Neoliberal gentrification in Santiago de Chile

Speaker: Dr. Ernesto López-Morales, Urban Planning Department, University of Chile

Discussant: Dr. Alan Mace (LSE Geography and Environment)

Venue: LSE Geography and Environment, Room STC.S221, St.Clement's Building 

(http://www2.lse.ac.uk/mapsanddirections/findingyourwayaroundlse.aspx)

Chile holds one of the most neoliberalized housing and land markets in Latin America. López-Morales analyses several politico-economic aspects of the Chilean market of large-scale, high-rise urban renewal and its effects in terms of land economics and gentrification. His presentation specifically observes the ground rent value monopolistically extracted and absorbed by upper-income redevelopers, and the effects experienced by local lower-income owner-occupants in terms of a loss of their ground rent value. Whilst local-level municipalities artificially "enlarge" rent gaps by establishing high Floor Area Ratios (FAR), assuring the monopoly capture of the potential ground rents by the private real estate agents, the remaining ground rent achieved by petty owners-residents and tenants cannot meet the value needed to purchase replacement accommodation, producing a noticeable context of social exclusion. This presentation reflects on the relation between urban neoliberalism, land economics, and gentrification, and presents evidence to support that gentrification can be different to what has been explained by works on/from the West or English speaking world academia, basically differing in scale, the type of displacement produced, and the disparity of the power deployed by the agents involved in the process.