INNER CITY SUBURBIA’S
A Response to the Future Homogeneity of Santiago

Like most Latin American cities, profound political, economic and regulatory changes in national governance have played an immense role in shaping the urban fabric of Santiago. As a result of the introduction of Neoliberal policies in 1973 and the subsequent privatization of the city through the selling of public enterprises, abolition of urban boundaries and the deregulation of public transport, the city today exists as a fragmented fusion of the distinct changes in urban planning policies in relation to time.
Neoliberalism in Santiago not only marked the beginning of important transformations in the political and economic spheres within greater Santiago, but eventually became a key component that dictated the characteristics for the future growth of the city. Economic policies such as the revision of the urban law in 1975 permitted and actively encouraged suburban expansion outside the cities peripheries in an attempt to regulate land prices; and later, the reformulation of the legal frameworks surrounding land use in greater Santiago - allowing for the subdivision of agricultural plots occupying the city peripheries for further suburban expansion (again aimed at freeing up the inner city for more economically viable developments). As a result of this new form of expansion, the cities centrality was broken, and new centralities were scattered across the east as an incentive to promote new suburban sprawls.
With the introduction of this new economic model, and the utopian promise of suburban life in America, the wealthy uprooted and rapidly migrated away from the center, to eventually form new sub-centers and islands of suburbia’s in the eastern peripheries of the city. However, in 1979 a legal policy allowed for the eradication of centralized shantytowns, whereby members of lower socioeconomic groups where relocated to the western peripheries, in an attempt to free up valuable land for development. As a consequence of these new urban policies, the city today exists as two halves; the North Eastern – the zone of wealth and the highest concentration of basic infrastructure and program, and the South Western – a landscape dominated by sub- standard low-income housing.
With the rapid decline in population density in the inner city, and with urban growth policies that promote suburban development, the cities socio-economic hierarchy and subsequent spatial organization remained polarized. As a response to the peripheral development, distances between origin and destination became subject to internal migration. With this in mind, the notion of transport becomes the primary and necessary element in determining the efficient functioning of the city, whilst the specific action of commuting becomes a fundamental part of everyday city life.

My project feeds of this context and looks at mega parking structures as a potentially dominant typology in the urban landscape of Santiago. With the combination of a decline in users of public transport and the resultant increase in numbers of private car ownership in the last 10 years, I believe the necessity for these utilitarian monuments within the city context to be inevitable. Thus the need to reconfigure these spaces as vibrant and crucial urban entities that promote and stimulate a diversity of actions and interactions, as compared to cultural black holes in the urban fabric of the city is essential.