The big bang of neoliberal urbanism: The Gigantomachy of Santiago's urban development (original) (raw)
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La Flor y Muerte de un Barrio An Ethnography on Comprehensive Gentrification and Class Struggle in Urban Majorca, 2015
With his seminal proposal of a rent-gap theory, Neil Smith developed a consistent materialist explanation for gentrification that efficiently contended with individual consumer preference tenets by focusing on the cycles of capital’s disinvestment and reinvestment in the built environment thanks to the necessary mediation of forms of collective social action. However, since the rent-gap theory had been devised to argue against «consumer preference», with the emphasis on the back-to-the-city movement by capital and not people, all understandings of people vanished, including those that hold them to be the bearers of particular class relations and interests. Despite later attempts to mellow such a structuralist approach by teasing out the working-class experience of resistance and displacement, it is hard to find in the original and subsequent work on rent gaps any explicit reference to the actual class relations that take place in the production of space of which gentrification is only one out of many expressions. These class relations are encouraged by the geographical expansion of capital and by the bureaucratic mediations of the State but in the last instance all of these are dependent on the labour of the working class. Such an understanding bears the possibility for thinking and implementing the limits to gentrification. Not only does gentrification have to face the contradictions of capital in its geographical expansion, and the conflictive State mediations encountered at every moment of the rent gap, but it may also encounter the opposition of a working class objectively made within the gentrification process. After theorizing on the role ethnography can play in social anthropology and by extension in all social sciences, and by drawing lessons from the extensive oeuvre of Henri Lefebvre and to some ulterior developments on the production of space, I offer an ethnographic account for Es Barri, an area subject to comprehensive gentrification in the Historic Centre of Ciutat de Mallorca (also known as Palma, Spain). Although only partially successful, I argue the gentrification encountered in the field is comprehensive in so far it has been sought from several different instances and by various means, among which the involvement of so-called civil society organizations specialized in implementing on the ground the ideas of scale (the neighbourhood) and preservation (heritage) the class relation the rent-gap hypothesis holds. Furthermore, with the aim of complementing Neil Smith’s contribution regarding the collective mediator the State is, and acknowledging that gentrification is only yet another a spatial expression of a much more comprehensive social relation, I argue each of the rent-gap moments of disinvestment and reinvestment are laboured by different groups (the so-called underclass and the middle classes) that, despite the fact they carry out a struggle that subjectively brings them together, they are apparently unaware of forming a single working class that produces surplus for others thanks to what I come to call their «urban labour». Likewise, I contend that for rent gaps to be successful and find a profitable closure there is a need to maintain as wide open as possible the class gap on which urban labour is founded upon. Against the description of the spatialisation of classes that are already formed, there is a need to explain politically how spatialisation intervenes in the urban struggle that makes them.
This paper intends to shed some light upon one of the most recent processes of reconfiguration of the Portuguese urban landscape, namely, state-led gentrification. In order to do so, it looks at one of the most relevant instruments that have been used in recent years with the goal of creating a more dynamic housing market, thus fostering urban renewal and regeneration processes. In this sense, this paper seeks to contribute to a debate that is crucial to understand contemporary dynamics of urban change in the Portuguese context. It begins with a description of the ways through which the production of urban environments is profoundly interwoven with the current economic and financial crisis. Next, it characterizes how neoliberal urbanism has been inscribing itself into the Portuguese urban landscape. Obviously, the role played by the state in this process and the reconfigurations it goes through during it are also addressed. Finally, a detailed description of the implementation of the New Urban Lease Regime (in Portuguese, Novo Regime do Arrendamento Urbano -NRAU), here considered to be a pivotal instrument of state-led gentrification, is provided, focusing on how it has been implemented. Its immediate and potential consequences are also taken into account, against the backdrop of the most recent political changes occurred in Portugal. Arguably, by looking at the NRAU from a historical and geographical perspective, necessarily focused on the spatial transformations and power relations in presence, it is possible to provide a significant contribution to a better understanding of the ways Portuguese main cities have been changing throughout the years, reflecting class relations and a political economy of housing operating at multiple scales and necessarily hindering the possibilities of producing a more just urban fabric.
International Journal of Housing Policy, 2019
The housing crisis in cities across the globe has been shaped by an architecture of neoliberal housing policy. However, to bring myriad qualitatively and nationally disparate modes of housing privatisation, restriction, individualisation and marketisation under the umbrella of a single, monolithic ‘neoliberalism’ risks limiting explanatory power, ignoring national particularity and privileging theory over ‘actually existing neoliberalism’. Therefore, this paper attempts a cosmopolitan understanding of these processes across the North/South dichotomy, comparing the trajectories of two cities seen as archetypal examples of housing neoliberalisation: Santiago and London. Drawing on Latin American and Global North literatures, we analyse the socio-spatial and political-institutional effects emerging from neoliberal transformations of access to housing. By exploring mutations in: the role of the state; the origin/purpose of funding/financing; the class composition of policy beneficiaries; the geography of public housing; and, housing tenure, the paper produces a rich comparison of two significantly different housing systems. Written in the spirit of ‘new comparativism’, the paper contributes to the ongoing decentring of Western-dominated theories of neoliberalism. Two importantly different city-trajectories emerge, and these particularities enable us to add depth to our understanding of the current housing crises, while at the same time drawing cross-border comparisons and conclusions, and cosmopolitanising our theories of neoliberalisation.
Comparative Studies in Society and History, 2022
This paper analyzes a housing project in Santiago, Chile that now lies in ruins and has become a contested memory site. The project was once an ambitious, modernist project that housed former squatters during Salvador Allende’s socialist presidency (1970-1973) and its demise has subsequently become emblematic of the violent processes of neoliberal urban restructuring that marked the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990). Yet efforts to memorialize the site also contain within them certain silences and elisions, gaps which can help to reveal the complex, embedded nature of liberal property relations in Chile. These relations underscore certain dynamics through which squatters have historically been able to gain housing rights and a foothold in the city. They also provide a key location through which to better understand the specific contours of neoliberalism’s trajectory, including its haunted forms of ruination, its points of tension, its limits, and the making of its counterpublics.
Appropriating Urban Rent in the Neoliberal Spanish City
2016
The Spanish neoliberal agenda has been specifically linked to specialization in what is known as the secondary circuit of capital (Harvey, 1982; Lopez and Rodriguez, 2010). This has involved a gradual reduction in landowners’ importance and hegemony and a parallel rise in the importance of developers and financial institutions in matters concerning the appropriation of real estate income. This paper aims to address this issue, looking at the case of Spain, through an analysis of two parallel processes: first, the evolution of urban planning legislation approved since the 1990s and, secondly, the evolution of mortgage legislation. In combination, both mechanisms have led to the financialization of land and its integration into global circuits of capital through mortgage securitization, determining the emergence of a system of capital accumulation based on urban real estate which typifies the current crisis (Harvey, 2012: 51-106).
El Estado como agente de la expansión del suelo urbano: Santiago, siglo XIX
ARQ (Santiago), 2016
The State seems to have no control over the land market, since this would depend on the 'invisible hand' that regulates transactions between private agents. Analyzing two cases in Santiago in the 19th century, this text shows us, however, that it has not always been this way: through the creation of public parks the State did operate as a developer, encouraging an urban expansion that-for our current mindset-it should only regulate.
International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 2010
The rent gap theory, a consistent explanation of gentrification in inner-city spaces, sees a growing disparity between capitalized ground rent (CGR) and potential ground rent (PGR) as a catalyst for large-scale property reinvestment and thence gentrification. In historical working-class Santiago's peri-centre (inner city), not only is there a measurable rent gap, but a state-subsidized market in high-density urban renewal based on the accumulation of increased CGR by a few large-scale developers. This article focuses on a low-income municipality of Santiago, which has a local government that aims to attract this market via the liberalization of its local building regulations (seeking to increase the PGR), and deliberate underperformance in a national programme for housing upgrading (seeking to devalue the CGR in spaces previously targeted for renewal). It is observed how, in this city, two forms of ground rent exist, a lower one capitalized by current owner-occupiers (CGR-1) and a higher one capitalized by the market agents of renewal . This is seen as a form of social dispossession of the ground rent and a necessary condition for gentrification. It is concluded that the state-led strategy of urban renewal in Santiago needs to be refocused on more participative forms of distribution of the rent gap.
A New Poblador Is Being Born: Housing Struggles in a Gentrified Area of Santiago
2016
Since the early 1990s, Chilean democratic governments after Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship have made an effort to allocate publicly subsidized housing to the lower classes. Nevertheless, the dominance of market principles in urban policies has contributed to the formation of highly segregated neighborhoods and the gentrification of peripheral neighborhoods. As a result, Chilean public opinion is witnessing the rearticulation of what in the mid-twentieth century was known as the pobladores movement—social mobilizations demanding housing solutions for the poor. In the old working-class municipality of Peñalolén, severe gentrification since the late 1980s has triggered the appearance of autonomous grassroots organizations such as the Movimiento de Pobladores en Lucha (MPL). The movement has been able to fight social and spatial injustice in Santiago through a subversive appropriation of state policies. Its experience reveals the potentialities of such mobilizations for democratizing cities under a neoliberal regime. Desde principios de los noventa, los gobiernos democráticos chilenos que siguieron a la dictadura de Augusto Pinochet han intentado proveer vivienda social subsidiada a las clases populares. Sin embargo, el predominio de principios de libre mercado en las políticas urbanas ha contribuido a la formación de barrios altamente segregados y a la gentrificación (o " aburguesamiento ") de los vecindarios periféricos. Por consiguiente, la opinión pública chilena estápresenciando la rearticulación de lo que a mediados del siglo 20 se conociócomo el movimiento de pobladores —movilizaciones sociales que demandaban solucio-nes habitacionales para los pobres. En el otrora municipio popular de Peñalolén, la impor-tante gentrificación que se ha venido desarrollando desde finales de los 80 ha redundado en la aparición de organizaciones de base autónomas como el Movimiento de Pobladores en Lucha (MPL). Este movimiento ha sido capaz de combatir la injusticia social y espacial en Santiago mediante una apropiación subversiva de políticas estatales, experiencia que revela el potencial de dichas movilizaciones para la democratización de las ciudades bajo un régimen neoliberal.