Chilean Architecture and Class

Thus far, the institutions I have visited and architects I have met have all been products of a small and very wealthy financial elite. The Encyclopedia of Nations, reports that

Currently more than 40 percent of the country’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of just 10 percent of the population. In Latin America, only Brazil and Guatemala have less equitable income distribution. This huge disparity has created a large social divide in which a relatively small middle class is caught between a huge mass of urban and rural poor and a small and extremely powerful elite. Fundamental to the shifts in economic policy over the years is the importance attached to income distribution by the changing administrations…The number of Chileans with incomes below the poverty line (roughly US$4,000 per year for a family of 4) fell from 46 percent of the population in 1987 to 23 percent in 1997.

(http://www.nationsencyclopedia.com/economies/Americas/Chile-POVERTY-AND-WEALTH.html)

With its huge revenues from the government-controlled copper mines, Chile is investing in housing and infrastructure development that has helped to bring many Chileans out of extreme poverty. However, a short trip outside of Santiago will show that the upscale garden communities like Providenica, Vitacura and Las Condes are lone oases. Immediately outside the city, in the agricultural lands of the Central Valley, industrial-scale cheese processing plant for La Funda sits beside a series of stick/thatch shacks in the flood plain of a polluted river (where the cows are left to graze). Farmers still plow by hand with donkeys. At the edge of a poorer exurban neighborhood, kids play soccer feet from 100 km/hr traffic inside the cloverleaf of the highway exit ramp because it’s the only government maintained grass in the area. It all makes for more thorough land use (kind of green in a way) but doesn’t do much for the quality of life of kids who chase balls in highway traffic or people’s whose houses periodically go sub-aquatic.

The Chilean architecture that gets international press is the vacation homes and corporate office towers of the suburban financial centers east of Santiago proper. Of course, it’s true just about anywhere that architecture by architects is a luxury (and largely unnecessary) product, but Chile’s example is extreme. Most upper class families are able to build vacation homes right on the coast or in the mountains with an hour or two of Santiago, which oftentimes are adjacent to hand-to-mouth farming, ranching or fishing communities. The Japanese magazine A + U  devoted its entire July 2006 edition to Chilean architecture.  Nine out of the fourteen featured structures were private homes and one was a high-end hotel. Not a single featured structure was public.

A week and a half ago, I joined the group called Un Techo Para Chile (“A Roof for Chile”) which is devoted building temporary structures and permanent housing for the extreme poor of Chile. Kind of like the Habitat for Humanity of Chile. Except when I went we weren’t building anything. We were filling in a 13’ x 10’ x 6’ hole that sat 11″ from the edge of a shack where a very nice family lived. Actually, a bathroom had stood where the hole now is, but it caved in a few weeks ago. Water (toilet and shower) waste had been pumped directly onto the ground, eroding the ground enough to create sinkhole large enough to collapse an entire portion of a house. This family is now bathroomless. It could be worse–they have a working sink in the kitchen with running water and a stove, but in a country with less income disparity, they would also have heat, a house without gaps, a paved road (this is an urban neighborhood) and a way to control the array of stray dogs and cats that seem to be invading their house. They have two small children and the father has a heart condition that leaves him too weak to work.  

Lack of decent housing poses obvious immediate economic and health problems. Lo Espejo is at least an hour by public transportation to the city center, where many residents work. The distance from both jobs and resources such as clinics, schools and government offices takes up time that could be used in child care or work, not to mention the cost.  The lack of heat and insulation keeps the houses uncomfortably cold in the winter and allows stray animals to enter the house, wanted or not. The release of raw sewage onto the ground means that both houses sometimes cave in and that people live immediately adjacent to their own waste. Animal excrement is scattered across the communal packed dirt areas, immediately adjacent to the jerry-rigged barrels used as family bread ovens and where children play.

Within Chile there is a hope that the recent economic growth can bring Chilean standards of living up across the board.  To a certain degree, extreme poverty has been well addressed.  The shack that the family in Lo Espejo occupies was built by volunteers free of charge, and more permanent housing is under construction nearby.  Unfortunately, the heavy dependence on copper revenue and its decreasing demand means that the flush of cash that the government is now experiencing might soon come up seriously short. For now, Chile is one of the least affected by the economic downturns, thanks to a huge “rainy day” fund generated by huge budget surpluses from increased copper revenue. If the international economy stays in a deep recession though, copper demand will not rise for a long time to pre-crisis levels. Heavily dependent on the industry, Chile’s government bailout may not last forever.   (See http://online.wsj.com/article/SB124337806443856111.html)

 In the meantime, though, according to the Wall Street Journal, ”Chile is putting $700 million into a huge infrastructure program designed to create at least 60,000 jobs in road paving, airport upgrades and housing construction. The home-building plan, which features subsidies for middle- and low-income buyers, has prompted developers to start clearing land for a 400-unit development called Western Gardens not far from Santiago’s airport.”  Chile has built hundreds of thousands of new public housing units in the last two and a half decades, but in Santiago, the projects are largely segregated to the far west and south of the city, leaving the poor as isolated as ever from their more middle and upper class counterparts.

Architecture has an ethical obligation to address human and wider societal issues. Architecture is not only these summer houses that are touted on international vanity magazines. Maybe this is a problem of how architects and architecture itself is structured. Architecture shouldn’t be a luxury service. Architects are able to bring design solutions and ideas that a self-builder cannot.  There is one university affiliated public housing organization, Alejandro Aravena’s Elemental “do” tank.  It’s a rare offshoot of the vanity design in which many published architecture engage. Chile has come a very long way since the Pinochet era, but the social/economic structure has a long way to go before everyone has access to halfway decent housing.  The economic crisis will show just how strong both housing policy and social change is here.