Substations and technological spaces: energy and representations in Santiago de Chile during the first part of the 20th century.

• In Event: Landscape construction in the modern history of Chile and Latin America. Approaches from animal domestication, technology, and infrastructure.

Abstract

Abstract: This presentation explores the extension of the first electrical substations in Santiago de Chile during the first part of the 20th century. Developed by the foreign capital Electric Light and Company (Compañía Eléctrica de Tracción y Alumbrado Eléctrico), the municipality and the state, the substations had as their primary objective the transmission of energy from the hydroelectric power plants of the Chilean central valley to the city. To explain this, it is proposed, based on the methodological review of municipal and legislative sources and the ENEL (Empresa Nacional de Electricidad) Historical Photographic Archive, that the substations represent materially and symbolically three key aspects. First is the paradox of the electrical installation process. Although its presence in the city was linked to the modernist German influences of the A.E.G., the municipality located the substations outside the urban radius. They faced the precariousness of the periphery, where the city's inhabitants had neither houses nor essential services due to the increase in Santiago's population. Two, electrical substations are crucial to understanding how the study of hydroelectricity, located mainly in rural environments, is linked to the development of urban space. Third, and finally, the extension of substations will be key to defining both electrical policy and its aesthetics in the space, related to the “concrete revolution” throughout the twentieth-century Chilean hydroelectric development.

Author

• Yohad Zacarias, The University of Texas. Austin