Abstract, The Occupation of the Parque Indoamericano in Buenos Aires: Discourse Dynamics and Stakeholder Practices

:::::: Abstract ::::::

The Occupation of the Parque Indoamericano in Buenos Aires: Discourse Dynamics and Stakeholder Practices
by Corinna Hölzl                                         


In 2010, some 13,000 people occupied the second-largest park in Buenos Aires, located in the most deprived area of the city. The city and state governments reacted with violent repression leading to three deaths. After government officials promised that a housing program would be provided, the problem was viewed as “solved.” However, four years later not a single home had been built. Interpretive frames and political practices in Buenos Aires were influenced by the conflict, and this ultimately strengthened the positions of the national and local governments. This, in turn, intensified structural discrimination against lower-income groups in Buenos Aires. Thus, far from bringing about sustainable housing solutions, the occupation reinforced policies of security and sanction.

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

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Struggles against Territorial Disqualification: Mobilization for Dignified Housing and Defense of Heritage in Santiago
by Nicolás Angelcos and María Luisa Méndez                                              


A critical analysis of two conflicts associated with the displacement resulting from gentrification in Santiago, Chile, reveals that this displacement affects both the urban poor and the middle classes and that the common adversary is the real estate sector. The subjective experience of the groups involved can be understood in terms of the concept of territorial disqualification, a threat both to their positions in the social structure and to the recognition of the identities, personal and collective, that have been constructed about particular neighborhoods. The subject defended in struggles against territorial disqualification is the community. While class positions, specific demands, and territorial claims differ significantly, the structural framework in which neoliberal urbanism develops makes possible a confluence of class organizations that are susceptible to generating interclass strategies of opposition.

Abstract, Heritage and the Social Construction of Citizen Power in Historic Neighborhoods of Santiago

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Heritage and the Social Construction of Citizen Power in Historic Neighborhoods of Santiago
by Mauricio Rojas Alcayaga                                              


One of the great changes in the field of heritage studies is the abandonment of the idea of heritage as linked to the inert and monumental past and as a category established only by the state with the support of private patronage in its protection. Citizen empowerment with regard to its establishment, protection, and reinterpretation, with a strong territorial and grassroots component, has transformed it into a field of sociocultural dispute over space and memory in the present. Heritage is a social construction in the dialectic of power. Heritage movements organized in two historic neighborhoods in Santiago are resisting and transforming a capitalist model of urban planning that affects their culture, tradition, and collective memory—their ways of living and identity. Their contributions to an emerging political dispute over heritage add new meanings to a field in need of them.

Abstract, The Memory of Inhabiting Modern Architecture: Villa Portales, 1955–2010

:::::: Abstract ::::::

The Memory of Inhabiting Modern Architecture: Villa Portales, 1955–2010
by Rosanna Forray and Francisca Márquez                                                


Villa Portales is an icon of modern architecture and urban planning of the 1950s and 1960s in Santiago de Chile. It embodies the political and institutional project of the time, which sought to respond to the need to establish a balance—although tenuous—in a fragile and strained economic and political system. This fact is crucial to understanding its socio-spatial objective, the administrative model it employed, and especially the crisis it has endured. The testimony of current Villa Portales dwellers points to a deterioration of its residents’ quality of life beginning in the 1980s with the changes in the role of the state introduced by the military dictatorship, the privatization of public services, and the termination of the Caja de Previsión de Empleados Particulares (Private Employees’ Pension Fund). Despite all this, the community was able to make this space a place of resistance and new meaning based on the sense of belonging arising from its architecture and its history.

Abstract, Deepening Demobilization: The State’s Transformation of Civil Society in the Poblaciones of Santiago, Chile

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Deepening Demobilization: The State’s Transformation of Civil Society in the Poblaciones of Santiago, Chile
by Carter M. Koppelman                                                    


Since Chile’s transition to an electoral regime in 1990, the demobilization of local organizations in Santiago’s poor and working-class neighborhoods, known as poblaciones, presents a puzzle, given the continuation of the neoliberal socioeconomic program that urban popular sectors mobilized against under the dictatorship. Ethnographic and interview data from two districts in southern Santiago reveal that the posttransition period has been characterized by increased state domination of local organizations in Santiago’s poor communities. By virtue of their dependence on material resources, local organizations have become extensions of the local state, engaged in service provision rather than contentious claims making. At the same time, the extension of state control has been masked through reinforcement in official discourse of the symbolic boundaries between state and society. This shifting and blurring of the state–civil-society boundary contributes to the deepening of the political demobilization of popular organizations.

Abstract, “A New Poblador Is Being Born”: Housing Struggles in a Gentrified Area of Santiago

:::::: Abstract ::::::

“A New Poblador Is Being Born”: Housing Struggles in a Gentrified Area of Santiago
by Miguel Pérez                                                     


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.

Abstract, Gendering the Urban Social Movement and Public Housing Policy in São Paulo

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Gendering the Urban Social Movement and Public Housing Policy in São Paulo
by Charmain Levy, Anne Latendresse, and Marianne Carle-Marsan                                                             


A deteriorating economic scenario, a critical mass of unmarried female heads of households, and the institutionalization of the São Paulo housing movement in the 2000s contributed to women’s taking on a new public role within the movement. The strong presence of women at different levels of this social movement was a necessary but not determining factor in generating public awareness about gender-differentiated needs and claims for access to housing. Female leadership and a strategic alliance with the women’s movement and with nongovernmental organizations and local elected officials contributed to the development of gender-specific public housing policies.

Book Review, Revisiting the Politics of Planning and Action in Latino Urban America

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Revisiting the Politics of Planning and Action in Latino Urban America

by Erualdo R. González                


In Latino Urbanism: The Politics of Planning, Policy, and Redevelopment, editors David R. Diaz and Rodolfo D. Torres offer a range of scholarship examining the way socioeconomic and political change and urban policy interventions influence the nature and functioning of cities with large Latino populations. They argue that the volume blends traditional critical urbanism perspectives with varied theoretical perspectives on political and policy interventions. The volume has three themes: (1) the limits of popular community development models in neighborhood and commercial spaces, (2) urban living experiences and the role of market-driven and racialized public policy, and (3) community organizations and change. Scholars with varied disciplinary backgrounds provide a mix of contemporary and historical case studies and essays.

Book Review, Scars and Resistances in Latin American Cities

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Scars and Resistances in Latin American Cities

by María Mercedes Di Virgilio                     


The production logics of Latin American cities have not followed the same canons as those of American or European ones. Although in many cities we can recognize neighborhoods or areas that appear to conform to the “North Atlantic urban ideal,” these areas or neighborhoods—as expressions of the so-called formal city—clearly adjoin and interact with what has come to be known as the informal city. The two volumes reviewed here contribute to the vast literature on Latin American cities and to discussions regarding poverty and the scars that informality has stamped on these cities since their foundation (for an overview, see McTarnaghan et al., 2016).

Cities from Scratch: Poverty and Informality in Urban Latin America, edited by Brodwyn Fischer, Bryan McCann, and Javier Auyero, is another in the long list of works on urban informality, but it attempts to move beyond the truisms and paradoxes found in this type of analysis (1):

Abstract, Building Citizenship: The Struggle for Housing in Eastern Mexico City

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Building Citizenship: The Struggle for Housing in Eastern Mexico City

by Luisa F. Rodríguez Cortés                                


Urban social organizations have played a crucial role in the definition of political relations and the transformation of urban space. The practices established by a social organization working under conditions of poverty and vulnerability in the dispute over access to housing in eastern Mexico City produce an urban citizenship that is both weak and precarious, marked by tensions between autonomous practices and bargaining with state institutions, a rift between leaders and the grassroots, and targeted struggles that prevent the development of a shared sense of citizenship on a larger scale.

Abstract, The Uses of Informality: Urban Development and Social Distinction in Mexico City

:::::: Abstract ::::::

The Uses of Informality: Urban Development and Social Distinction in Mexico City
by Frank Müller and Ramiro Segura                                   


“Urban informality” is a signifier that is disputed by real estate developers, politicians, and residents in undertaking strategies of social distinction and gaining particular political and economic benefits. Research in the western periphery of Mexico City distinguishes three cases of such use of informality. First, real estate developers employ informality as a threat to valorize and justify an enclosed “First World” lifestyle in gated communities. Second, informality motivates homeowners’ associations to take on a neighborhood-defending and state-monitoring role. Third, besides its function in reconstituting class frontiers, it serves as a referent for broader social mobilization against the perceived informality of the local elite. By facilitating social distinction, informality continues to marginalize communities as it influences planning decisions and access to land in urban Latin America.

Abstract, Criminals in Our Midst: Middle-Class Reactions to Representations of the “Ordinary” in a Buenos Aires Shantytown

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Criminals in Our Midst: Middle-Class Reactions to Representations of the “Ordinary” in a Buenos Aires Shantytown
by Jacob Lederman                                      


Building upon the concept of moral indignation, an analysis of the social reaction to a Buenos Aires shantytown shows how discourses that emphasize the criminality of its inhabitants are mobilized to explain the economic and ontological instability experienced by the local middle class. The media’s use of rhetorical frames that highlight the lack of boundaries between the middle-class readership and the residents of the shantytown produces indignation directed against the urban poor. The newspaper’s readership reconstructs social difference through discourses that frame the shantytown’s inhabitants as predatory, undeserving, and dangerous.

Abstract, The Occupation of the Parque Indoamericano in Buenos Aires: Discourse Dynamics and Stakeholder Practices

:::::: Abstract ::::::

The Occupation of the Parque Indoamericano in Buenos Aires: Discourse Dynamics and Stakeholder Practices
by Corinna Hölzl                                         


In 2010, some 13,000 people occupied the second-largest park in Buenos Aires, located in the most deprived area of the city. The city and state governments reacted with violent repression leading to three deaths. After government officials promised that a housing program would be provided, the problem was viewed as “solved.” However, four years later not a single home had been built. Interpretive frames and political practices in Buenos Aires were influenced by the conflict, and this ultimately strengthened the positions of the national and local governments. This, in turn, intensified structural discrimination against lower-income groups in Buenos Aires. Thus, far from bringing about sustainable housing solutions, the occupation reinforced policies of security and sanction.

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

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Struggles against Territorial Disqualification: Mobilization for Dignified Housing and Defense of Heritage in Santiago
by Nicolás Angelcos and María Luisa Méndez                                              


A critical analysis of two conflicts associated with the displacement resulting from gentrification in Santiago, Chile, reveals that this displacement affects both the urban poor and the middle classes and that the common adversary is the real estate sector. The subjective experience of the groups involved can be understood in terms of the concept of territorial disqualification, a threat both to their positions in the social structure and to the recognition of the identities, personal and collective, that have been constructed about particular neighborhoods. The subject defended in struggles against territorial disqualification is the community. While class positions, specific demands, and territorial claims differ significantly, the structural framework in which neoliberal urbanism develops makes possible a confluence of class organizations that are susceptible to generating interclass strategies of opposition.

Abstract, Heritage and the Social Construction of Citizen Power in Historic Neighborhoods of Santiago

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Heritage and the Social Construction of Citizen Power in Historic Neighborhoods of Santiago
by Mauricio Rojas Alcayaga                                              


One of the great changes in the field of heritage studies is the abandonment of the idea of heritage as linked to the inert and monumental past and as a category established only by the state with the support of private patronage in its protection. Citizen empowerment with regard to its establishment, protection, and reinterpretation, with a strong territorial and grassroots component, has transformed it into a field of sociocultural dispute over space and memory in the present. Heritage is a social construction in the dialectic of power. Heritage movements organized in two historic neighborhoods in Santiago are resisting and transforming a capitalist model of urban planning that affects their culture, tradition, and collective memory—their ways of living and identity. Their contributions to an emerging political dispute over heritage add new meanings to a field in need of them.

Abstract, The Memory of Inhabiting Modern Architecture: Villa Portales, 1955–2010

:::::: Abstract ::::::

The Memory of Inhabiting Modern Architecture: Villa Portales, 1955–2010
by Rosanna Forray and Francisca Márquez                                                


Villa Portales is an icon of modern architecture and urban planning of the 1950s and 1960s in Santiago de Chile. It embodies the political and institutional project of the time, which sought to respond to the need to establish a balance—although tenuous—in a fragile and strained economic and political system. This fact is crucial to understanding its socio-spatial objective, the administrative model it employed, and especially the crisis it has endured. The testimony of current Villa Portales dwellers points to a deterioration of its residents’ quality of life beginning in the 1980s with the changes in the role of the state introduced by the military dictatorship, the privatization of public services, and the termination of the Caja de Previsión de Empleados Particulares (Private Employees’ Pension Fund). Despite all this, the community was able to make this space a place of resistance and new meaning based on the sense of belonging arising from its architecture and its history.

Abstract, Deepening Demobilization: The State’s Transformation of Civil Society in the Poblaciones of Santiago, Chile

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Deepening Demobilization: The State’s Transformation of Civil Society in the Poblaciones of Santiago, Chile
by Carter M. Koppelman                                                    


Since Chile’s transition to an electoral regime in 1990, the demobilization of local organizations in Santiago’s poor and working-class neighborhoods, known as poblaciones, presents a puzzle, given the continuation of the neoliberal socioeconomic program that urban popular sectors mobilized against under the dictatorship. Ethnographic and interview data from two districts in southern Santiago reveal that the posttransition period has been characterized by increased state domination of local organizations in Santiago’s poor communities. By virtue of their dependence on material resources, local organizations have become extensions of the local state, engaged in service provision rather than contentious claims making. At the same time, the extension of state control has been masked through reinforcement in official discourse of the symbolic boundaries between state and society. This shifting and blurring of the state–civil-society boundary contributes to the deepening of the political demobilization of popular organizations.

Abstract, “A New Poblador Is Being Born”: Housing Struggles in a Gentrified Area of Santiago

:::::: Abstract ::::::

“A New Poblador Is Being Born”: Housing Struggles in a Gentrified Area of Santiago
by Miguel Pérez                                                     


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.

Abstract, Gendering the Urban Social Movement and Public Housing Policy in São Paulo

:::::: Abstract ::::::

Gendering the Urban Social Movement and Public Housing Policy in São Paulo
by Charmain Levy, Anne Latendresse, and Marianne Carle-Marsan                                                             


A deteriorating economic scenario, a critical mass of unmarried female heads of households, and the institutionalization of the São Paulo housing movement in the 2000s contributed to women’s taking on a new public role within the movement. The strong presence of women at different levels of this social movement was a necessary but not determining factor in generating public awareness about gender-differentiated needs and claims for access to housing. Female leadership and a strategic alliance with the women’s movement and with nongovernmental organizations and local elected officials contributed to the development of gender-specific public housing policies.

Introduction, Planning Latin American Cities: Housing and Citizenship

:::::: Introduction ::::::

Planning Latin American Cities: Housing and Citizenship
edited by Clara Irazabal and Tom Angotti                                                                


After the 1973 coup in Chile, the Pinochet dictatorship, aided by advisers from the United States, became a proving ground for neoliberal reforms in Latin America. Its efforts to minimize the public role and maximize private initiative have strongly influenced social housing programs in other countries in the region. In effect, Chile’s housing reforms were recognized as best practices. The massive social housing program it launched in the early 1990s has been emulated throughout the Americas, most notably in Brazil’s Minha Casa, Minha Vida program. Following its developer-driven and neoliberal approach to housing, Chile produced a significant volume of new housing units. However, from the larger vantage point of community development and citizenship rights, the new housing has been deficient. It has generated new urban ghettos and peripheral neighborhoods and contributed to suburban expansion, auto dependency, unevenness in the provision of services, and a new form of poverty.