PARA TODOS TODO: ‘UNEXPECTED’ OUTCOMES OF URBAN GREENING POLICIES IN SANTIAGO, CHILE

Abstract

This research analyzes how a continuum of socio-economic and political structures since colonization, what I defined as colonial legacies, has affected the development of greening policies and other broader urban realities in contemporary Santiago, Chile’s capital city. I connect these colonial legacies with the current outcomes of urban green areas in several ways: 1. How Santiago’s spatial organization and planning have excluded working-poor, indigenous, and non-white people from fair access to services and spaces of privilege. 2. How Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship (1973-1990) increased geographical and economic disparities across wealthy and non-wealthy municipalities. 3. How neoliberal economic policies not only decreased public services while increasing social exclusion and economic segregation for everyday people but also prioritized economic outcomes for municipalities in detriment over social and environmental. In dialogue with the literature on green space in Santiago, this research brings together a de-colonial theoretical framework, intended to make visible hidden and often oppressive realities affecting everyday and marginalized people, and a Global South epistemology urban scholarship, intended to validate the production of knowledge that comes from spaces in the margins, to also understand: 1) to what extent are urban greening policies at the municipal level excluding/including residents from participating in urban green area development, and 2) how are residents (everyday, low-income, and marginalized) rethinking urban green spaces (and the urban in general) in the wake of massive social unrest across the Latin American region. I offer answers to these inquiries by using qualitative methods (open-ended interviews with municipal authorities and residents of six municipalities, participatory observation, content analysis, and visceral data collection) to show how the access and development of these public spaces have been shaped by structural systems that have continued the ideas in which Santiago was organized since 1541. An expert-residents’ disconnection, were ideas and the understanding of urban green areas (as well as the urban in general) from authorities does not replicate what everyday and marginalized people need and asked for, emerged as a major theme to explain the realities of green areas across wealthy and non-wealthy comunas. This research concludes that this disconnection has become fundamental to clarify why other oppressive urban realities, beyond green areas development, have remained invisible and unaddressed by the state and elite group in Santiago, a situation that generated massive social unrest in the country.