This research was based on the premise that, beginning in 1831, large-scale landscape projects were imagined, developed, and materialized in Santiago as alternatives to an institutional planning framework that was repeatedly sought but only defined in 1939. These projects guided the transformation of the city from the mid-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century.

First, the project sought to identify the sites and projects that, by articulating geographic and artificial systems —both preexisting and proposed— directed long-term transformations of urban form before official planning instruments had been defined.

Second, it argued that the projects that triggered these processes correspond to what today would be understood as landscape architecture projects: territorial transformations capable of synchronizing relationships between proposed programs and imagined urban futures for Santiago.

Third, it showed that these landscapes were made possible by actors who publicly formulated critical positions regarding the urban condition and promoted the adoption of foreign models as possible responses.

Finally, the research proposed interpreting these landscapes from a contemporary perspective that makes visible the longue durée as an intrinsic condition of landscape design. This long duration of design strategies coincides with the long duration of landscape itself, which cannot be captured in a single moment because it is always becoming: collecting its processes of ideation, materialization, growth, and decline.