Relatos de vida en un asentamiento informal en El Boro, Alto Hospicio, Chile

Abstract

Since its creation as a municipality in 2004, Alto Hospicio has tripled the number of its residents — mostly young people, low-wage earners, informal workers, and immigrants in regular and irregular situations. The number of homes has also doubled, almost entirely financed by different subsidies for social interest complexes, or self-built informally on the margins or in interstitial spaces. Considering the national scope, Alto Hospicio concentrates the largest number of informal settlements in the country. The interest of this article is to give account of the changes in the production of these settlements that have occurred in recent years. The analysis begins with information on the socio-spatial context of the city of Alto Hospicio and of a specific precarious settlement located there. In it reside the protagonists of four life stories collected here, through which, in dialogue with documentary and bibliographic sources, the changes that informal settlements have experienced are shown. It is concluded that, unlike past decades, we are facing what experts define as informal market logic, a mercantilist search that filters the production of urban space on the outskirts of the city, and that constitutes the dominant pattern in Latin America.