Event overview
Dr. María Luisa Méndez, Sociology Department, Universidad Diego Portales, Santiago-Chile
In this article, I focus on middle class residential politics in areas that have been recently declared as “heritage neighborhoods” (Zona Típica). On the one hand, most middle class residents involved in these local politics denounce an “urban massacre” in traditional neighborhoods, which is characterized by the unexpected, undiscriminating and systematic demolition of houses in order to give way to new high rise buildings. For these residents, preparing and presenting their cases to the National Monuments Council (CMN) in order to have their areas of residence declared as heritage neighborhoods has been a way of protecting what they call “the barrio kind of life”, in other words, a lifestyle based at a small scale, local shops, relatively rich and family centered sociability, etc. On the other hand, however, and in order to make their cases, these residents have had to draw a line between what is and what is not considered part of the area, and therefore the lifestyle that is worth being protected. This process of production of space (Lefebvre, 1991) involves institutional, discursive and performative angles (Berson and Jackson, 2013), which lead to the physical delineation of the borders of the heritage neighborhood.
Following Berking et al. ideas about urban conflict as played out in local contexts and particularly mobilized through cultural frames or repertoires (Berking et al, 2006), and boundary work (Lamont, 1992; Lamont and Virag, 2002), it is not rare to find binary oppositions such as the old and the new, the traditional and the modern; values in favor of social interaction versus individualism (Gwen van Eijk, 2011); or the public versus the private (Méndez and Barozet, 2012); social ties versus anonymity; heterogeneity versus homogeneity (Tissot, 2011); the slow and the fast way of living; pro egalitarian views versus neoliberal views (Shapiro, 2009), among others. Possibly, the distinction that epitomizes this boundary work is that of the authentic and traditional middle class versus the (inauthentic) emergent or new middle class. The former would embody a pre deregulation period in Chile and the latter would represent the recent rapid, modern, individualized and non engaged way of living.
My argument in this paper is that, although these middle class residential politics involve strong institutional, symbolic, social and spatial boundary work, they do this while also expressing what they consider are more inclusive political views. This case shows how space is produced under times of change. These claims illustrate that it is possible to develop a rhetoric of justification that expresses both awareness of neoliberal residential politics and the desire for relatively exclusive spaces: they are actually not rejecting less privileged people, they are actually confronting a neoliberal urban massacre. Thus, when confronting urban transformation, these residents’ rhetoric on neighborhoods provides critiques to privatization and neoliberalism, by recapturing a pre-neoliberal reforms period and neighborhood sociability. Notwithstanding that, however, inequalities are still embedded in claims to place making and belonging. In this case, inevitably, belonging is a matter of rejecting the “aspiracional”, the emergent, the “neoliberal” new middle classes in Chile. Finally, by addressing the relationship of the middle classes to territory and their place in relation to the contemporary city (Butler and Robson, 2003; Bridge, Butler and Lees, 2012; Zukin, 2010; Low, 2003; Savage et al, 2005; Brown-Saracino, 2009), this paper focuses on questions regarding the ways in which we currently understand different middle class neighborhoods in terms of intra and inter class distinctions, and the local politics and practices involved in those distinctions.
Dates & times
Date | Time | Add to calendar |
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2 Feb 2015 | 3:00pm - 5:00pm |
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