The rural lands of urban sprawl: institutional changes and suburban rurality in Santiago de Chile

ABSTRACT

Urban sprawl has been mainly discussed in regard to its negative impacts. However, there is a variety of rural lands that benefit the suburbanization process in social, environmental, economic and political terms. These lands configure a category of rurality rarely considered as part of the urban phenomenon, and usually seen as pending space for further (sub)urbanization. In this sense, planning regimes and institutional changes tend to transform suburban rurality into marketable residential space, triggering reactions of preservation and change. With regard to the capital city of Chile – Santiago – it is argued that the meanings about the “urban”, the “rural” and the “city” become disputable in the light of suburban rurality and problematic as direct antonyms or unequivocal synonyms. It is also demonstrated that despite dramatic institutional changes, suburban rurality can survive over time if it finds support in social organizations and alternative planning rationales. The research in which this paper is based was conducted in five years and included the revision of several leftover interstitial spaces in which suburban rurality emerges as one of the most meaningful categories of suburban space. To gain further understanding on suburban rurality, this paper is based on a qualitative approach – including semi-structured interviews and archival revision of historical documents and policy reports – and focuses on the southern geographical space of the metropolitan area of Santiago de Chile, where most of social housing developments have been located over the last 60 years.

KEYWORDS:

• Urban sprawl
• suburban rurality
• familial orchards
• social organizations
• Santiago de Chile

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 The level of well-being is determined by the socioeconomic level (NSE) that defines the socioeconomic group (GSE). Such nomenclature is used to characterize populations in accordance with socioeconomic indicators, which include salary, domestic goods, property, employment, education, house, and cars inter alia. The nomenclature includes AB, C1 (high-income or wealthy), C2 and C3 (lower middle class and middle class), and D and E (poor and very poor).

2 “Huertero”: A person who lives and works in a “huerto” [orchard].

3 “Canalista”: person who has legal rights to use water of a canal for agricultural purposes.

4 Land prices in Chile appears in “Unidades de Fomento” (UF), a monetary unit used to adjust the Chilean peso to inflation. It allows the value to be kept constant during low inflation. The UF values cited here were estimated by the National Internal Revenue Service (SII) for 12 January 2016 and transformed into US Dollars at: www.xe.com, accessed in January 2016.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Commission of Science and Technology of Chile, CONICYT (project code 72110038).