The 20th century
Rural Urbanization

The attempt to prepare an urbanization plan for the city of Leiria is unsuccessful and will be temporarily abandoned. Public administration pursues a development brought about by private initiative, transforming the once rural countryside into urban ground thus eagerly appropriating the added-value caused by the artificial alteration of the territory’s status. Leiria Urbanization General Plan is discarded and gives way the making of the Municipal City Planning from which is expected all the virtues of a balanced planning of the city and its municipality. Meanwhile the city is built piece by piece. The urban allotment procedures, to which someone has called “the leprosy of urbanism”, fill the urban space with more or less intervention from the municipality, bounded only by the limits of law enforcement and the compliance to the administrative procedures and the supervision of central administration.