Los municipios chilenos constituyen un servicio público y forman parte del Estado. No son considerados parte del gobierno, sino órganos encargados de la administración local, no obstante lo cual tienen con la administración central relaciones de subordinación y coordinación. Una reforma municipal debe considerar otorgar mayores atribuciones, según la tipología que se les asigne a los municipios y sus diferentes características.
Compared to their predecessors of Imperial times, public fountains of Late Antiquity have only triggered a negligible interest in scholarly research. This contribution represents the most up-to-date overview on the topic. It focuses on newly built fountains and on the visual and functional maintenance of earlier ones in Late Antiquity. Through a combination of architectural, decorative and technical data, the authors address the overall meaning of both monumental and modest public fountains in the late antique cityscapes of the eastern Mediterranean. A review of late antique fountain architecture in the light of past realizations demonstrates that, even if the trend of grand nymphaea was still present, new investments were more modest and/or cost-effective. This peculiar pragmatism also reveals itself in the practice of converting existing monuments into public fountains. The active preservation of older fountains shows an uninterrupted concern for the functional continuity and the upkeep of their pleasant appearance. Besides architectural repairs and the preservation or update of statuary programs, the various alterations made to the hydraulic apparatus demonstrate a great flexibility in the way water was made available to consumers. Even if some of these alterations may at first sight seem negative, in many cases they can also be interpreted as a willingness to increase the comfort of users and to maintain a good quality of water. Sometimes, however, the changes made to older fountains led to the almost total disappearance of their functions, even if their decorative façade could be maintained. Many of them were turned into genuine castella aquarum or, redistribution stations. The wide array of functional alterations analyzed in this article testify to a new culture of water management in many late antique cities. Water resources 1 The authors share the authorship of this article that combines the results of their doctoral studies on aesthetic maintenance in late antique towns (Ine Jacobs, Aesthetic Maintenance of Civic Space. The 'Classical' City from the 4th to the 7th c. AD (Orientalia Lovaniensia Analecta 193) (Leuven, 2011) and Roman monumental fountains in the eastern Mediterranean (Julian Richard, The 'Nymphaea' of the Greek East as Testimonies of the Religious and Social Life, and of Urban Profiling and Characterization in the Eastern Roman Provinces, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven (Leuven, 2008). 2 became increasingly diversified through the dissemination of fountains and basins of various sizes in the most densely populated areas. The aesthetic maintenance of earlier fountains, the pragmatic investment in new ones, as well as the willingness to improve comfort and to bring water resources closer to consumers all demonstrate the existence of a vivid late antique fountain culture. Studying Late Antique Fountains Both their decorative façades and the cooling effect of flowing water caused fountains to have an extremely pleasing effect on the hot and crowded cities of th...
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