Citizens' Anti-highway Revolt in Post-Pinochet Chile: Catalyzing Innovation in Transport Planning

Figures & data

Figure 1 A map of the highway project cutting through the centre of Santiago, affecting mostly low-income neighbourhoods with low car ownership rates and therefore little opportunity to use it. The large green patch is the San Cristobal Hill around which the Coordinadora organizations were located. The yellow line is the final path of this sector of the highway—under the river, so it left three of the four Coordinadora communities intact. Source: Living City.

Table 1 Municipalities crossed by the Costanera Norte highway project

	Name	%poverty (2006)	Household per capita income (1996)^a	UNDP human development ranking	Cars/1,000 inhabitants	Population (1995)
High income	Vitacura	4.4	854	1	308	79,914
	Las Condes	2.3	777	2		228,030
	Providencia	3.5	728	3		114,195
	Lo Barnechea	8.1	667	6		63,368
Middle income	Santiago	7.3	461	17	115	214,563
Low-income, high-poverty areas	Independencia	6.0	388	82	9393	70,986
	Quinta Normal	10.8	340	88		110,071
	Recoleta	12.4	316	93		156,671
	Pudahuel	7.1	267	100		169,684
	Cerro Navia	17.5	243	143		153,716

Notes: Of the 10 municipal areas affected by the Costanera Norte highway project, three saw significant resistance: the middle- to high-income Providencia, and the low-income Independencia and Recoleta areas. Population, Seremi Planificación y Coordinación (2009); Income per capita: Agostini (2010); %poverty per comuna, Casen (2006). UNDP/PNUD (2004b), Anexo Estadístico, UNDP/PNUD (2004b). Cars per thousand, SECTRA (2006b) (East, Centre, North).

a Converted from pesos to dollars, using the Central Bank average dollar: peso exchange 1996 (Central Bank 2003–2006).

Table 2 Citizenship learning and the Coordinadora

Citizenship learning should	The Coordinadora
1. Help people acquire new knowledge by linking to the core concepts in their existing patterns of knowledge	Started from each community's/leader's survival and environmental aspirations, to acquire and structure new knowledge appropriately
2. Practice what it preaches, provide experiences of engaging in democracy not just information about it	Functioned in a horizontal manner, practicing direct democracy, as key to committing, training and empowering leaders from diverse organizations
3. Provide opportunities to practice problem solving and to become self-aware about their problem solving processes	Organizing the campaign, which involved challenges on the streets, in the judicial, environmental, communications and financial spheres required sensitive, aware problem solving
4. Provide opportunities to re-present experience in different ways, in order to deepen analysis and understanding	Reframed imposed narratives (‘selfish neighbours’, ‘self-interested market people’) to articulate their communities' needs as democratic rights, essential to social justice
5. Allow spiral learning (revisiting and understanding at a deeper level), to facilitate growth and development	Collective deliberations involved all participants contributing their knowledge, willingness to act, ideas and capacities, and constant analysis of the state of the campaign formed part of these processes, thus developing critical and analytical skills
6. Provide ‘scaffolding’ opportunities, in which those who are more experienced help novices with tasks that they cannot quite manage themselves, giving control back to the novice when he or she can manage alone	Each community had specific strengths and weaknesses; through collective action in the Coordinadora, the tendency was to supplement weaknesses and limit errors, through collective analysis and decision-making
7. Provide practice at all levels of reflection from immediate to deeper self-examination	Generated a variety of spaces, mostly informal, that encouraged a variety of reflection
8. Best be conducted in the context of communities of practice—establishing group norms, values, language, meanings and purposes	Successfully created a collective identity based on common practices across diversity during the anti-highway campaign, and passed this along to Living City
9. Incorporate a range of cultural expressions and social activities to create the learning community	Combined a range of experiences, interests, spaces for participation, learning and action
10. Engage with values	Questioned assumed values (inequality as symbolized by the highway), counterposing issues of rights

Source: Own elaboration using Merrifield's 10 components of citizen learning (column 1), Merrifield (2001, pp. 28–29).

Table 3 Organizational characteristics compared

	Coordinadora (1995–1999)	Living City (2000–2004)
Attitude to participation	Forced, through conflict	Part of lifestyle, some conflict but also co-operation and eventually co-production
Main feelings	Humiliation, fear, feeling mistreated by authorities, insecurity, mistrust	Friendly, supportive, rewarding, growing self-confidence, mutual confidence, trust
Knowledge	Seeking help, information	Experienced, shares, helps, actively seeks new
Skills	Vary widely across the groups	Shared more evenly, also more specialization
Member organizations	Many informal, some formal organizations, some tensions	Many formal and informal organizations, working together
Continuity	Constant interruptions and abrupt shifts when leadership changed	Continuity of issues and support for continuity of organizations, although problems remain
Resources	Uneven access to resources, sharing	Resources better managed, able to obtain more
Relationship authorities	‘Them and us’, some ‘friends’	Project-based critiques, collaboration on some initiatives, especially senior technical staff
Type of links	Bond internally, links with ‘outsiders’	Bond internally, bridge through Living City

Source: Own elaboration.

Figure 2 Relational trees and forests. Each colour represents the different kinds of participants' efforts to improve Bellavista, as they communicated throughout their different relationship trees. Small groups involving everyone from street vendors, through neighbours and public officials communicated across class and other boundaries to build consensus throughout a beleagured urban community, which led to a successful project.

Table 4 Categories of citizenship, participation and governance compared

	Main types/categories
	1	2	3
Citizen participation stances (Atwood)	Victim	Survivor	Leadership
Citizen participation (level of organization)	None or limited	Ad hoc coalition (social movement)	Citizen institution
Citizen participation: predominant interaction	Others help	Others help and work with	Lead systemic change
Planning	Non-planning	Anti-planning	Inclusive planning
Types of participation (Susskind et al.)	Paternalism	Conflict	Co-production
Types of governance (Kooiman)	Hierarchical	Self-governance	Co-governance
Political/policy system (my categories, based on Tillly)	Authoritarian	Contested	Democratizing
Power direction	Top down	Bottom up	Middle out
Key outcome	Imposition	Resistance	Autonomy and resilience, co-responsibility

Source: Own elaboration based on typologies developed by Atwood (1972), and used by Living City (2001 onward), Susskind and Elliott (1983) and Kooiman (cited in Somerville 2011).

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