Aigua i Societat a Barcelona entre les dues exposicions (1888-1929)

Resum

This thesis aspires to approximate to the evolution of water provision at Barcelona between the Universal Exposition in 1888 and the International one in 1929. The established objective is to approach to the urban service of water considering it as an integrate factor on the intense and accelerated process of economic growth and of politic, social and urban transformation that the Barcelona of this period experiments. In this context water plays a protagonist roll on economic production and on public surety of the city, the private hygiene and on its habitants health.

The investigation establishes relations between water provision and social, politic and economic interests that were present on the city, it approximates to the different possibilities of access to water of different social sectors and interprets the fight for the service model that will finally gets on the way. A private monopoly model on Societat General dAigües de Barcelona hands. This is the resulted of the conflict between this enterprise and the politic groups of the Barcelonas council, the interests of other supply societies and the economic sectors dominants at the city.

The thesis approximates to the water provision problematic from a social and historical perspective that integrates and not sees just the water offer side, of the exact transport, with all the problematic complexity that all this put up. The relation of elements with the social demand, with the distribution centres and the final exacts use and the social, politics and historic context were they inscribe are the other essential side. In this way it contributes to know better life conditions of the Barcelonas population on the studied period in those things that refer to the water access possibilities and the causes and repercussions of the health crisis that affected its hygienic and health state. We ought to remember the particular way that Barcelona suffered the endemic situation of typhus on 1914 and the epidemic cholera outbreak on 1884 it had in water its origin and its privileged way of transmission and contagion.

In another things order, the investigation make a careful study of the politic interpretation of Barcelonas council public services, it offers new views in the objective analyse and in the politic groups strategies from that times presents on the city, it permits to approximate with new facts to the Barcelonas bourgeois influence and its influence metropolitan area around city paper as a attraction centre of the hydrological resources of the near environment and the total of the Catalan territory.

The combination between the interhistory and the water provision enterprises, in special of the SGAB and the citys historical evolution facilitates the analysis of the model of water provision model, a fight that passes the services field and that has evidently politic, social and economic implications in the city, Catalonia and Spanish politics ambit. This methodological model of approximation, analyse and interpretation of the water provision service could be implicated to other cities or other public services. Its bases are, first, the interhistory contextualisation and the water service to make the interpretive discourse being shared between other specialists and being it valid to the study of other provisions. The model is created too on the transversally essential of water problematic trough politic periods and the complexity of the establishments on the interpretative structure from the different knowing disciplines.

Data del Ajut	2 de febr. 2007
Idioma original	Català
Supervisor	Joan Serrallonga Urquidi (Director/a)