Struggles against Territorial Disqualification: Mobilization for Dignified Housing and Defense of Heritage in Santiago

Urban Development in Chile: The Making of a Neoliberal City

The neoliberal project has been established in Chile since the mid-1970s. It is highly complex, and we only want to highlight three aspects: (1) the reduced role of the state in the production of society and the establishment of the market as the main mechanism of social coordination, (2) deindustrialization and the deepening of the primary-sector-export model, and (3) the destructuration of the principal social actors of the period (unions, pobladores, middle classes linked to the state bureaucracy, among others) and the recomposition of the matrix of political representation. These three elements contributed significantly to the weakening of the national-popular project that was hegemonic until the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s and the configuration of a new sociopolitical matrix in which different social sectors’ participation in political decisions was sharply reduced (Garretón, 1983).

The neoliberal project not only involves a restructuring of the country’s production and politics but also influences the various forms of social relations. As Harvey (2013) points out, cities are particularly important in the neoliberal context because they not only express class inequalities but also contribute to their production through what he calls “accumulation through dispossession.” In the Chilean case, this is particularly evident with regard to the working classes: with the establishment of encampments (precarious working-class settlements, usually created by land invasions) between 1979 and 1984, more than 20,000 families were displaced to the city’s outskirts, thus allowing the increasing commodification of urban land (Dubet et al., 1989). In 1978 (Iglesias, 2011), a housing subsidy program was created to benefit the poorest sectors of society, resignifying the right to housing in terms of individuals’ access to goods through the market. These general developments, part of the establishment of neoliberalism during the dictatorship, were not essentially changed during the democratic governments that followed. As Ruiz (2012) points out, the political pact and the macroeconomic balance sheet were prioritized over the demands of the popular movement that had contributed to destabilizing the dictatorship. This is how “corrected neoliberalism” developed through the decades (Garretón, 2013), staying true to the fundamentals of the dictatorship’s restructuring of society although with higher levels of social spending.

Among these transformations, the deregulation of land prices was of fundamental importance. In order to reduce state capacity in urban planning to a minimum, in 1979 the dictatorship decreed the National Urban Development Policy, which declared city land a nonscarce good so that it could be traded on the market (Ferrando, 2008). Deregulation of land prices had a negative impact both on the poorest, who had to abandon the central areas of the city for marginal areas, and on the traditional middle sectors, which had been concentrated in certain areas of the city that later became more economically attractive. Both sectors were strongly threatened by the logic of the market, which favors real estate capital and the classes that have succeeded in the capitalist development of the country for more than 30 years. The result is an intensely segregated city, accentuating the spatial distance between different social classes.

Triggers of Territorial Disqualification

Neoliberal modernization has profoundly transformed the social structure of Chile. The retreat of the state with regard to capitalist accumulation, the hegemony of private and multinational companies, and the commodification of social rights (housing, education, work, health), among other things, have generated a structure of profoundly unequal opportunities that favors a minority of the population while establishing patterns of subordinated integration for the great majority. The urban modernization processes occurring in Santiago (e.g., construction of highways, cellular antenna installations, high-rise housing, shopping centers), while representing an opportunity in terms of access to services, are mostly a threat to the living conditions of social sectors that often link their individual and group identity to the symbolic values that their territory offers (e.g., heritage, community, environment).

Borrowing the concept of social disqualification (Castel, 2009; Paugam, 2002) developed around job insecurity, we here resignify it as “territorial disqualification,” understood as neoliberal urban development that implies a threat both to an individual’s position in the social structure and to the construction of personal and collective identity. In the case of Santiago, territorial disqualification is triggered mainly by the hegemony of real estate capital, intensified through gentrification, and its consequences in terms of segregation. From the point of view of urban sociology, residential segregation has been the discipline of choice for understanding the relationship between socioeconomic inequality and urban life. In the contemporary literature, Santiago is characterized as a highly segregated city in the sense that the spatial reorganization of the city based on the deregulation of land prices and the allocation of public housing through subsidies generates communities that are strongly homogeneous in terms of social class and spatially distant from one another. Among the consequences of segregation sociologists highlight the poor quality of jobs in working-class neighborhoods (Sabatini and Brain, 2008), the increase in violence and delinquency (Sperberg and Happe, 2000), the lack of public spaces where neighbors can come together (Márquez and Pérez, 2008), and ghettoization (Cornejo, 2012).

One of the most important processes that has intensified segregation is gentrification—the displacement of middle-class groups to sectors of the city traditionally inhabited by the working class, causing the expulsion of those residents. According to Sabatini and Salcedo (2007), this has changed the pattern of segregation in Chilean society, producing a new type of coexistence between different classes. For the Latin American case, Casgrain and Janoschka (2013: 24) propose three forms of gentrification: gentrification of new construction, the “replacement of abandoned industrial areas or high-rise construction in existing empty lots”; symbolic gentrification through tourist and cultural activities, displacing previous residents and street vendors for the touristic appropriation of the neighborhood; and neoliberal gentrification, systematic state and local action to dispossess poor families and the generation of a discourse legitimating that action, mainly in terms of urban renewal. In all these processes, displacement of the working-class from gentrified territories, understood as limiting the possibility of choosing a place according to their expectations, is central.

One problem with studies of gentrification, however, is that they are almost exclusively focused on its negative consequences for the poor. Although the low-income classes are the ones that suffer displacement (Janoschka and Sequera, 2014), the middle classes are not only agents of gentrification but also in many cases (particularly among older people and small businesspeople) the object of displacement (Casgrain and Janoschka, 2013; López-Morales, Gasic, and Meza, 2012). Thus what is particular to the Chilean case is that, rather than a specific social class, the gentrifying agent is real estate capital. López-Morales, Gasic, and Meza (2012) have shown that since 1998 the most important form of housing construction in Chile has been high-rise low-cost housing, particularly in neighborhoods surrounding the center such as Ñuñoa. In this process, the state plays a fundamental role, since it establishes the bases, through subsidies and regulations, for real estate companies’ accumulation. In the face of this, the traditional middle classes and urban poor who live in favorable locations in the city ³ are most affected.

Struggles against Displacement: Historical Zone Designation and the Demand for Territorial Stability

We have shown that neoliberalism has become increasingly rooted in Chilean social life in recent decades, emphasizing the way in which this is expressed in the city and its consequences in terms of segregation, gentrification, and displacement. However, these processes have not gone unchallenged (Casgrain and Janoschka, 2013; Harvey, 2013; López-Morales, Gasic, and Meza, 2012). Since the mid-1990s a number of groups have organized, especially in middle-class areas, to defend their neighborhoods. Their objective has been to halt or transform neoliberal urbanization as it negatively affects the urban and communitarian fabric of their territories (Biskupovic, 2011; Canteros, 2011), and they have put forth initiatives to have them designated as heritage (Uribe, 2014). Rojas (2014: 4) points to the examples of Barrio Bellavista in 1996, Barrio Yungay in 2005–2009, and Barrio Matta-Viel in 2009. A number of these organizations seek to reconcile interests that are more individual/family in character (as the strategies of class reproduction associated with neighborhood preservation tend to be) with a strategy against neoliberal urban development that is more collective and of greater social impact. The success of this reconciliation and redirection varies, as many families continue to privilege the defense of their particular interests over more general claims. In Guillermo Francke and Barrio Dalmacia, mobilization has been based on a strategy against displacement and demanding designation as historical zones. This declaration protects areas that have stylistic uniformity and artistic or social interest. Various middle-class neighborhood groups are using this legal status to halt what they have characterized as a “real estate massacre,” mostly seeking to block the construction of buildings.

With regard to the pobladores, the demand for housing has become more complex, especially since the land invasion in Peñalolén. ⁴ The collective action of pobladores has historically been focused on the housing deficit. The first two Concertación ⁵ governments’ policy of construction of substantial public housing reduced the housing deficit by half, which meant a significant demobilization of pobladores on the one hand and the reorganization of the demand in terms of its location in the city on the other. Since the end of the 1990s homeless organizations have increasingly demanded territorial stability. Recognizing that land price deregulation leads to the expulsion of the poor to the city’s outskirts, these new organizations demand that the subsidies granted by the state be used for the construction of public housing in the beneficiaries’ neighborhoods of origin. The demand for territorial stability is much harder for the state to meet than the traditional demand for housing and, given that the current location of many poblaciones is very attractive from a real estate point of view, means regulating land prices. While the forced displacement of pobladores was originally imposed by the dictatorship, since the 1990s it has been imposed by the market.

The organizations’ demands for historical zone designation or territorial stability distinguish their relationships with the state, but these are not the only strategies they use. Both groups have developed strategies aimed at both general changes in the institutional conditions of city or the municipality, such as efforts to change their regulatory plans, and protests, meetings, cultural events, petitions, and occupations of public spaces or empty lots, all aimed at defense against social and spatial displacement.

As we have said, “territorial disqualification” describes urban development’s threat to one’s position in the social structure and lifestyle and one’s personal and group identity. Individuals may effectively claim a middle-class identity (Méndez, 2008), but what they are defending is, in contrast to the class positions favored by modernization (small business owners, retailers, professionals), a lifestyle that they have consolidated in recent decades but that has lost value. This class position seems to be linked to the population’s age (generally elderly) and level of education (professionals and artists). These are people with “a sense of belonging,” “quiet” and “concerned for the neighborhood” (Guillermina, interview, Barrio Dalmacia, September 27, 2009): “What is happening here is that people are all of an age—our children are about to get, married or recently married and about to have kids of their own—so . . . it’s a neighborhood of adults . . . because this neighborhood has always been very tranquil.” The young people who live in high-rise public housing, which is massive and anonymous and encapsulates all the new things that threaten their traditional calm and familiar lifestyle, are viewed as “young people who don’t care about others,” “lazy,” “without a sense of belonging”: “With the thousands of people who will be moved into the buildings . . . there are always people who cause trouble, who bother people, who complain, who don’t pay . . . and also in schools. We haven’t had that problem here. We don’t hear anyone’s noise. No one has parties; everyone stays at home” (Daniela, interview, Barrio Dalmacia, October 6, 2009).

In the case of the working class, displacement to the city outskirts also implies a threat to a lifestyle. Many of the poblaciones where the urban poor currently live have been appropriated, urbanized, and constructed since the end of the 1940s. ⁶ Here subjects attempt to distance themselves from the stigmas associated with poverty, such as delinquency or economic dependence (End Poverty Foundation, 2010). “The first information on housing they gave me at the Municipality of Santiago was that they would send me out there, to La Florida—not La Florida, Bandera—to the slums [callampas]. I won’t go to those places” (Catalina, interview, Barrio Franklin, October 5, 2010). The state’s solution to the housing deficit is displacement to marginal areas and the disqualification that this implies. The word “slums” carries a strong stigma.

Thus, in a context of deregulation of land prices, the construction of buildings undermines the possibility of remaining in the area for groups that do not have sufficient capital. In the case of the middle classes’ moving to another place, this means losing the features that made them want to live in their neighborhoods in the first place, such as their proximity to the city center or access to services and public spaces, particularly parks and plazas. Thus interviewees emphasized the threat constituted by construction of a building in the area (Eugenio and Victoria, interview, Guillermo Francke, November 5, 2009): “Despite its precarious construction, the neighborhood has beautiful places; it has a special character, and I find it attractive. There are many nice places. There used to be a minibus that stopped on the plaza. I would go with the kids to wait for the nanny, and then we would go to play in the plaza. It was very nice.”

In the case of the working-class sectors, especially everything in the poblaciones that were initially marginal but have currently become prime locations in municipalities such as Santiago, La Florida, or Peñalolén, getting housing through the housing subsidy program means displacement to areas that are precariously urbanized or too far from their workplaces such as Buin, Colina, and Lampa. Sandra (interview, Lo Hermida, October 28, 2010), despite her precarious housing situation (living with relatives), wants to remain in her neighborhood of origin:

The particular place where I live is very tranquil. I have always had access to transportation to where I want to go, and I have everything, so I wouldn’t go live someplace else. . . . Before, when my mom applied for a house they were going to send her to Lampa, someplace like that, so no . . . we want to live here. My mother has always lived with relatives, and she still lives with her in-laws, so we’ve always lived here in the población.

The desire to stay put, from a material point of view, is based on class position and on the structure of opportunities associated with the place. While material conditions in the middle-class neighborhoods are better than those in the poor neighborhoods, in both cases displacement provoked by the encroachment of real estate capital suggests disqualification. Urban development is not an opportunity to better their relative positions in the social structure but a threat to the achievement of their life projects.

Struggles for the Defense of Community

In addition to the material interests associated with struggles against territorial disqualification, there are demands that cannot be understood if we ignore the link between territory and identity construction. The community—a space where authentic relations based on affectivity, neighborliness, kinship, and friendship predominate and solidarity, participation, and respect are practiced—is the subject defended in struggles against territorial disqualification: “They’re good people, very good people. I know that, whatever I need, I can turn to them, any of them. I know they are willing to help—like the neighbor I went to when I had the accident that night and she took me in her car” (Irene, interview, Guillermo Francke, November 7, 2009). “I heard my mom tell my dad many times . . . that she felt that her neighbors were more like family because they were always with her, because they lived in the same conditions every day. They saw each other every day, and she told me that I should be with neighbors of my age. I always understood that family effectively went beyond blood ties to life ties” (Tamara, interview, Lo Hermida, September 29, 2010).

Community relations seem to be a fundamental support for the construction of personal identity and protection against threats associated with modernization such as delinquency. While respondents emphasize the latter as a phenomenon brought by transients or outsiders that strikes the area hard, in the case of the working class the threat is greater because displacement to marginal poblaciones may involve constant exposure to delinquency and the stigma that it carries: “Our neighborhood is threatened by delinquency, especially by the restaurants that have opened up on Manuel Montt. There are many restaurants and pubs, and there are nights when customers’ cars attract delinquents who want to steal something” (Ignacia, interview, Barrio Dalmacia, October 6, 2009). “Why should I go somewhere else if they can rob my house there and my kids are going to be alone and I would worry? Here you can ask the neighbor, ‘Listen, neighbor, keep an eye on the kids,’ because I have known her for years. I know her behavior. Everyone knows each other here!” (Carola, interview, Barrio Franklin, October 24, 2010).

For the working-class, in addition to protection from delinquency the neighborhood functions as a support against family economic crises such as job loss or illness. In such cases the call for community solidarity seems to be a survival strategy (Pedro and Patricia, interview, Barrio Franklin, October 7, 2010):

When, for example, we need gas and don’t have the money, we go to our neighbor: “Neighbor, lend me your propane tank, and I’ll bring it back later.” And she lends me her propane tank, and she does the same thing when she needs something: “Lend me some rice.” That’s how it is with our neighbor. . . . And the grocer also gives us lunches on credit for the kids who go to school.

An indicator of the importance of community is individuals’ sense of belonging to their territories. Such feelings are traditionally based on the value placed on territory. For both the middle-class and the working-class, the presence of family of different generations seems to be an important reason to defend their territory.

In the two cases under study, neoliberal modernization seems to threaten community lifestyles. In the case of the middle classes, housing densification represented by the construction of high-rise buildings is a constant threat. Respondents point out that the tranquility of the area, the authenticity of interpersonal relationships, and the privacy afforded to their families would be strongly affected by high-rise construction (Ignacia, interview, Barrio Dalmacia, October 6, 2009):

The building went up despite the anger and impotence we felt as we saw them destroy the houses. We lost the view of Cerro San Cristóbal, for example. We could see the fireworks at New Year’s. We would stay home for New Year’s and see the fireworks from right where we were. . . . Now we can’t see them, with that tower blocking our view, and people living there go out on their balconies. We hear their noise. They have invaded our space and in a different way because they are not in the house next door but above us.

In the case of the working-class sectors, the defense of territory takes a different form. Here urban modernization does not affect the neighborhood as much as it does the families living there. The main threat comes from the housing policy of granting them subsidies that in the vast majority of cases are completely insensitive to their inscribed territorial identity (Gabriela, interview, Nuevo Amanecer, March 20, 2012).

I always wanted to stay in this area, never wanted leave it. I don’t know who is going to be my neighbor. It forces me to stay home all the time for a long while to see who I am living next to, build ties, see how far school is. I always more than anything wanted to stay in the community.

It is important to highlight the valorization of the organization and the demand to strengthen previously defended community ties. In fact, neighbors’ involvement, participation, sacrifice, and solidarity seem to be more important than the degree of progress in getting demands met. Individuals, beyond their specific interests, show more willingness to fight when they are able to organize as a community: “Our concern is not only housing. A house is not the only thing that unites us. What unites us is organization, the desire to form a different community” (Julio, interview, Barrio Franklin, November 25, 2010). According to Guillermina (interview, Barrio Dalmacia, September 27, 2009),

Effectively, getting declared a historical neighborhood was a great incentive for the organization to come together, to see each other’s faces more frequently, and for all of us who live on this block, at least, to know which people you could really count on, which people are good, because you know you have to collaborate with them, you have to know where they stand. Since the declaration we are effectively more organized.

The positioning of community in residents’ discourse has been interpreted as a defensive logic against social segregation. Márquez and Pérez (2008) have emphasized the neo-communitarian trends present in both poblaciones and middle-class condominiums facing threats from neoliberal modernization. They point out that communitarianism results from a limited willingness to come together with others due to the insecurity provoked by living in a society that is integrated by the market. In contrast, we hold that community as the subject of collective action cannot be reduced to a defensive logic. In fact, the urban conflicts that have occurred since the mid-1990s attempt to promote community as an alternative to the hegemonic construction that neoliberal urbanization has established. Thus they deploy strategies aimed at designation as heritage, sustainability, life with dignity, and cities on a human scale, among other signifiers that challenge the commodification of the city.

Conclusion

This article has shown that territorial disqualification affects both the middle-class and the poor in that it represents a threat to their positions in the social structure and to the recognition of their identity, personal or collective. Given that the agents of gentrification are real estate capital and the state, this is detrimental not only to the working classes but also to middle-class sectors resisting the increased population density caused by the construction of high-rise housing. The concept of territorial disqualification has been proposed as a broad concept for understanding the experience of displacement caused by increasing segregation and gentrification of the city center and its surroundings. It allows us to analyze the material and the symbolic components associated with displacement under one lens. Thus, on the one hand, being displaced from the neighborhood implies an important loss of status and the material opportunities in terms of access to the city that this involves. On the other hand, it constitutes a threat to the individual and collective identities that have been constructed around particular neighborhoods.

Beyond the important similarities of the claims associated with territorial disqualification, many individual actions are mobilized within organizations consolidated around a specific interest. In the case of pobladores, mobilization for housing may take many years, but it does not necessarily lead to an oppositional political project. Similarly, many individuals who participate in the defense of heritage get involved to maintain their class position and therefore abandon the organization when their demand is met or is diluted. Because of this, the work of organizations and their leaders is fundamental in the containment of particular interests and the promotion of social struggles with greater social reach. In some cases this has enabled the emergence of political organizations in which actors have partially abandoned the defense of their immediate interests in favor of the projection of a strategy to contain development by real estate capital. Such is the case of the struggles to change the regulatory plans in Peñalolén and La Reina, where pobladores and middle-class residents have organized for the promotion and defense of heritage, the environment, and the construction of public and mixed housing.

All this should not, however, lead us to think that the particular interests that led many people to join these struggles disappear in the organization. Moreover, in the same municipalities where these processes of articulation have occurred, middle-class residents have protested against the construction of public housing near them (Radio Bío Bío, 2016). The structural framework that defines neoliberal urban development, generating an awareness of the central role of real estate capital and the state’s responsibility in segregation and gentrification, enables the emergence of these organizations, but it does not guarantee their political expression. Despite this, the possibility of transforming the conditions that produce territorial disqualification continues to depend on the capacity to overcome the contingent character of such articulation.

Beyond the articulations that are produced, we would like to stress, following Lefebvre (2013), that the collective action of various actors cannot be reduced to a struggle for access to the city—for consumption—but also involves the uses that its residents can make of it, which have been subordinated to the logic of value exchange that guides urbanization. Thus, the defense of community effectively questions the individualistic and competitive principles that underlie neoliberal urban development.