“Sanhattan”: The Making of a Global Business District in Santiago de Chile

• In Event: Gentrificación. La ciudad neoliberal

Abstract

Scholars have long argued that capitalist globalization, rather than inaugurating a “flat world,” has generated a cross-border network of particular sites where capital accumulation is managed. These take the form of “global cities,” which serve as nodes within what Manuel Castells labelled the “space of flows” that comprises the global economy. While originally identified as a Global North phenomenon (e.g. New York, London, and Tokyo), there is increasing recognition that a growing roster of Global South cities function as “emerging gateways.” This paper focuses on the emblematic case of Santiago, the once-sleepy Chilean capital that now anchors a metropolitan area of over 7 million inhabitants. Crucially, Santiago has become a hub for global financial services, corporate headquarters, tourism, and Latin America’s ever-closer economic integration with the Asia-Pacific region. Management functions supporting this commercial activity are concentrated in the global business district christened as “Sanhattan,” which began to coalesce in the early 1990s and is currently Santiago’s most “influential” neighborhood. Its anchor is the “Costanera Center” complex, which features high-end hotels, corporate offices, and Latin America’s tallest building. As a new site of accumulation, Sanhattan exemplifies contemporary spatial transformation in global capitalism. Other regional examples include São Paulo’s “Brooklin Novo” (New Brooklyn) and Rio de Janeiro’s “Porto Maravilha” (Marvelous Port) development. Thus, along with analyzing the meteoric rise of a “Southern” global city, this paper heeds Saskia Sassen’s call to “relocalise pieces of…city economies” by demonstrating how global business districts, as micro-level sites within cities, illuminate global capitalism’s local entanglements.

Author

• Kevin Funk, Spring Hill College