Putting Neoliberalism in a Place: A Memory Site, Urban Restructuring, and Property's Entanglements in Chile (original) (raw)

Neoliberal Transitions: The Santiago General Cemetery and the Affective Economies of Counter-Revolution (Identities)

Identities Journal

Anchored in the Santiago General Cemetery, this essay analyses the management of revolutionary memory under neoliberalism. Juxtaposing the gravesites of Salvador Allende and Víctor Jara, I theorise the gendered and racialised processes through which collective dreams for justice – and even radical politics themselves – come to be co-opted under neoliberal capitalism. If in Jara’s grave we see the state performing the part of the hyper-masculine disciplinarian father, I argue, in Allende’s grave we witness the state as the begrudgingly accepting father, ready to take in the repentant children back into the nation, in exchange for obedience. Finally, I turn to alternative memorialisation practices performed by the nation’s discontents, and namely ongoing struggles for collective self-determination and decolonisation. Ultimately, I situate critiques of neoliberalism in Chile in dialogue with intersectional queer and transnational feminist scholarship on the seductive logics of neoliberalism – and emergent forms of justice that appear just beyond its purview.

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.

When Spatial Justice Makes the Neo-Liberal City Tremble. Social and Seismic action in Chile: The aftermath of the February 27, 2010 earthquake.

justice spatiale | spatial justice, 2014

This article proposes an analysis of the forms of production of the city in a profoundly neoliberal context, and in particular, the role of organized social actors, urban social movements and the various actions of resistance and resilience in a post-disaster period. Focussing on the last two years of mobilizations (2011-2012) and addressing the spatial aspect of collective action, the action of two movements that have become the main actors in the social process stands out: the National Federation of Pobladores (FENAPO) and the National Movement for Just Reconstruction (MNRJ). Since 1975, a very profound neo-liberal model has been established in Chile, with visible impacts on the cities as well as on government action and social actors. We begin with the analysis of the neo-liberal city, including the urban development and housing policies of recent decades, in order to understand the continuity in the reconstruction policy after the 2010 earthquake. In this context, we assume that the earthquake served as a catalyst for the social movements in recomposition, in an advanced neo-liberal setting. We will examine the resistance and mobilization process by stressing the spatial aspect of the collective action and the example of two national pobladores movements.

Toward a Life with Dignity: Housing struggles and new political horizons in urban Chile

American Ethnologist, 2018

In the last decade, poor urban residents in Santiago, Chile, have powerfully struggled for the right to housing. They have done so by enrolling in neoliberal housing programs through which they seek to become homeowners by both saving money privately and applying for subsidies. In a context in which market-based urban policies have contributed to the segregation of low-income families in the city’s peripheries, the right to la vida digna (life with dignity) has emerged as the new political horizon of these struggles. As a right based on a moral category like dignity, la vida digna reveals the actions and discourses through which the poor, while becoming ethical subjects, signify their everyday experiences with vulnerability in political terms. [Keywords: dignity, morality, housing struggles, vulnerability, Santiago, Chile]

Gentrification by Ground Rent Dispossession: The Shadows Cast by Large-Scale Urban Renewal in Santiago de Chile

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.

Memories and silences of a segregated city: Monuments and political violence in Santiago, Chile, 1970–1991 2015, Memory Studies. Vol. 8(1) 102–114.

How does Santiago, Chile, remember its dead, the victims of political violence of the 1970s and 1980s? The existence of dozens of memorials, monuments, and sites dedicated to the memory of victims of the dictatorship would seem to indicate a settled national cultural politics that recognizes the injustices and crimes committed by a terrorist State. The public, nongovernmental nature of the initiatives is, nonetheless, the first indication that we are dealing with an ambiguous political story. While the central government has supported these initiatives, they are mostly the result of efforts by social organizations and victims’groups. The spatial-temporal reading of the scenario of commemorative markers proposed in this article offers evidence of a geography of memory that is configured, on one hand, by a memory project that has inherited political trajectories which have been passed down for a long time, articulated by small groups that at certain junctures manage to form into producers of local memory. On the other hand, the high socioeconomic segregation in residential areas shapes politics of memory that are territorially discontinuous and that encourage forgetting in residential settings of the country’s elite.