For a Proper Home

Housing Rights in the Margins of Urban Chile, 1960-2010

Bibliographic Data

ID2818541
AuthorsÁngela Vergara (0000-0002-6871-4486)
Year2016
Volume96
Issue2
Pages394-396
Publication date2016-05-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherDuke University Press (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1215/00182168-3484378
OpenAlexW2345087996
LanguageEN
Citations received6

Edward Murphy provides an engaging, well-researched, and bottom-up historical account of low-income residents in Santiago, Chile, from the 1960s to 2010. Looking at a time of rapid urban growth and dramatic political and economic transformations, the author analyzes the struggles of Santiago's poorest residents and the multiple ways that they have shaped the urban landscape, ideas about property rights, and state housing policies. By examining the intersections between citizenship and home ownership, Murphy reveals how Santiago's housing movement became both a form of urban insurgency and a consolidation of traditional private property rights. From a larger perspective, the book illustrates the history of Chile's urban growth and the ongoing and unresolved questions of urban and social segregation and inequality.Throughout the book, Murphy shows the critical importance of interdisciplinary research and writing. Weaving together historical and anthropological methodologies and a solid analysis of recent scholarship on urban citizenship, he successfully moves between the realms of politics and social movements and the private space of the home. Through exhaustive historical research in state archives that include documentation from the Ministry of Housing and Urbanism and public housing agencies, the municipal government, and neighborhood associations as well as congressional records, he tells a story of negotiation and adaptation, the transformation of urban policies, and the multiple ways that poor urban residents have appealed to, interacted with, and negotiated with the state. Based on oral interviews, ethnographic observations, and critical examination of his own privileged position as he conducts research in Santiago's urban periphery, the author enters the homes of the poor, providing a detailed account of ideas of ownership, social expectations, and economic strategies. It is important to note that the book focuses exclusively on Santiago, Chile's capital and largest city, and that the interviews and ethnographies were conducted in four poor neighborhoods located in Santiago's northern periphery (an area called Renca).The book is chronologically organized in nine chapters, providing a clear narrative of Chile's contemporary history. The first part of the book (chapters 1 and 2) provides a good theoretical and historical foundation, while chapters 3 through 9 offer a historical narrative that places the questions of housing and citizenship within the context of Chile's conflictive political changes (as the country moves from traditional democracy to a democratic socialist revolution, military dictatorship, and back to democracy). In chapters 3 and 4, for example, the author examines the growing social activism that characterized the period between 1960 and the military coup of 1973. This was a time of insurgent ownership, as the author clearly shows, when poor urban residents and squatters, many of them recent rural migrants, organized seizures of land and pushed the national state to respond to their needs. This movement, as the Popular Unity period demonstrates, was not free of tensions, and political conflicts shaped, radicalized, and, many times, divided local urban movements.Chapters 5 through 9 are the most original ones, covering a period that has been little studied by historians. In these chapters, the author illustrates how military repression and the imposition of a neoliberal economic agenda transformed the city and, specifically, the lives of shantytown residents. Pobladores, the author explains, both adapted to and resisted these changes, joining the larger struggle for democracy in the 1980s. Following the return of democracy in 1990, poor urban residents have continued struggling for better housing, although their movements have had less visibility than in the past. The author, then, contributes to larger debates about the long-term consequences of Chile's dictatorship and the continuity of a neoliberal economic model.Overall, For a Proper Home contributes to understanding Chile's recent political, economic, and social changes through the lens of Santiago's shantytowns. The author clearly documents how housing and social movements have been an integral part of Chilean history, shaping urban politics and public policy. From the activism and land seizures that became emblematic during the 1960s to the struggle for democracy in the 1980s, residents in shantytowns have placed housing rights at the center of the political debate. Despite the many problems that still affect the city, Santiago's poor residents have become homeowners and have gained access to basic urban infrastructure, transforming the city as well as their own individual and collective identity. From the fascinating case of Santiago, the author also raises critical questions about urban growth in the global South and the different and similar ways that squatters and poor urban residents beyond Chile have been able to access a home

Citizenship · Geography · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Public housing · Right to the city · Scholarship · Sociology · State (computer science) · Urbanism · Architecture · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Latin American Urban Studies · Law · Public Administration

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