plan to be carried out under the supervision of the newly-appointed Public Works Department, commissioned to bring order, regularity and elegance to the city. From 1870 on, the Public Works engineers sought to implement the Portuguese government’s claim of full sovereignty over Macao, by managing the urban landscape to effectively end the ancient practice of ‘divided sovereignty’ between Portuguese and Chinese local authorities. This division, from the modern point of view, had resulted in a disorganised organic pattern and an insalubrious city.
However, Silva’s blatant disregard for government regulations in the construction process, as well as the patch-up settlement reached after the work was completed, resonated profoundly with Macao’s century-old tradition of autonomous space appropriation. Through the analysis of the project’s plans, as well as related contemporary Public Works reports, this study demonstrates that the transition from bottom-up city building to the nineteenth century top-to-bottom model was indeed quite a contested process, reflecting both the ambitions and the contradictions of colonial Macao.
The World Heritage property bears witness to Macao’s exceptional history, placing the peaceful encounter of cultures and intertwining of influences between East and West at the heart of its outstanding universal value declaration. Macao is, by these criteria, the quintessential “in between city”, as it has throughout its history developed in between cultures, identities, empires and, more importantly, in between autonomous spatial appropriation and centralized urban planning.
Putting it in a schematic way, Macao has known essentially two very different forms of urban development, closely related to the official settlement strategy deployed by the Portuguese imperial administration which, in its turn, reflected how it was coping and adapting to the changing geopolitical circumstances in the Pearl River Delta region.
From the early settlement to the mid-19th century, the city follows an “organic” pattern, meaning that it grew with no predetermined geometrical regularity in the configuration of the urban structure and the built space. Instead, it developed adapting itself morphologically and functionally to the site, while establishing strong military and religious visual elements in the urban landscape.
We may interpret this irregularity of the urban form as the result of an absence of political or colonizing purpose during these first three centuries: the occupation of the territory and the spatial organization of the city were the product of relatively free individual appropriation and shaping of the built space by the different communities that inhabited it, combined with an absence or relative debility of a centralizing authority. For example, it was only in the 1620s that the first Portuguese governors were appointed to Macao, the matters relating to the town government being treated up until the 1850s by the local Senate, a group of elected representatives among the resident Portuguese merchants. It was them who established with the Chinese local authorities the practice of a “divided sovereignty”, which in effect meant that the Chinese dictated the rules (or rather the restrictions) namely in what concerned land usage, as well as construction and urban renovation. Given this case-by-case and extremely negotiated management scheme, no global urban planning could prevail.
This state of affairs is radically overthrown in the years following the 1st Opium War. Even though Portugal had chosen not to take part in the western offensive against China, when it was time to negotiate its terms of surrender, the Lisbon authorities lost no time in taking their place beside de winning party, thus trying to secure the recognition of Portuguese sovereignty over Macao. This meant the end by 1844 of the “divided sovereignty” system, with both the Chinese authorities expelled from the territory and their restrictions overruled, and the Portuguese Senate’s prerogatives reduced to those of a municipal council. The Governor had the upper hand now and at long last the Portuguese metropolitan grasp was reaching as far as China.
In terms of the urban form, this political change brought about a revolution in the development strategy paradigm. Determinately conveying the new colonial enterprise, and borrowing on the European hygienist trend of the 1800s, a new set of urban extensions started to materialize, outside of the old city walls, but also towards the River and the sea, through a vast land reclamation program. The same modern principles were used to reflect on the renovation of the old city itself, namely the Chinese Bazaar which was, in the eyes of the new administration, the perfect symbol of everything that was wrong with the permissive (and submissive) old system. A project of opening a grand avenue through it, directly connecting the inner river harbor to the outer sea coast, is then suggested by a group of intellectuals, as means to reorganize this “messy” and “dirty” district.
The plan for this New Avenue clearly represents the new vision of the territory by the central government, as do all its contemporary urban extension plans. From this moment, the will of the Government and its definition of public interest, public health, modernity and progress are placed above any other institution or social group. The city becomes a wholly politically submitted territory. Thus, space appropriation ceases to be a free and autonomous process, but a completely centralized one, controlled by judicial and economical instruments that aim to regulate the urban practice in all its aspects.
Based on the analysis of city plans dated from the 18th to the 20th centuries, and particularly focusing on the Chinese Bazaar New Avenue project, we will look at the contrast between these two great geopolitical paradigms that have presided over the destinies of Macao, how they have influenced its territorial administration throughout the centuries, and how finally they have produced two opposite urban development models and two essentially different urban structures: the first, a bottom-up process, resulting in an “organic” appropriation of the built space and urban form by its inhabitants, the second a top-to-bottom process, resulting in a more controlled urban environment and a more geometrically “regular” urban form, meant to stage the dominion of the built space by the centralizing power.
Il se situe dans le contexte plus large de l’action et de l’administration portugaises dans l’outremer pendant le long 19ème siècle, son âge de l’impérialisme et le correspondant système urbain mondial, au sein duquel les principales villes du monde sont devenues progressivement
interconnectées, échangeant en personnes, savoirs, images et idées, mais aussi en capital, en travail et en biens entre elles. Comme si le monde était devenu, grâce à l’influence du réseau des empires occidentaux, une vaste cité interdépendante, stimulée par le progrès des infrastructures de
transports et communications.
Dans ce sens, un des axes principaux de ma recherche est l’idée de l’impact globalisant de la modernisation à l’échelle de ce réseau impérial. Autrement dit, comment la modernisation de ces centres urbains est devenue un processus global à travers l’expansion des avancées technoscientifiques de la révolution industrielle, mais aussi de concepts culturels progressistes, tels que l’hygiène et la santé publiques, ou bien de nouveau modèles de gouvernance et d’administration territoriale, tout comme des nouveaux instruments juridiques nécessaires à la mise en œuvre, par les états occidentaux, de toute cette panoplie d’intérêts matériels. Aussi, et même si en différentes mesures, ces transformations affectaient tous ces territoires interconnectés, indépendamment de
leur situation géographique ou de leur prépondérance dans la hiérarchie coloniale de chaque état, qu’ils fussent des capitales, des villes provinciales métropolitaines ou des villes provinciales de l’outremer. Elles se tenaient au même moment, matérialisant les mêmes philosophies et utilisant les mêmes instruments techniques, scientifiques et juridiques, entrainant les caractéristiques reconnaissables de la ville moderne.
Même si je me positionne dans la ligne de récents études post-coloniales essayant de problématiser les mécanismes de l’impérialisme à travers l’architecture et l’urbanisme, mon objectif, cependant, n’est pas tant de montrer encore un exemple de modernisation dans le contexte colonial, ou d’illustrer un cas de modernité indigène chinoise, mais plutôt de présenter un cas d’étude local dans une perspective globale afin que, à son tour, cette analyse puisse contribuer à nourrir une narrative globale mieux informée des processus de modernisation urbaine.
A titre complémentaire, ma thèse espère pourvoir contribuer également à renforcer les liens entre la recherche historique, résolument basée sur des sources primaires, sur le sujet de la modernité urbaine occidentale dans le long 19ème siècle, et la réévaluation de sa valeur patrimoniale. Il s’agit
d’une ambition plutôt opérationnelle, qui voit dans l’histoire de l’aménagement urbain moderne une ressource précieuse à l’élaboration de stratégies mieux informées et plus intégrées de conservation et de gestion des paysages urbains, que ce soit en rapport avec le Centre Historique de Macao, classé à l’UNESCO, ou avec n’importe quel autre contexte similaire à travers le monde européen où, par manque de connaissances sur le paysage urbain moderne, celui-ci puisse être victime de pressions diverses et irréversibles avec de graves dégâts patrimoniaux.
http://www.theses.fr/s285721
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 and territorial management models, as well as the new legislative instruments enabling Western states to implement this panoply of ‘material improvements’. As such, and although in necessarily different measures, these transformations were affecting all the interconnected territories, regardless of their geographical situation, or of their preponderance in the colonial hierarchy of each state, be they capitals, metropolitan provincial cities or overseas provincial cities. They were happening at the same time, materializing the same philosophies and using the same technical, scientific and legal tools, resulting in the recognizable features of the modern city.
While in line with recent post-colonial studies working on the connections between architecture and urbanism and the imperial machineries, the purpose of this study is less to give an insight on modernization in the colonial context, or a look into an example of a Chinese indigenous modernity, but rather to present a globally aware case study which, in turn, may contribute to nurture a better-informed, more locally aware, global narrative of the urban modernization process.
On a related note, this thesis also hopes to contribute to strengthening the ties between primary-source-based historical research on the long nineteenth century Western urban modernity, and the reassessment of its heritage value. This is a more operational sort of ambition, which sees in the history of modern urban planning a valuable resource for devising better informed, more integrated strategies of urban landscape conservation and management, whether regarding the Historic Center of Macao UNESCO-classified property, or any other similar context throughout the European world, where the under-researched modern urban landscape may be falling prey to several irreversible pressures with significant loss of cultural heritage.