Learning One’s Place in the Neoliberal City: Subsidized Housing and Urban Citizenship in Santiago, Chile

• In Event: 461 - Regular Session. Ethnography/Ethnographic Studies 2

Abstract

Housing is not only a basic human necessity, but conditions of residence are also central in shaping the conditions of urban social citizenship, understood as full membership in the community of the city. Several scholars have argued that struggles around housing in cities of the global South have given rise to new understandings and claims to social rights. However, this paper argues that an expansive sense of rights does not always result from such struggles. Drawing on a long-term ethnographic study of a struggle for access to state-subsidized housing on the periphery of Santiago, Chile, this paper examines the relations of citizenship that emerge between the urban poor who claim rights to improved housing conditions, and a neoliberal state that provides only limited social benefits through market mechanisms. It shows that when states institutionalize market-based systems of social provision that provide only low-quality housing to the most deprived sectors of society, they engage with the urban poor not as citizens entitled to full urban belonging, but as failed market actors who are conceded only a correspondingly devalued place in the city. Furthermore, by turning the production of housing over to the private sector, the state limits the possibility for the poor to claim expansive social rights. Through their engagement with a neoliberal system of housing provision, Chile’s urban poor learn that recourse to the state is not a viable path to full conditions of citizenship, and turn toward individual market strategies to improve their place in the city.

Author

• Carter M Koppelman, University of California-Berkeley