Santiago de Chile | Lingering smog trapped in the thermal inversion created by Los Andes
We are now entering the second decade of the 21st Century. Globalization has produced the first-ever global economic crisis slowing the economies of the developed world to an unpalatable pace. Architects, along with all other producers of culture, are turning their attention to the developing world where the massive global currents of capital and resources are shifting to fuel the rapid growth and transformation of cities. The question of the city is reaching ever expanding levels of complexity as rapid urbanization accelerates on the African Continent, Southeast Asia, China, and Latin America where extraordinary opportunities are born out of extreme constraints. The question at hand is no longer how to generate urban complexity, but rather how to understand and act within this new confluence of urban crises by making the existing complexity evident in ways that produce systemic gains for the city.
I recently spent time in two Latin American Capitals, Santiago de Chile and Buenos Aires, Argentina. These two Mega Cities are 691 miles apart from each other and on opposite sides of the cone of South America. The histories of these two cities formed together in the Spanish Empire's conquest of the South American continent. Each were once seats of Spanish Viceroyalty power and economic hubs, and today they are very different cities.
In architecture, "Section" is understood as a method of drawing where single cut through a structure reveals its organizational vectors. Of the word's 14 definitions offered by Merriam Webster, three are of interest in understanding Santiago de Chile:
1) The action or instance of separating by cutting
2) A distinct part or portion of a larger body
3) A distinct part of a territorial or political area.
Santiago de Chile is a city of sectional extremes. The city is spectacularly staged where the earth is heaving itself into the sky: a one hour drive to the 13,000ft border with Argentina in Los Andes and a one hour drive to the 0ft Pacific coastline. When flying from NYC to Santiago de Chile, one flies south along the sliver of land that comprises Chile. On the left side of the cabin, the view is of los Andes and the border with Argentina. On the right side of the cabin, the view of of the Pacific coast. My friend Rodrigo cleverly noted that in effect, Chile is as wide as an airplane fuselage. Santiago de Chile sits on an ancient lake bed valley in Los Andes that creates a massive thermal inversion making for a massive air quality issue that only clears up when it rains. Of course the rain then turns the air quality issue into a water quality issue...
Santiago de Chile has no mayor, but rather is a 6.6 million person agglomeration of 32 different municipalities and the Chilean federal government creating an extraordinary, sectional, bureaucratic nightmare. 40% of Chile lives in Santiago and the city generates 45% of Chile's GDP. The value in Chile's economy is generated from the land. Copper, agriculture, and tourism are the major exports with copper serving as the counry's economic backbone. Huge economic disparity is evidenced in Santiago by the extremely wealthy sections in the Northeast of the city and the very poor informal settlements in the South and the West sections of the city. Wealth is extracted from the land in the north of the country in the form of copper ore and exported globally. Consequently, Santiago and Chile more broadly never evolved a developed manufacturing sector of it's economy that could produce a middle class.
Politics in Chile is extremely polarized. Augusto Pinochet ascended to power in the 1973 C.I.A. backed Chilean coup d'état that ousted Marxist President Salvador Allende. He left La Moneda Presidential Palace in Santiago de Chile on March 11th 1990 after 26 years in power in a bloodless transition back to democracy. Statistical accounts of the Pinochet dictatorship are as contoversial as the dictatorship itself, but is seems that more than 3,000 Chileno dissidents were executed, 80,000 inprisioned, 30,000 tortured, and some 200,000 exiled. The political pendulum swings wide in Chile and the living memories of dictatorship keeps the left far left and the right far right. A side-effect of this polarization is a lack of understanding of complexity as the milieu of politics rarely contains any discussion of content, but rather continuous establishment of position. When coupled with the sectional bureaucracy of Santiago, the result is a city that does not understand it's own complexity: a provincial, alpha-world city.
An interesting side effect of globalization seems to be an anxiety for local identity. "Traditional" atesianal tchochkies clog every port-of-call as some sort of consumable artifact of local identity and culture. This anxiety applies to cities as well. Santiago de Chile has public space, but no public identity. That is to say, the city has no vision of itself and consequently public spaces are largely unprogrammed or the existing programs are not positioned in any sophisticated relationship to the city. Clearly, this is a direct result from a lack of complexity in the identity of the city itself. In fact, Santiago has many "cultural centers," artifacts of various political legacies, that sit empty and are used for corporate expos and parties.
So... what?
The issue is identity. Santiago de Chile requires both a Metropolitan Identity and a Cosmopolitan Identity for this second decade of the 21st Century. What it doesn't need is a complex project or a project that generates complexity. What it needs is project that makes visible existing complexities: a visionary project that could illuminate the sectional extremes as parts of the whole of the city. A project that transforms a city denizen into an active participant in the city giving rise to a collective sense of public identity.
ZC
Sunday, November 29, 2009 at 10:27AM 
Metropol Parasol under construction in Sevilla, Spain by J. Mayer H.
