Rodrigo CAIMANQUE, Universidad de Chile, Chile
This paper analyses the intersections between diverse grassroots movements of Baron hill in Valparaiso, Chile, and role of current municipal politics based on citizen participation and community empowerment. Baron hill is an historic area of the city, subject to real estate pressure expressed both as high-rise towers for housing and exclusive projects aimed at second homes. Grassroots movements have struggle to revert this form of urban entrepreneurial development while also building processes of autogestión aimed at defending and protecting the collective use of historic buildings for the community.
Since 2016, the municipality of Valparaiso has been leaded by Mayor linked to New Municipalism principles (Thompson, 2020), supporting communities in their struggles, and opposing to the forms of real estate development happening in the city and Baron hill. The municipal council, after hearing the community claims, took the political decision to add more restrictions to the local master plan, reducing the permitted highs for buildings. This implied a triumph for grassroots movements organized as network that goes beyond neighborhood boundaries, though not without political cost at municipal level.
Through a qualitative study based on key actor's interviews and discourse analysis, this study seeks to assess to what extent municipal supports are helping to build a co-operative agenda in the territory (Bianchi and Vieta, 2020), and to what extent grassroots movements continue developing their objectives of autogestion after the local government political shifting. This work also open questions regarding the effectiveness of these measures in a context of increasing interest for real estate development and the threat of gentrification.
Mots clés : New Municipalism|Autogestion |urban politics
A105190RC