ABSTRACT
Such city was conceived as an impossible place, considering the country that Portugal was at that time. The approach to this idea, considering the Governmental perspective, shows that the Dictatorship intended to build a completely new urban world upon an unrealistic range of settlements, from the north to the south, and from the smallest to the biggest ones. Over more than 400 urban settlements with more than 2500 inhabitants should be the subject of a new plan, including all the places with either touristic, leisure, climatic, spiritual, historic, or artistic relevance.3 Moreover, this purpose should be achieved in solely three years after the approval of the Decree-Law nº 24802, which took place in 1934. These figures are surprising within
were able for urbanistic issues. Even when it became clear that this group was insufficient to satisfy the wide number of plans that were being designed in 1943, Duarte Pacheco was assertive: the municipal authorities could invite new architects in order to enlarge the initial group if they wanted to, however each of them should be approved by himself (Lôbo 1995a: 41). Even if the aim of the Decree-Law nº 24802 had been defined in order to provide city councils with effective urbanistic instruments, this fact miscomprehends the reality. The truth is much more complex: all the urbanistic system that was created by the Portuguese dictatorship was deeply centralist, and was part of governmental policy (Lôbo 1995b: 34-49). Duarte Pacheco faced those urban studies as a medium to organize the construction surge met by Portugal during the consolidation of the political regime, says Nuno Portas (Portas 1973: 727). According to this author, such plans were part of a process undertaken in order to ensure that the inner cities of the country and the ones located in the province would be developed over large avenues like Lisbon (1973: 727). In other words, such process defined a strongly controlled urbanistic program. It was implemented in order to give a territorial face to the political regime, and, accordingly, it should be rapidly spread all over the country by both a solid and unrealistic number of settlements.
