‘YO NO ME VOY DE LA CARO’; DEALING WITH GENTRIFICATION IN AN INNER-CITY COMMUNITY OF NEOLIBERAL SANTIAGO DE CHILE

ABSTRACT

This proposal analyses the kinds of violence taking place in an inner-city neighbourhood of Santiago de Chile and how people cope with this challenging scenario to avoid gentrification processes. In particular, it examines the spatial dynamics of exclusion and stigma in which such violence occurs; it explores diverse drivers of exclusion and gentrification in the context of thirty five years of deep neoliberal reforms; this discussion goes through the ways in which people respond to, cope with and resist exclusion and threats of gentrification. The principal finding of this work is that there is a simultaneous long-term process of violence from above and below taking place in the settlement, interacting with and reshaping each other and the daily life of the community throughout. In addition, this innerburb, next to urban infrastructure, is somehow helpless to erase the stigma of a violent area despite all the self-help improvement and the public infrastructure built up in the last decade. Furthermore, this stigma had been used in an attempt to mix the borough in order to conduct a gentrification process within it. To be part of the old suburbs’ ring places this neighbourhood on the symbolic periphery of the city. The symbolic periphery refers in this vein to the targeting of the area as a territory that can be transformed through the urban land market and spatial policies rather than a place in which a community is embedded. The spatial isolation of neighbourhoods from different social classes maintains the marginalisation of the turf and it does not provide better social integration despite being close to shopping centres.

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