Between hamlets and the ‘walled city’. The (re)definition of the peri-urban landscape of Santiago, in the case of Colina district

Abstract

Santiago de Chile has experienced processes of peri-urban expansion characterized by the proliferation of closed residential spaces in its metropolitan periphery. These mega-real estate projects cover large areas of land and urban-scale facilities, installing a new housing typology that aspires to be a city in itself. We are talking about “fenced cities” that have produced the progressive deterioration of spaces that were never urban and lost their exclusively rural condition, generating problems such as the degradation of the natural environment, the destruction of agricultural plots and the growing banalization of the peri-urban landscape.

This is a phenomenon that is clearly expressed in the southern valley of the Colina commune, where we carried out an action-research project, whose exploratory and propositional character seeks to originate design solutions that, theoretically and critically informed, are capable of reversing the growing degradation of said landscape. Under this methodological approach, the article constructs a graphic narrative, which takes the survey as the primary form of research in architecture, using drawing to describe: what has been? what is? and, what could be? the peri-urban landscape of the southern valley of Colina. Following this tripartite structure, we begin by delving into the understanding of the urban history of the commune, to understand the configuration of its current dynamics, until reaching the formulation of a project for the future.

In this way, a morphological-historiographical journey is constructed that documents the transition of the Colina commune from the rural matrix of the Picunche people; passing through the deterioration and loss of its agricultural systems promoted by the real estate development of the “high-income cone”; until reaching the definition of design solutions based on nature, which contemplate the insertion of eco-neighborhoods and sustainable mobility systems with the potential to change and/or reverse the current peri-urbanization patterns.