In Chile, several industrial initiatives developed a systematic and intense policy towards worker housing in the 1930s. The Manufac-turera de Papeles in Puente Alto and the cement company «La Calera» built modern micro-urbanised neighbourhoods where workers lived in hygienic houses. As a result, workers were caught in an extensive net-work of social control in which families were subject to employer sur-veillance. This article analyses the different debates about working class housing and the desire for reform within the field of social hy-gienism. By so doing, we examine the necessary intellectual matrix ad-dressing the availability, orientation and the landscape of some of the working-class neighbourhoods that came into existence between 1930 and 1940.