Santiago, Chile: globalization and metropolitan expansion: existed continues existing

Abstract

In the mid seventies, a new stage of modernization and development of capitalism begun in Chile, impulsed by a strategy of economic liberalization. The profound restructuring that took place culminated in a stage of sustained economic growth, reindustrialization and tertiarization. At the same time a progressive recovery of the tendency towards metropolitan concentration occurred, in which the command of the new economic powers and the main industrial and tertiary activities as well, showed a clear preference towards settling in the Metropolitan Area of Santiago. This gave way to the intensification of suburbanization of both productive and population activities as well. Three types of transformations are worth mentioning. First, the emergence of a city with regional coverage, suburbanized and polycentric, with imprecise boundaries, (like) an archipelago type configuration, and whose expansive dynamism has incorporated many neighboring urban centers and rural areas which have begun to be part of a wide periurban area as well. Second, despite the persistence of a high regressive income distribution which has maintained a extremely fragmented and segregated city, an important reduction of the relative levels of poverty and indigence has also occurred. And third, the irruption of a group of new urban artifacts (shopping malls, large commercial surfaces, condominiums and gated communities, decentralized business enterprise centers, multiplex, and new areas for recreation, etc.) that have begun to have a strong effect on the structuring and articulation of new metropolitan space.

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