Attempts at Neoliberal Urban Planning in Postearthquake Chile: Master Plans for Reconstruction

Abstract

Urban and regional reconstruction after the February 27, 2010, earthquake and tsunami in Chile was organized by master plans at the local level. These plans, based on public-private partnerships, can be considered an innovation as an instrument of postdisaster reconstruction. They emerged as a commitment to privatization of urban planning in Chile. An analysis of two master plans based on field research carried out between 2011 and 2014 reveals that they had limited impact because of weak public-private ties, lack of comprehensiveness, and lack of legitimacy. They can be read as failed attempts at neoliberal deepening at the level of urban and regional administration.

Después del terremoto y del sunami del 27 de febrero de 2010 en Chile la reconstrucción urbana y regional fue organizada usando planes maestros a nivel local. Estos planes, con base en alianzas público-privadas, pueden considerarse una innovación como instrumento de reconstrucción posterior a un desastre. Surgieron como una transigencia con la privatización de la planificación urbana en Chile. El análisis de dos planes maestros con base en el trabajo de campo que se llevó a cabo entre 2011 y 2014 revela que esos planes tuvieron un impacto limitado debido a la debilidad de los lazos entre el sector público y el sector privado, la falta de un enfoque amplio y la falta de legitimidad. Se pueden entender como esfuerzos fallidos de la profundización neoliberal al nivel de la administración urbana y regional.

Keywords

Reconstruction Master plans Maule Region Neoliberal planning

Chile has an ancient seismic history.¹ In just the past 100 years, there have been 20 seismic events registering over 6.5 on the Richter scale (Centro Sismológico Nacional, 2013). There is consensus that socio-natural catastrophes can be treated as opportunities for the development of the affected areas (Archer and Boonyabancha, 2011). In fact, the seismic experience in Chile has played an important role in the country’s history of urban housing; postdisaster reconstruction has been a source of new urban policies for increasing communities’ resilience. The 1928 earthquake (Talca, 8 on the Richter scale) led to the formulation of the country’s first model for urban regulation, and the reconstruction that followed the 1939 earthquake (Chillán, 7.8) produced the first norms for earthquake-resistant architecture and the creation of state institutions aimed at the reconstruction of housing and territory² that would play a central role in the following decades in the country’s policies for development and housing. This potential for innovation in urban management of socio-natural disasters reemerged after the earthquake and tsunami of February 27, 2010.

This process took place in an institutional context consolidated in successive neoliberal reforms over three decades (Hidalgo and Janoschka, 2014). Beginning in 1977 the civil-military dictatorship headed by Augusto Pinochet introduced a series of reforms that liberalized the economy, restricting the regulatory role of the state and establishing the free market as a central principle for economic development.³ Since 1990, the recovery of democracy has involved not a retreat from free-market logic but its deepening, despite the fact that the administration was led by center-left coalitions for 20 years, a period during which the right played the role of the political opposition. In March 2010 Sebastian Piñera assumed the presidency, heading a coalition of conservative parties that had inherited the social and economic thinking of the dictatorship. With this victory, expectations of deepening neoliberal policies developed (Mayol, 2012). Barely a few weeks prior to its coming to power, the earthquake and tsunami occurred, and the new government had to reorient its plans toward the reconstruction of the extensive territory affected. However, the fact that the country was in a positive economic environment driven by high commodity prices⁴ was favorable for addressing the disaster. These elements fostered a suitable context for developing new policies for urban and regional administration; in effect, the master plans for reconstruction served as a test of innovative public policy in this context.

In general, the postearthquake reconstruction process was strongly focused on the relocation of housing and infrastructure (INVI, 2010). Therefore, considering the magnitude of the impact of the earthquake and tsunami, which extended almost 600 kilometers along the Pacific coast, affecting 300,000 housing units, the reconstruction plan (MINVU, 2011) was based on the use of instruments and programs from the regular housing policy with some administrative variations. Broadly speaking, the policy gave a leading role to social housing management companies, private or public companies that organized demand and managed the design and construction of houses. The state granted subsidies to residents while the management companies carried out the administrative work; some private management companies obtained profits from those subsidies. Receiving a subsidy was subject to a series of criteria of vulnerability. The main problem in implementing this system as a strategy for reconstruction was that in many affected areas, especially in rural and small areas, there were no management companies interested in administering the housing process (Micheletti and Letelier, 2015).

In the urban and regional reconstruction field, a new model was proposed: the master plan. The main concept of the postearthquake master plan was to generate public-private partnerships organized at the local level, bringing together actors with definite interests in the areas affected by the disaster, to lead the reconstruction. The master plan can be considered an experiment conducted by the Piñera government to deepen the prevailing neoliberal regime of urbanization and planning.

It has been pointed out that neoliberal policies are institutional linkages that are part of a set of institutional frameworks and local policy histories (Brenner and Theodore, 2005; Janoschka, 2011; Peck, 2010). Neoliberal regimes should be understood as projects for reconstructing the relationship between the state and private actors and interests. Public-private partnerships have become customary mechanisms in the development of neoliberal policies in the urban environment (Hackworth, 2007). There is a broad constellation of forms of public-private partnerships (Sager, 2015), which usually involve transfers from the public sector linked to some degree of privatization and lucrative investment opportunities. As a new logic in administration, these partnerships are promoted as innovative tools that introduce discipline to the rules of the market (Linder, 2009). In the case of Chile, public-private partnerships were introduced in the mid-1990s with the objective of providing highway infrastructure and urban transport. In this context, the reconstruction master plans were an attempt to expand the formation of public-private partnerships in the field of urban and regional planning.

One hundred thirty-three master plans were formulated between 2010 and 2011 to address the reconstruction of affected localities, but there was no explicit suggestion with respect to their formulation or application. As Linder (2009) has argued, what is important about public-private partnerships is not so much their identification as tools of administration as the political uses that various actors make of them as political symbols and policy tools. It is from this direction that we approach our analysis. The visible impact of these master plans has been slight and limited to the period of reconstruction (2010–2014).⁵

This article focuses on an empirical analysis of the master plans, called “sustainable strategic reconstruction plans,” developed for the city of Constitución and for Duao, Iloca, and La Pesca (municipality of Lincantén), all in the Maule Region. Three aspects are addressed in the analysis: the actors and their roles in the development of these plans, the kinds of projects that emerged and their potential urban impact, including the capacity for linking the provision of housing, equipment, and infrastructure, and the mechanisms for achieving citizen participation. Our hypothesis is that the limited impact of these plans is due to deficient state leadership in the formulation of action frameworks for the success of the public-private partnerships, together with the lack of real interest on the part of private capital in the affected geographical areas and the plans’ limited legitimacy. The reconstruction was conducted in a fragmented way, characterized by scant planning and the promotion of private profit as the exclusive premise for urban development (Rodriguez and Rodriguez, 2009).

The empirical evidence of the cases presented was gathered between 2011 and 2014 through successive periods of fieldwork in the municipalities of Constitución and Lincantén. The collection of information was carried out through interviews, ethnographic observations, and other research activities. Because information about the earthquake reconstruction process has been intensely criticized for its lack of systematicity and reliability (Forttes, 2014), sustained field research over time was fundamental.

The Emergence of the Master Plans

The seismic event impacted more than 8 million residents in an area in which 16.6 percent of residents live in poverty (Díaz Silva, 2011). It is estimated that 370,051 homes were affected, of which 220,000 were subject to reconstruction policy (MINVU, 2011). The huge impact of the earthquake had two characteristics from the point of view of urban and regional analysis. First, while it affected a broad area of the country, its greatest effects were in small rural towns (around 112 localities) and in settlements along the coast of the Maule and Bío-Bío Regions (MINVU, 2011), destroying work opportunities linked to family economies and temporary workers (Concha et al., 2015).⁶ Secondly, the vast area affected included a wide diversity of settlement types, and this forced the state to develop solutions on a case-by-case basis (Pablo Allard, interview, April 12, 2010).

Whereas the management of risk proposed by international organizations is divided into stages (preparation, occurrence, emergency, and reconstruction [Vargas, 2002]), in Chile there is no such institutional process. Each ministry is responsible for its own field of action. Thus the Ministry of Housing and Urbanism assumed the leading role in housing and urban and regional reconstruction. It adopted a reconstruction plan involving the allocation of housing subsidies for victims, emergency management for victims who had lost their homes and had no access to a safe refuge, and urban and regional reconstruction under the master plans. Our analysis focuses on the latter.

Chile was a pioneer in the introduction of economic and social policies identified as neoliberal at the end of the 1970s (Harvey, 2007; Moulian, 2002), and the deepening of the neoliberal bases of the model has continued to develop to this day (Hidalgo and Janoschka, 2014; Rodríguez and Rodríguez, 2009). The rapid development of master plans once the catastrophe occurred and the leading role of private companies with direct interests in the affected zones caused concern that the planning process after the earthquake would become a milestone of urban and regional privatization, imposing private interests over public order and reducing regulation with the aim of timely action (Imilan and González, 2013; INVI, 2010; Pulgar, 2014; Rasse and Letelier, 2012; Rodríguez and Rodríguez, 2011). In these terms, the innovation in urban and regional management proposed by the Piñera government was best interpreted by Klein (2010: 350): “Only a crisis—real or perceived—leads to real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are performed depend on the ideas that are floating in the air.”

A central element in neoliberal restructuring is the change in the relationship between private property owners and the state. While this restructuring may adopt very diverse forms and mechanisms, its processes and results are products of inherited institutional frameworks, regulatory practices, and political struggles (Sager, 2015). Following Brenner and Theodore (2005), “actually existing neoliberalism” is a “situated” process whose results and devices reflect specific trajectories. In fact the state does not disappear in the neoliberal context; rather, it takes on the new role of generating frameworks of action for the expansion of private interests and capital. This is a central element in the state’s commitment to master plans—new relations for urban and regional administration through public-private partnerships granting private actors an unprecedented leading role.

Sustainable Strategic Reconstruction Plans: The Theory Behind the Concept

The Ministry of Housing and Urbanism describes the first reconstruction diagnostic in the following way: “Since the days of the catastrophe, we have observed the spontaneous coordination of dozens of communities, towns, and cities that has emerged because of the leadership of their intendants, mayors, and residents, combined with the action and generosity of corporations, foundations, and civil organizations” (MINVU, 2011: 52). This initial observation characterizes local initiatives for confronting the emergency as positive, a kind of management of the catastrophe “from below,” from civil society and communities. However, this situation was more a result of the incapacity of the state to manage the catastrophe than of a policy of promoting local capacities (Imilan, Fuster, and Vergara, 2015). In some localities, the actions carried out by a group of private actors, usually headed by a large company, were formalized by the creation of a cooperation agreement, a document that established the framework for action, deadlines, and objectives for the association of the state, through the regional branches of the Ministry of Housing and Urbanism, with municipalities and private entities and/or academic units.

The 133 master plans were divided into four groups. Sustainable strategic reconstruction plans (5), were directed at coastal areas of the Maule Region and Valparaiso. A coastal waterfront reconstruction plan was developed for 18 coastal localities of the Bío-Bío Region, strategic reconstruction plans for the cities of Curico and Talca, and urban regeneration plans (108) for the affected towns of the central valley. The differences among the types of plans were never explained except that the urban regeneration plans were developed for places that had not been seriously damaged and had no political priority. The development of the public-private partnerships that underlay these plans was described by the Ministry of Housing and Urbanism’s coordinator for reconstruction as follows (Pablo Allard, interview, April 12, 2010):

For this first phase of planning, we have made a land registry of all the spontaneous collaborations that have taken place among civil organizations, groups of friends of a town or city, and private companies that may want to contribute or have already done so. We are making agreements with municipalities for this. As the government we are giving them a framework that guarantees practices such as master plans or possibly triggers projects that do not remain hopes for a possible future but are validated technically and also by the community.

Essentially, a master plan produced a list of urban infrastructure projects and an objective defined by the public-private partnership and identified the lines of funding in state programs for supporting local and regional investment without committing to immediate financing.

In general terms, master plans for reconstruction had the following characteristics in common: They recognized local self-determination rather than imposing solutions and recognized agreements for aid and collaboration led by municipalities; they were nonbinding; they did not replace the state’s planning role; they offered the opportunity to develop a comprehensive and sustainable vision; and their transparency allowed the delimitation of roles, interests, and responsibilities for the community. The deadlines for filing plans were short; by the end of 2010 each plan was expected to have a portfolio of projects ready for the funding of architectural studies and detailed engineering and the first works. This goal was rarely met, since the work schedules for the plans were constantly being revised. The master plans were not formulated in a standardized way, nor were they frameworks of common procedures except for being nonbinding and preserving the planning role of the state.

The Case Studies

The case studies were selected for their central role in the reconstruction of the coastal waterfront in the Maule Region, which according to Larragaña and Herrera (2010) was the area most affected by the tsunami. The plans for Constitución and for Duao, Iloca, and La Pesca were two that from the first attracted public and media attention.

The city of Constitución recorded a total of 8,236 resident victims—out of a total of 37,202—distributed in 2,989 homes (MINVU, 2011). The earthquake and/or the tsunami directly affected 22 percent of its population. The main damages in material terms were from the flooding of the historic city center, where approximately 50 percent of the affected properties were located. Educational facilities and public services such as police and fire department headquarters, shopping centers, banks, the city’s food market, various municipal facilities, and coastal tourist services were involved.

The towns of Duao, Iloca, and La Pesca in the municipality of Lincantén are situated along a strip of coastal waterfront 14 kilometers long and only 300 meters wide. This area had 884 residents according to the 2002 Census. Duao and Iloca are located along the coastal route J-60, which is connected to the town of Vichuquén to the north and Constitución to the south, and form a conurbation with La Pesca at the mouth of the Mataquito River. These three towns are on a marine terrace delimited by the seashore and the coastal cliffs and depend on artisanal fisheries and beach tourism during the summer months. Since they are located in a rural zone, the master plan for reconstruction was the first attempt at planning for them. Loss of housing, damage to highway infrastructure and emergency and security facilities, the total loss of educational infrastructure, and damage to fishing and small businesses all occurred, mainly because of the impact of the tsunami on the narrow coastal strip.

The Actors

In formal terms, the master plans emerged from a public-private association and became official through cooperation agreements that were not subject to approval by the Congress and, indeed, were formalized only by a notary public. They depended on the interest of private actors in participating in urban and regional reconstruction, and it was those private actors who directly managed the participation of the other private actors involved. Finally, the partnership was completed by the public institutions at the local or regional level—municipalities and regional branches of federal ministries—that provided administrative support.

Each plan produced a prioritization of projects and a model for obtaining funding. No plan was ensured a budget for its implementation; instead, each project had to be applied for according to the government’s funding guidelines, a standardized instrument known as the National Investment System. In addition, the National Reconstruction Fund⁷ was used for attracting private donations. In contrast to the regulatory plan that is the main type of instrument of urban planning at the local, provincial, and regional levels in Chile, the master plan sought to create an urban image of the future and not just regulate land use, its purpose being to promote specific investments.

The agreement that engendered the plan for Constitución was agreed to by Celulosa Arauco y Constitución, the town’s main company, which contracted Consultoras ARUP (planning office), Elemental (architectural firm), the Chile Foundation (a foundation promoting entrepreneurship), and the Universidad de Talca. From the public sector came the Municipality of Constitución, the Intendencia of Maule (the regional government), and the Ministry of Housing and Urbanism’s Maule branch. Arauco was the main promoter and financer of the development of the plan, the first such plan to be developed and a model for those that followed. Arauco’s emergence as a regional actor was appealing to many residents because it had not previously had a clear “good neighbor” strategy or displayed corporate social responsibility. To carry out the work of formulating the plan, Arauco hired two companies with which it had previously worked—Tironi and Associates, a communications and lobbying firm, and Elemental, an architectural firm that had developed social housing projects linked to the Catholic University of Chile and Copec (another company in the same holding company as Arauco). The Constitución plan achieved media coverage from the outset, possibly because of the actors involved in its formulation and the media plan designed by Tironi and Associates. Thus it became the image of the master plan through countless press and television reports.

Under the logic of mutuality and economic dependence between the towns of Constitución and Lincantén, whose economies are based on the timber industry and in which major branches of Arauco are located, Hatch Consultants offered its help to the Municipality of Licantén to support the reconstruction of the then-little-known localities of Duao, Iloca, and La Pesca. Although there is no explicit link between Hatch Consultants and Arauco, the two companies worked together to strengthen the presence of Arauco in both towns, seeking reconciliation with local communities in the course of repeated confrontations because of the pollution of the Mataquito River in the town of Licantén. Consequently, a cooperation agreement that shaped the two plans was signed in April 2010. The master plan for Duao, Iloca, and La Pesca was promoted by a consortium made up of Hatch Consultants, Ricardo Stein Architecture, and the Architecture Department of the Universidad Mayor, and its public counterpart was the Municipality of Licantén and the regional representatives of the Ministry of Housing and Urbanism. At the center of the administrative model was the consortium of private actors. In contrast to the case of Constitución, in this plan Hatch Consultants rather than Arauco was the financer. Outside of the cooperation agreement, new actors, especially citizen actors, emerged. Housing committees of victims began to pressure for short-term housing solutions, local chambers of commerce hoped to reactivate the economy, especially the part linked to tourism, and the fishermen’s union sought the reconstruction of installations that had been wiped out by the tsunami. Let’s Lift Chile, a charitable foundation, and Antofagasta Minerals, a Chilean mining company that had been developing a food-related tourist project known as the “route of the Maule coves,” were also involved.

In both master plans Arauco played a leading role. Its specific interest was unclear. Its property belonged to a group headed by Anacleto Angelini, a businessman who had benefited from the fraudulent privatizations carried out during the dictatorship. At the end of the 1970s the state had privatized the cellulose plants, and therefore the timber industry was very important for its business matrix (Monckeberg, 2001). Apparently, Arauco’s interest in participating in the master plans was based on an increase in so-called reputational capital. The timber industry in Chile is controversial; the dictatorship had enacted a law in 1974 (Decree 701) that gave it significant tax exemptions, and under the Piñera government this law was to be revised, abolished, or extended. The forestry industry had been the focus of socio-environmental conflicts with Mapuche communities (Carrasco, 2012). In addition, in the early 2000s Arauco was questioned about the significant environmental impacts of its plant in the city of Valdivia. In this context, it is possible to explain the participation of the influential communications and lobbying firm Tironi and Associates in the master plan.

The Projects

The majority of the projects that the plan considered were reparations and public spaces. The restoration of public property such as schools, fire department headquarters, libraries, and municipal offices is the best-known. In the case of Constitución, the main project was the design of a coastal forest for mitigation of the impact of tsunamis, which involved the expropriation of dozens of residents of the river’s edge, the area most damaged by the tsunami (Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Housing for victims along the edge of the coastal forest in the city of Constitución.

The construction of housing for persons who had lost their homes (the so-called construction on new land) was not included in the plan. Another important omission was any links with the 15 projects in Constitución financed autonomously through the National Reconstruction Fund. The infrastructure projects are located in the central areas of the city, while the housing projects are located on the periphery. In the case of Duao, Iloca, and La Pesca, the main project was the construction of a civic center that would rebuild the basic services of the place, including the fire station, the police station, and the schools that were destroyed by the tsunami (Figure 2). The other two important projects were the construction of a restaurant zone managed by local fishermen and the rebuilding of the Iloca consolidated school. These two projects predated the earthquake (Imilan and González, 2013). The gastronomic center was part of the above-mentioned project funded by Antofagasta Minerals, and the replacement of the Iloca school had long been discussed by the community. The civic center project contained in the master plan was never implemented; instead the municipality carried out its own project (Figure 3).

Figure 2.

The Iloca elementary school, destroyed by the earthquake and tsunami.

Figure 3.

The new civic center on the edge of the master plan area of Duao, Iloca, and La Pesca, with the new elementary school in the foreground.

Generally, monitoring the implementation of the dozens of projects that made up the master plan was a very complex task. The lack of information and the precariousness of monitoring systems for the management of the reconstruction process were emphasized by the report on the process conducted when the Bachelet administration began in 2014 (Forttes, 2014).

Participation by Residents

Citizen participation in the urban areas in Chile is weakly institutionalized (Fernández, 2014). The Citizen Participation Law⁸ does not define “participation” as such, only its policies, plans, programs, and actions (Article 69). Thus it establishes no clear procedures and provides no binding character to the development of policies. According to Tironi (2015), participation in the master plans was to be “experimental,” involving innovative procedures for generating linkages with the citizenry. In the case of Constitución, the participation would seek to generate an emotional link between the residents and the reconstruction plans in their locations, taking into account the traumatic experience of a significant percentage of the residents of the affected areas. In this context, citizen participation was put forth as one of the pillars of the validity of the plan. Three ways of promoting citizen participation were developed: a physical facility on the central plaza that allowed the gathering of neighbors and the display of advances in the development of the plan’s projects; forums for egalitarian discussion and debate involving public, private, and societal actors (suggestion boxes were installed in the plan building); and voting on the prioritization of projects. The election involved 4,230 voters, and the replacement of the city’s fire station received the most votes. The construction of the coastal forest project was not put to a vote, since the authorities had already decided to do it.

The municipality was sidelined from decisions (Imilan and González, 2013), and the civil society actors that emerged in force after the disaster, such as the victims’ committees and the inhabitants of the emergency villages, did not participate in the master plan as collective actors. Municipal officials from Constitución were critical of the weak links with the organized citizenry (head of the social area, Municipality of Constitución, interview, Constitución, September 22, 2013):

The team that came was of experts, practically all from Santiago. . . . There was very little grassroots participation. . . . When I say “organizations” I mean the leaders, the president of the neighborhood council, the president of the Sports Club, the president of the Seniors’ Association, the municipal official in charge of that area, that sector, the mayor, the Municipal Council. So, it was the reverse here; the information would come down as if from Olympus: “We’re going to do this. This is the decision we’re going to make.”

The master plan for Duao, Iloca, and La Pesca was promoted by professional teams that had no ties to the area. In contrast to the plan for Constitución, this one had no explicit suggestion with respect to generating citizen participation. According to our interviews, the level of citizen participation was extremely low and led from above. It also lacked representativeness, since it gathered the impressions of residents only in Duao. As a community leader from Iloca expressed it (interview, Iloca, February 20, 2012), “Everything took place in Duao, at Donde Gilberto [a tourist complex], in the events hall. For example, people from Iloca did not go because it did not interest them or they didn’t believe, so it was not representative, not for the entire community. I asked them once when they would have it in Iloca, and it never happened.” Similarly, officials from the Municipality of Lincantén recognized that citizen participation hardly went beyond the level of information and consultation: “Hatch and the university developed the project in a short time, and that was the project that they showed people, and it was improved on the basis of the opinions they received” (head of the coastal area, Municipality of Licantén, interview, Licantén, February 19, 2012).

In the case of the Iloca civic center, a similar situation occurred. Inspired by the destruction of the location’s facilities, the first measure stated in the plan was the construction of a civic center, which had not existed before the earthquake and was something that the mayor and the municipality’s technical and social teams wanted at the time rather than a recognized need. The architect in charge of the project said that this project was treated as a “task above architecture . . . [wherein] citizen participation was limited to the idea of creating a civic center” (Antonio Polidura, interview, Santiago, April 4, 2012). Participation workshops for the plan were limited to commenting on the design rather than on the people’s real needs in the postdisaster context.

Processes in Perspective

The two plans had very different outcomes, but some common elements stand out. There was little clarity with regard to the real actors in the development of the plan and the sources of funding for the projects.⁹ Some actors that were part of the cooperation agreements later disappeared. The professional teams that developed the plans had little connection to the local territory, and over time the private actors involved tended to play a smaller role in promoting them.

The projects developed in the context of the master plans had limited impact; while some of them materialized, some of them developed completely separately from the master plan. Even more important as a planning experience was the lack of connection between urban projects and housing projects. If one of the objectives of the plans was to create a “city image,” it is incomprehensible that they did not consider the new settlements with groups of housing complexes for victims of the earthquake part of this “image.”

Participation was kept at the level of information. Constitución did conduct an election, but its effects on prioritization had no importance in practice (Irazábal et al., 2015). In fact, the plans did not take into consideration the new socio-spatial realities arising from the postdisaster situation, such as the construction of new neighborhoods and the destruction of economic activities. This situation has also been observed in other master plans such as that of Talca (Rasse and Letelier, 2012).

Conclusions

Chile’s master plans are nothing new in urban and regional administration. The experimental way in which they were developed does not produce lessons for the future. They replicated the deficiencies of urban and regional planning in Chile: lack of comprehensiveness and deficient citizen participation. Models of management that address the problem in its complexity have not yet been developed.

What was wrong with the master plans? On the basis of this study, we can identify three elements that respond to this question. First, the public-private partnerships that supported the plans were formulated in terms of weak institutional frameworks in which the articulation between public and private actors was not clear. Second, the limited legitimacy of the plans and the weak mechanisms for participation failed to achieve citizen involvement with the projects and their design and selection. In addition, citizen conflicts and resistance of various kinds made the projects’ development more complex. Third, the private actors involved did not develop specific interests in the affected places as business opportunities. In the case of Constitución, the involvement of Arauco was more about promotion of corporate communication than about the exploration of new business opportunities, and the citizen actors were wary at first, foreseeing the threat of displacement of populations for real estate and land speculation. Probably, the level of development of most of the cities for which master plans were developed was insufficient to provide many business opportunities.

These attempts at implementing master plans lead us to consider the failure of privatizing urban planning. Since 2010, two other national-level processes are important to note. On the one hand, in 2015, after years of debate, Chile’s first national policy for urban development was adopted. While it has no legal framework, it addresses a criticism of the forms of urban development carried out in the past two decades that the postearthquake master plans did not. On the other hand, a series of citizen movements linked to socio-environmental conflicts and education has emerged; the citizen empowerment that Chilean society has experienced since 2010 is directed toward criticism of the commodification and privatization of social life in the country. In this context, master plans seem contradictory to the new sensitivities that have developed in the country since the neoliberal turn.

Footnotes

Notes

Walter Imilan is a professor at Universidad Central de Chile. Luis Eduardo González is an architect and member of the Sustainability, Resilience and Urban Regeneration Researcher Group of the Universidad del Bío-Bío. Margot Olavarria is a political scientist and translator living in New York City.

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