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At the time of victory, on September 4, 1970, Chile was experiencing profoundly uneven accelerated urbanization. Facing the housing deficit, access to services and urban facilities would be the challenge of the Popular Government. Applying creativity and participation of popular sectors, President Allende addressed with innovation the problems that we still face today.
Salvador Allende and the Chilean road to socialism in democracy had a program of 40 measures, the mobilization of a generation of new innovative professionals, workers committed to transformations, as well as, with the admiration and collaboration of a generation of the world left. The combination of popular wisdom and technical innovation will take the President from 36.6% initial support to 44.2% shortly before his ouster. When he still had half his term left, there was an unprecedented explosion of creativity and popular energy, whose echoes persist to this day.
The democratic and plural leadership, his capacity to listen, was the seal of the fellow president for the benefit of the effectiveness and creativity of his government; today they would call it effective horizontal leadership. Seal very well embodied by the team between the construction worker prime minister, Héctor Cortez, and the architect Miguel Lawner, responsible for implementing the program in the urban and housing environment.
Chile is at that time a country in the process of modernization and accelerated urbanization, with 8.8 million inhabitants, 75% living in cities and only 27% concentrated in the capital. That is to say, a decentralized and more homogeneously inhabited territory, but with low human development indices.
Shortly before, the Ministry of Housing and Urbanism had been created (1965), the first Metropolitan Plan of Santiago, and various public entities to implement social housing policies, but construction was stagnant due to lack of public land and an incipient industry.
The infrastructure networks did not cover the popular sectors equally, accumulating a housing deficit of 600 thousand homes as a result of migrations from the countryside to the city, which had generated land seizures in the urban peripheries. With populations emerging like callampas in the forest after the rains.
The government program thus recognized it with 5 concrete measures, seeking to comprehensively face these challenges: “Carry out the remodeling of cities and neighborhoods, with the purpose of preventing the expulsion of modest groups to the periphery, guaranteeing the interests of the inhabitants of the sector. remodeled, like the small businessman who works there, ensuring 10% of the occupants in their future location ”.
To achieve its objectives, numerous real estate projects will be promoted to relocate these popular camps, a KPD industrial prefabrication system will be installed that reinvigorated the incipient public and private industrial production, a unique experience in our history. The site operation is also deployed to regularize land tenure and access to the basic infrastructure network such as water, electricity and sewerage, but this was only the beginning.
It was possible to expand large remodeling projects to densify the urban centers of the country with the participation of the residents; Let’s Go Up was the most innovative of the socialist government’s initiatives to incorporate the popular sectors into well-located vertical neighborhood dynamics, and to densify them. According to the 1970 census, households living in apartments were barely 7%, today they represent 17.5% in the capital. By the end of 1972, the country had exhausted the available construction materials and reached a historic pick in housing construction, which would only be retaken two decades later by democratic governments.
Today that political program is still in force, becoming a public policy of the State, a response during the coalition governments led by the socialist president Michelle Bachelet. However, our cities are the most unequal in the OECD, led by Santiago. This due to the neoliberal intervention of the dictatorship that liberalized the ownership of urban land, eradicated settlers towards the periphery and subsidized the supply generating a large speculative real estate industry.
The entire world today faces similar challenges, but of different proportions. High levels of socio-spatial segregation, housing deficit in the main capitals of the world – there are houses for tourists, but not for residents. A socialist agenda for cities cannot avoid conflicts such as setting rental prices, or establishing quotas to control the speculative phenomena of global capitalism, the environmental effects on cities, the living conditions of their inhabitants, the governance of speculative processes and the increase of sustainable urban density.
The coronavirus pandemic threatened the idea of the concentration and density of our cities on the planet, reminding us that the consumption of natural land, as well as the unlimited growth of city-regions fed by the investment market, are an environmental danger that puts in risk our own survival. A parsimonious use of land and natural resources requires governing both cities and global capitalism, which were great challenges for Latin America at the time, and which Salvador Allende knew how to interpret.
- The content in this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of The counter.
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