The Public and the Community in Tension in Self-built Urban Spaces: The Case of the “Operación Sitio” Settlements in Santiago de Chile
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2025
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Springer
Abstract
Self-constructionSpace is a recurring themeSantiago de Chile in recent discussions about public spacePublic space in Latin AmericaLatin America. Some critical aspects of the debate are, on the one hand, the search for correspondence between the social construction of habitat and the intervention logics proposed by public policies, and on the other hand, the high level of conflictConflicts that occurs in these spacesSpace, which is expressed in disputes in public spacePublic space, causing a tension between the difficulty of building a public sphere and the withdrawal to a predominantly community life. The research presented here aims to contribute to this discussion, studying the influence of urban morphology in determining the character of these spacesSpace which, in contexts of self-construction, are strongly defined by the agency of the inhabitants. We will focus on two dilemmas associated with this question: (a) the difficulty of building spacesSpace from communities without losing the ability to include a wider public and (b) the complexity of articulating forms of appropriation that promote attachment to spacesSpace and cohesion among inhabitants, which confront coercive domination phenomena of spaceSpace. The evidence emerges from a socio-spatial analysis of “Operación Sitio” settlements in Santiago de ChileSantiago de Chile. However, these developments, built between the 1960–70 decades, were part of a scheme to promote progressive housing in various developing countries with the technical supportSupports of the United StatesState and funding from the World Bank called “sites & servicesSites & services”, which finds detractors and supporters, they are characterized by the high incidence of self-construction and their assistance by the StateState, which gives concrete form to the interdependence between the StateState's formal planningPlanning and the appropriation by the inhabitants.
Description
Keywords
Self-organization, Social production of habitat, Public spaces, Sites and services, Peripheral urbanization