Chapter Conclusions

The present chapter observed how the modernising and industrialising mode of regulation developed from the 1930s to 1973 in Chile lay at the basis of the production of the current peri-centre of Santiago. This social-economic system had the capacity of creating peri-central industrial environments, modelling a technocratic state housing and planning apparatus with the capacity of renewing an important part of the dilapidated inner city, and creating a working class consciousness that empowered and mobilised the unmet social demand for shelter. However, deep class contradictions are observed in this history, both in the class exploitative and speculative origins of the land and housing markets in the peri-centre until the 1960s, and in the way the bourgeoisie faced the emergence of the mobilised poor in the city space. The radical attack on the space of the pobladores by the dictatorship (1973-1990) is just another manifestation of this kind of class-confrontation.

Another important aspect to note is the historically limited capacity shown by the democratic pre-dictatorship state to control urban speculation and inflation, both factors that excessively appreciated urban land and dwellings’ prices. Whereas class speculation was a historical continuum, the effects of inflation were more relevant for the housing policy by the final phase of the Chilean import-substitution mode of regulation. This created a Gordian knot from where the only solution seen as possible by the masses was to undertake land seizures, because they found themselves with no access to the formal housing system. However, the urban social movements would not only occupy the peri-central space and consolidate many of their poblaciones, but also generate a permanent popular identity related to this space, which still exists up to the present in many poblaciones. This is observed in chapters 6 and 7 as an important social asset for political struggle.

The radical economic liberalisation of Chile was all-embracing and long-lasting. Facing the historical contradiction between national economic capacity and housing supply, the dictatorship resolved it at the cost of lowering dramatically the quality of the housing and space produced, hence configuring a pauperised peripheral space which would contrast with the far better socially and infrastructurally consolidated peri-centre. But at the same time, the inner city was being de-industrialised and its collective ways of life

dissolved by newer market-based, individualistic forms of urban living. From 1979 on, urban sprawl accelerated and a number of new residential and productive units would spread to the periphery, connected by new rapid and increasingly privatised infrastructure passing through peri-central spaces. ‘New peripheries’ (Dematteis, 1998;

Monclús, 1998) and ‘expanded metropolisation’ (De Mattos, 2001) are just two of the new categories to describe this new ‘geography of opportunities’ that paradoxically benefited only the most affluent (Sabatini and Wormald, 2004).

The economic, social and political effects of the transition from the period of import-substitution industrialisation to neoliberalism represent a clear stage in the historical process of economic-led creative destruction of the inner city of Santiago, and this considerably shaped the current peri-central space. Inherited from this process are:

a) The high levels of spatial fragmentation of plots, urban density, building heights and relatively homogeneous land use in the poblaciones, created as campamentos or by the Operación Sitio programme.

b) The high rates of land ownership shown by today’s pobladores, in stark contrast with the newer or renovated spaces in the periphery and renewing central areas.

As CHAPTER 4 analyses, this can be seen as a form of urban consolidation.

c) A historically high use value, as a densely occupied and multifunctional residential-working space.

d) The high levels of participation and mobilisation currently shown by the peri-central neighbourhoods, even despite their also higher current levels of social anomie, crime and drug dealing (compared with their historical past).

e) Consciousness about the right to the place politically conquered by class mobilisation, and legitimised by the state in two different ways: first, by regularisation via the Operación Sitio programme, second, by land titles legally issued during the dictatorship.

Today’s pobladores exert their right paradoxically in two ways: both as socially empowered communal actors with collective aims, and as private individual small-scale

landowners concerned with the quality of their properties and their capitalised ground rent. This is closely related to the fact that, seen from the residents’ perspective, the historical social and economic life of campamentos, although materially precarious, had considerable advantages to the re-localised settlements in the periphery built by the dictatorship or even subsequent democratic governments (Gilbert, 2007; Rodríguez and Sugranyes, 2006a). Aspects like centrality, invigorated social networks, historic and symbolic assets could not be simply eliminated with the transit from a type of society to another (Skewes, 2006) but still represent important social assets for its current pobladores (Schild, 2000). These issues, among others, are the core of the analysis in the following chapters.

C HAPTER 4. The current peri-centre and the two entrepreneurial strategies for its renewal, 1990-2005

4.1. Introduction

As the previous chapter showed, the historical production of Santiago’s peri-centre is based on four main ‘forces’, namely import-substitution industrialisation, class-monopoly ground rent accumulation, urban and housing state apparatuses and urban social movements. Most of the space was developed during a period of almost four decades of state-led national economic and social modernisation. The present chapter completes this picture by dealing with more recent spatial-socio-economic processes.

Patterns of demographic hollowing out, segregation, uneven development and physical decay are observed as effects of the contradiction between a relatively precarious peri-central urban fabric and the economic liberalisation unleashed since the 1970s and continued with more refined state regulation up to the present.

This chapter also shows that decay and deprivation in Santiago’s inner city are concentrated only in particular western and northern peri-central quarters, whilst many other peri-central areas (especially in the south) are still well functioning. This fact contrasts with a generalised idea, in the public sector, about the peri-centre as a generally derelict urban space and subject of the strategies of widespread market-led urban renewal that have taken place since 1990. Yet in fact, the idea of reshaping the inner city of Santiago is not new. As CHAPTER 3 illustrated, this was an important urban development goal in the 1930s and was also a key issue for the 1960 Greater Santiago Master Plan (PRIS). More recent strategies for peri-central renewal were the Corporation for Urban Improvement (CORMU)’s performance until 1975, and later the Plan for renewal of Santiago’s downtown deployed from the late 1970s to the early 1980s. CORMU’s operation brought back thousands of middle-income residents to live in newly built, high-density modern estates, whilst the much more specific strategy commanded from Santiago-Centre municipality during the early 1980s targeted the revitalisation of the most valued downtown quarters (Bähr and Riesco, 1981;

Valenzuela, 2003).

In 1990, when democracy had just returned to the country, the strategy of the Ministry of Housing and Planning (MINVU) would both be more comprehensive and place the renewal of centre and peri-centre as a response to population losses, not only in Santiago but also in the largest cities of the country. This strategy also aimed at recovering urban areas of Santiago, especially in the west of Santiago-Centre comuna, one of the most damaged areas of the city by the earthquake of 1985. The state’s goal was, and still is, to provide affordable housing for middle-income people in improved central locations whilst seeking to counteract the negative effects of metropolitan sprawl, including inner city’s depopulation (Galilea, 2006a). In the specific case of the peri-centre, the Urban Renewal Subsidy (URS) and Ciudad-Parque Bicentenario (CPB), a large urban project located in the south-western peri-centre, would be driven towards these objectives. These public endeavours come from different technical rationales and have produced dissimilar outcomes, but, as chapters 5 and 7 will examine, both are factors that considerably increase local potential ground rents (PGR) if they act together with ad hoc national and local urban regulations. And as will be also outlined in CHAPTER 6, both factors were key issues during the struggle for the rezoning of PAC local Master Plan, between 2003 and 2005.