Engenharia e administração pública: um estudo sobre as reformas urbanas a partir dos engenheiros prefeitos na Primeira República

Abstract

This thesis aims to analyze the visions of the city shared by five engineer-mayors of the Federal District, throughout the First Republic in Brazil. Enjoying strong prestige and professional recognition, in addition to links in political and social networks, Francisco Pereira Passos (1902-1906), André Gustavo Paulo de Frontin (1919), Carlos Cesar de Oliveira Sampaio (1920-1922), Alaor Soares Leme Prata (1922-1926) and Antonio Prado Junior (1926-1930) were appointed mayors with specific missions and implemented projects at the head of the municipality. When using official documents, reports and legislative messages, letters, articles published in the press, books and memoirs, produced by these mayors, we notice similarities and divergences, conflicts and tensions between the sectors represented by these characters and different manifestations regarding urban improvements. As head of the municipal executive, these engineers strived to leave a mark on the administration, constituting memories, based on their own writing, and also an official speech that presented itself as technical or administrative. The broad perspective adopted in the study of these characters reveals a transformation in the way engineers acted, throughout the First Republic, who, from having technical competence and knowledge about the city, gradually, in the 1920s, lost this protagonism, with the advent of urban planners and other actors in the debate. This change accompanies, in turn, the development of the crisis of the First Republic and its solution in 1930.