Urban justice and the city as a political project

Urban justice and the city as a political project Reflections on a metropolitan government for Santiago

The London School of Economics and Political Science The Cities Programme MSc in City Design and Social Science Candidates Nos. 51136 & 55700 Word count: 18,034 28th August 2012

Acknowledgments

We offer deep thanks to those who have been consciously and unconsciously relevant in shaping the content of this work: Margarita Greene, Elena Pontigo, Esteban Pineda, Pablo Fuentes for his generosity, Ciudad Viva, especially Tomas Marin, Josefa Errazuriz and Lake Sagaris for their encouragement and inspiration.

We dedicate this work to Gabriela, Santiago and Alan.

Contents

(1) Introduction

2

(2) Santiago mega city: fragmented, unequal, sprawling. Ungovernable?

The housing failure

The reinforcement of segregation

Urbanization and capitalist colonization

The status quo of the administrative geography

5

(3) The question of a metropolitan territory The metropolitan problem

London: evolution of boundaries and the containment of the first metropolis

20

(4) The case for metropolitan government Governability and governance

Fragmentation versus consolidation

29

(5) Good government Legitimacy

Public space in Bogota: vision and order

Visible impact and accountability

Heart, brain and muscle

35

(6) An urban politics of the inhabitant

47

(7) References

50

(1)

2

Introduction

South America is one of the most urbanized regions in the world, with 83.7% of its population living in urban areas in 2010. That number is expected to increase to 91.4% in 2050 (UN Habitat 2010). In Chile, already 87% of the population is currently urbanized (UN Data 2012). Moreover, two thirds of the country’s population live in its three largest cities, of which the capital Santiago concentrates an astonishing 35% of the nation’s inhabitants. The pace of change is fast and its traces are ingrained in the urban physical space. The city has quadrupled its surface area in the past 50 years and with over 70,000 hectares (Ferrando 2008), the built-up area spills over 3 provinces and 44 municipalities. This growth has happened in the context of an expanding economy and declining levels of poverty. Poverty is among the lowest in the continent and Chile ranks the highest of all Latin American countries in the Human Development Index (UNDP 2011). By the end of the military dictatorship, in 1990, 33% of Santiago’s inhabitants lived in poverty and by 2009 that had declined to 11.5% (Ministerio Desarrollo Social 2011). Chile’s economy is one of the strongest in the region, vigorously recovering after a decline in GDP growth in the 2008-2009 period.

In addition, Santiago has been ranked as the second best city for business in Latin America, surpassed only

by Miami (América_Economía 2010), whose inclusion in the list, possibly because the comparison is over the ‘global Latin American space economy’ (Sassen 2008).

Chile’s development path has not benefited everyone equally, however. In fact, it can best be described as ‘growth with inequality’. Chile is the most unequal country in the OECD countries, which it joined in 2010.

At the time they had the same GDP per capita than Chile in 2009 ($15,000 USD), most OECD countries decreased their inequality levels to up to 50% through their tax system, whereas Chile maintains them after taxes (Fundación_Sol 2011). Three out of four of the country’s households live on a monthly income of less than $800,000 CLP (£1,000, approx.), and highly in debt with banks and commercial institutions (Fundación_Sol 2011). Even though Santiago generates close to half of Chile’s GDP, 40% of its households have earnings lower than $280,000 CLP (£350, approx.) per month, and only a minority (5.6%) have an income higher than $1,6 million (£2,000, approx..) (SECTRA 2001). In addition, and as Klink summarizes:

‘Santiago has increasingly been facing rapid sprawl, reduction of environmental quality, socio-spatial segregation and escalating intra-metropolitan disparities.

Recent theoretical work on the spatial evolution of Greater Santiago has confirmed a (postmodern) pattern of fragmented land uses, privatisation of public spaces and social-spatial segregation, as reflected in the proliferation of gated (vertical and horizontal) communities, often directly connected to specific workplaces by

(frequently privately financed) motorways, the rise of completely new towns and isolated industrial, commercial and technological parks and districts’ (Klink 2008a: 7).

Moreover, Santiago’s expansion and segregation is carried out in the absence of a metropolitan institutional arrangement. The national government, which controls most decisions regarding urban development, does not have a policy framework for cities, and has only in the past few years started working on a national urban development policy (Gobierno de Chile 2012).

This ‘institutional limbo’ affects all metropolitan agglomerations (of which there are currently three according to the national threshold of 1 million inhabitant), but is all the more problematic in Santiago because of its magnitude and extreme fragmentation (Klink 2008a). The question that Travers (2004) asked for London is relevant to ask in this context: is Santiago ungovernable? Recently, the problem seems to be attracting more attention in academic, civil society and political circles (Abuauad & Cuadros 2012; Plataforma_ Urbana 2012). In fact, the matter has gone as far as a proposal for a constitutional amendment to create metropolitan area mayors, introduced by two senators and which should be discussed in parliament in the near future.

Our interest on the issue of a metropolitan government for Santiago stems from our view of cities as multi-scalar political entities, and we would like to explore the implications of thinking of city government reform in this light, particularly regarding the extent to which city governments can be conceived as vehicles for

greater spatial justice. There certainly is a ‘democratic deficit’ in the absence of a political voice for Santiago.

Moreover, the fact that neither Chile’s centralized political system nor its decentralization attempts have been successful in re-balancing inequalities among Santiago’s sub-metropolitan areas makes us consider the potential of a metropolitan tier and wonder about the challenges it would face. Underlying our exploration lies a conviction about the urgency of renewing the political dimension of city-making, counter weighing the dominance of financial and real estate interests in Santiago’s ‘neoliberal urbanization’ (Robles-Duran 2011), which benefits a minority at the expense of most inhabitants of the city.

We will attempt to contribute to some degree to the current debate in Santiago about a potential metropolitan government, by seeking to approach, from an urban perspective, the challenges such a reform might face. This, in the belief that metropolitan areas are a phenomenon with given specificities and particularities, and which cannot be addressed as merely a smaller version of the national or a larger version of the municipal scales. In order to do this, we will make use of studies from a diversity of areas including geography, political science, political economy, anthropology and legal studies, trying to reflect the interdisciplinary nature of contemporary urban thinking, and will attempt to draw on both international and local research. We will also explore experiences from cities in other countries in order to bring out potential lessons for Santiago.

In the opening section we will look to the present urban conditon of Santiago, highlighting the major aspects that have impacted on its uneven urban developlment.

Afterwards, we will review the topic of the metropolitan

3

territory, and will look in more detail at the London case.

In the section that follows, we will reflect on the processes and types of city institutional power. A review of the key issues for a good city government follows, in particular, we will look at the case of Bogota as a successful example.

Finally, we will conclude by suggesting the lessons for Santiago and the key challenges to deal with its urban injustice through looking at the city as a political project.

4

(2) Santiago mega city: fragmented, unequal, sprawling. Ungovernable?

The pressures of new migrants over Santiago began near 1925 in the context of a particular process of hyperurbanization of the whole country, that resulted in Chile being considered ‘one of the most hyperurbanized countries in the world’ (Friedmann & Lackington 1967: 8). The expansion of the Chilean capital became more relevant in the 50s and 60s with the promotion of an import-substitution industrialization policy that gave rise to a strong migration from rural to urban areas (de Mattos 2004). However, what most strongly shaped the present urban condition of the mega city of Santiago, was the implementation of the ‘first neoliberal state experiment’ (Robles-Duran 2011: 148), during Pinochet’s dictatorship. Characterized by economic vulnerability and a sociopolitical unsteadiness (Robles-Duran 2011), Chile and particularly its capital Santiago became ‘fresh field for capitalist accumulation’ (Harvey 2005 in: Robles-Duran 2011: 148). The capitalist modernization of the country started in the mid-70s, but also developed and consolidated after the recovery of democracy with the continuation of the neoliberal economic model (de Mattos 2004; Greene & Soler 2004). In this context, urban planning became weaker and has been unable to cope with the transformations of the city, giving way to

the forces of the market (Greene & Soler 2004).

Neoliberalism coupled with globalization has resulted in a process of profound urban transformations for Santiago; urban segregation and social polarization, unequal growth, urban sprawl and a democratic deficit.

Indications of spatial inequality and segregation in Santiago relate to an extremely fragmented and unjust form of city government and allocation of resources. The segregation process has been two-fold: on one hand, lower income residents were displaced to the southern and western peripheries by the effects of a housing policy that allowed market-led developments to determine the location of social housing. On the other hand, employment and services are highly concentrated in higher income areas in the centre and north east, making daily commute for lower-income, public transportdependent citizens longer and more costly.

Today’s socioeconomic map of Greater Santiago suggests that the highest income groups are more segregated than the lower income ones, but segregation is more detrimental for lower-income groups (Roberts & Wlison 2009). The highest socioeconomic levels concentrate in only six of the 37 comunas (the local governments’ territories, equivalent to boroughs or municipalities), clustering in a sort of ‘privilege cone’ in the north-eastern part of the city. The north east has a strong predominance of wealthier groups, whereas other socioeconomic groups tend to be spread out across the rest of the city. Taking into account how income groups are distributed in space, and how location within Santiago is related to aspects of quality of life such as quality of education or mortality rates (Rodríguez & Winchester 2001; Sanchez & Albala 2004), it could be suggested that Santiago has ‘wedges of wealth and poverty that work to

5

6

Socioeconomic Segregation. The map shows predominant socioeconomic group per block. The ‘privilege cone’ corresponds to the Northeast sector of Santiago. The Southwest concentrates the highest amounts of D and E groups. In the last decade, the metro has been extended to serve the Southwest area, formerly it only served the Central and East areas of the city.

N

2 km Metro lines

ABC1

C2

C3

D

E

Source: Green et al. 2011: 128

Metropolitan centralities. Despite the recent development of ‘centralities’ (artefacts of globalization) in the Southwest area, these cannot be considered major job resources. The highest rate of employment is concentrated closest to the CBD 1 and 2 (‘privilege cone”)

produce and maintain geographies that proffer greater advantage and higher status to the wealthier versus the poorer residents’ (Soja 2010: 48).

The housing failure For many years, the main tool for alleviating poverty in Chile was a social housing policy mainly focused on home ownership. Where the home was located wasn’t as important as getting people out of slums, even if it meant displacing families from one end of the city to the other. ‘Segregation was the lesser evil’ (Sabatini & Brain 2008: 2). Guided by free market principles the new housing policy introduced in the mid-70s gave the private sector the responsibility of the construction of housing, making it a good to be accessed through the market, and therefore eliminating the notion of housing as a right (Jirón 2010). The open housing market searched for low land prices far from the urban centre, in the already deprived periphery. Furthermore, in a way that emphasizes the predominance of private property in the imposed neoliberal system, people with housing needs were forced into the private and formal economic sectors under a credit-subsidy-savings scheme as the only solution that allowed ownership of the dwelling.

As it might be expected, and reminiscent of other more recent phenomena such as the sub-prime crisis, the poor become trapped in unaffordable credits. What is worse, the loans were financing a good that devalued over time and due to its far location, diminished job access and disintegrated social support networks, all of which contributed to more material deprivation and the perpetuation of poverty under different conditions.

For Hidalgo (2011) this is the beginning of what he calls the ‘precariopolis’ (precarious city) of Santiago, which

Source: Authors, based on de Mattos et al. 2004: 65 (1), 182 (2)

2 1

7

N

2 km

Centralities (1) Malls (privatly generated ‘centralities’) Traditional Civic Centres Commercial & Industrial corridors Central Business Districts

Unemployment Ratio (2) Low

High

8

originated from a social housing development model which ‘...in its search for cheaper land, creates truly mono-functional, segregated and fragmented areas’ (Hidalgo 2011).

The concentration of social housing in the periphery of Santiago and the fragmentation it has caused has resulted in huge costs for some families, economically and also in terms of loss of social networks. Rodríguez (2008) makes the point that contrary to the idea of the polycentrism of Latin American cities and despite ‘artefacts of globalization’ such as malls and big chain stores being distributed across the city, Santiago still concentrates employment in central, wealthier areas that are far away from the poorest ones. Evidence of this can be found in the fact that 96% of Santiago’s total office square meters was located in only five comunas, all of them located in the centre and north east: Santiago, Providencia, Las Condes, Vitacura and Huechuraba (Rodríguez & Winchester 2001). Additionally, the city’s economy is largely centered in the services sector, which ‘tends to respond to the needs of middle classes that inhabit the most expensive areas. Under these circumstances, distances between the place of residence and place of work have taken on a greater importance for less qualified workers’ (CEPAL 2007 in: Rodríguez Vignoli 2008: 13, authors’ translation).

The Chilean social housing policy is considered a model in the region because it has been successful in terms of financing social housing, reducing housing deficit and practically creating a ‘slum-free city’.

However, it has generated new urban problems that stem from displacement, segregation and an extremely poor housing and environment quality (Rodríguez & Sugranyes 2004). As we mentioned, this policy has

its roots in a system created in the 1970’s, during the military dictatorship, based in protecting the participation of the private sector in the social housing market, mainly developers and banks which gave housing loans to low-income groups. As Rodríguez and Sugranyes (2004) assert, private developers would profit from selling low-income housing in land they bought cheaply in the periphery and wouldn’t have to bear the costs of building services and equipment in those areas.

In this way, it was developers who defined the location of low-income housing. Amongst Chilean scholars, the families that were ‘benefited’ with this kind of housing solution are identified as los con techo (those with roof) (Rodríguez & Sugranyes 2004). This refers to people that obtained the subsidy for a formal shelter but remained immersed in poverty due to the low-quality and location of the homes, which although provide ‘a roof’, deny its dwellers from the opportunities of the consolidated city. This signals a breaking point of the housing policy whose financing model succeeded in tackling housing deficit, but created such a severe urban problem that internationally renowned Elemental architect Alejandro Aravena proposed the only solution was the demolition of 200,000 units of social housing (2009).

The reinforcement of segregation Urban policies that relied on ‘the free play of the market as the principal mechanism for the allocation of land and housing ... accentuated the social and physical segregation of the metropolitan population, and caused a dramatic deterioration in the quality of life for the majority of the population’ (Kusnetzoff 1987). A deep transformation in the urban morphology resulted from these housing policies. The allocation of mono-functional and low-

N

5 km

9

Precarious improvisation. ‘Those with roof. A challenge for the social housing policy’. The cover of the book illustrates the urgent need for the ‘benefited’ families to overcome overcrowding. Although illegal and precarious, the self-help expansion of the units reflect the skilfulness of the dwellers.

Source: Rodriguez &Sugranyes eds. 2005

20 years of Social Housing. A total of 202,000 units were built between 1980 and 2000. Both the dictatorial and democratic regimes operated under the neoliberal system that resulted in the location of the units mainly in the Southwestern fringe of the city.

Source: Rodriguez & Sugranyes eds. 2005: 15

10

5 km

Ring Road

N

0.1 km

Northeast vs. Southwest. Detail of two different types of ‘centralities’ as described by planning policies. The differences of the urban form between them, depicts not only the incongruences of the definition of ‘centrality’ but also extreme variations in the livability and quality of life.

Source: Authors, based on Google Earth, 2012

Areas of Origin

CBD 2

CBD 1

Dictatorial displacement. In the 1980s, near 35,000 families were eradicated from the Central and Northeastern areas of the city to the Southwestern periphery. In some cases this meant moving away 20 km (from Vitacura to La Pintana) which implied the breaking up of the people’s social networks.

Source: Kaminer et al. eds. 2004: 177

Areas of Relocation

N

2 km

1 - 100 families 101 - 1000 1001 - 2000

income residential areas in the periphery with a reserved area at the centre for the development of the central business district relied on long-distance commuting and reinforced the socio-spatial segregation and exclusion.

Segregation of poor citizens to the periphery wasn’t only caused by the social housing policy above described, but was also a direct result of forced eradications of slum dwellers that started in the 1950’s and became massive during the 1980’s. Informal settlers were moved from central areas to the periphery, especially in the south of the city (Rodríguez & Sugranyes 2004; Rodríguez & Winchester 2001). According to Jirón (2010) the several studies made about the eradications ‘agree that most of the destination areas provided inadequate infrastructure or facilities to welcome the incoming population due to their peripheral location and lack of investment’ (Jirón 2010: 77).

11 Along with the market-led housing policy, the modernization of the public transport system and the development of highways through public-private partnerships has also generated a detriment of Santiago’s social and spatial fabric (Silva 2011). In fact, the high concentration of jobs in the central, wealthier areas, ‘combined with the concentration of poorer citizens in the periphery is conducive to longer trips that have higher costs time-wise, who also depend on bad quality, slow public transport systems’ (Rodríguez Vignoli 2008, authors’ translation). Furthermore, apart from the failures in the implementation of the Transantiago Plan (rationalization of Santiago’s buses and underground system), the modernization of the private transport system has generated deep controversies at an urban level (Greene & Mora 2005). The construction of privately operated highways has been done through a

Becoming a mega city. Before their conurbation, the surrounding towns (Maipu, Quilicura, San Bernardo and Puente Alto) functioned with a relative independence from Santiago. Afterwards, this centres lost strength in favour of Santiago’s centre. The most recent expansion occurred in shape of large scale mega projects, and hybrid spaces (urbansuburban) that developed as ‘agricultural plots’ to bypass urban regulations while still benefited from the proximity to the city.

Source: Rojas 2004: 4, 5

Quilicura

12

Maipu San Bernardo Puente Alto

1940

1952

1960

1970

1980

1992

2002

10,000 ha.

950,000 inhab.

15,000 ha.

1,380,000 inhab.

22,000 ha.

1,900,000 inhab.

32,000 ha.

2,200,000 inhab.

42,000 ha.

3,600,000 inhab.

50,000 ha.

4,300,000 inhab.

69,000 ha.

4,700,000 inhab.

N

10 km

Uneven intervention of the public realm. ‘Deliberate improvisation’ in the state development of franchised highways, funded by the state. Vitacura (top) enjoys the benefits of connectivity with a mitigated impact on its urban fabric, the opposite occurs in La Pintana (bottom).

Source: Authors, based on Google Earth

N

5 km

Highways

50 m

process of ‘deliberate improvisation [that] highlights three key aspects of contemporary Chilean development: the state’s belief in its own power to manage people and place; the privileged position of markets in urban development and the political vulnerability of communities directly affected by large projects’ (Silva 2011: 35). There are three general criticisms of the highways plan: excessive government funds allocated to guarantee a private business, doubts in the technical solution to tackle congestion and the effect on the neighborhoods they cross. Greene and Mora’s syntactic analysis goes further, demonstrating that privately operated highways generate structural changes in the city which create a new form of social segregation by affecting social interchange in the urban realm. On one hand, highway users lose contact with the urban context and on the other, for non-highway users it is ‘harder 13 to move and find their way in the city’ (Greene & Mora 2005: 409). This illustrates how not only housing but also transport state policies reinforce segregation.

The distance between poorer areas and the centre makes public transport a key opportunity to create spatial justice. Unfortunately, in Chile transport is perhaps one of the areas of urbanism where the disconnection between the needs of the majority of people, especially the more vulnerable groups, and the supply of public infrastructure and facilities is most clear. In the case of Santiago’s recent public transport policies this was a problem of physical design but also strategy and governance, if we consider the way transport decisions are made and resources allocated. In fact, ‘the simultaneous incentive of privately managed urban highways and Transantiago operate in clearly opposite directions from the urban transport public policy point of view’

14

(Correa Díaz 2010: 4). Sergio Bitar, a Chilean former Minister of Public Works, acknowledges the inadequacy of the public institutions that govern the city. For a government-funded highway the technical solution in a wealthy area of the city is a tunnel ‘hidden’ underground, which mitigates the impact at street level, maintaining the continuity of the urban fabric, whereas for poorer areas the highway is a trench-type that cuts through the urban fabric fragmenting the city both physically and socially (Instituto de Estudios Urbanos PUC 2011).

Santiago suffers from what Edward Soja would call ‘spatially defined injustices’ (2010: 31), stemming from socio-spatial disparities perpetuated by fragmented governance arrangements which benefit a privileged minority. Inequality manifests itself in a very clear spatial way in Santiago. The average income in the wealthiest comuna is ten times higher than in the poorest one (Sanchez & Albala 2004). Furthermore, there is a wider ‘geography of privilege’ (Soja 2010) associated with income distribution, since for instance, and as we mentioned before, quality of education is higher and mortality rates are lower in richer areas and the opposite is true for poorer ones (Rodríguez & Winchester 2001; Sanchez & Albala 2004). The social production of these problems can be identified to stem from the repercussions of neoliberal reforms introduced during the military dictatorship: the transfer of the administration of public services such as education and health from the national government to municipal level and the incentive for private, market-led service provision. Examining some of the specific spatial manifestations of these inequalities clearly shows us a case of what Soja calls an ‘uneven geographical impact of socially produced [problems]’ (2010: 31). Green space

per capita, for instance, is unquestionable: the average for Santiago is 3,2 m², but when we look at the territorial numbers we see that the Vitacura, with one of the highest GDP per capita in the country, has 18,2 m² and Pedro Aguirre Cerda, one of the lowest GDP per capita, has 1,2 m² (Sanchez 2010).

Municipalities have many responsibilities, including the provision of education and primary health. A funding structure that relies mainly on property taxes (Centro de Sistemas Públicos 2011) and central government funding, reinforces the tendency for comunas with more needs to have fewer resources and vice versa. This is explained in part because social housing, which as we have seen is mainly located in poorer comunas, is exempted from property taxes. Therefore, wealthier municipalities tend to have more resources to invest in better education, health, public spaces and services in general. Poorer municipalities, whose population has greater needs, will have fewer resources and largely depend on national or regional funding which municipalities must compete for. There is a common fund that redistributes resources among all municipalities, with wealthier administrations contributing significantly more to the common pool.

Poor municipalities, however, are highly dependent on this fund, which tends to be their main source of income, contrary to wealthy municipalities which have considerable independence and greater ability to create their own sources of income (Orellana 2011).

In this context, the absence of a metropolitan authority capable of coordinating fairer funding redistribution and public investment could be interpreted as a factor which creates or deepens the conditions for the reproduction of inequality generated by the uneven disposition of resources between municipalities. According to

Orellana, the ‘significant disparity in socio-spatial configuration within the Santiago Metropolitan Area reflects the structure of power within this metropolitan space’ (2009: 101), whereby wealthier municipalities are better able to shape private actions and public decisionmaking according to the interests of their resident populations. Furthermore, the actions of comunas with higher socioeconomic profile have a metropolitan-wide impact rather than only a local reach, and the opposite happens with the comunas with lower socioeconomic profile. This relates to several other studies that show that the comunas of the ‘privilege cone’ concentrate the benefits of Santiago’s urban development such as high level urban amenities, more green areas and a provision of services according with a ‘global city’ (Orellana 2009). It could be argued that the fragmentation and absence of a metropolitan level authority gives way to the predominance of local economic power, which reinforces the disparity between municipalities. In fact, the five comunas with higher socio-territorial profile (indicator which combines occupation and education levels) concentrate 42% of the municipal budget for the whole city, whereas the five lower comunas only manage 8%, having a similar population (Orellana 2009).

Urbanization and capitalist colonization Another sign of delegitimization of the urban political institutions is the massive growth of the city-periphery.

The rapid expansion of Santiago is not new, however it is today that the pervasive effects of urban sprawl are more evident. Unsurprisingly, yet disappointingly ‘urban sprawl in Santiago [has been] largely driven by policy and decision making’ (Heinrichs et al. 2009: 29), or the government’s negligence to control the market

(‘deliberate improvisation’). Already in the 60s Santiago showed the tendency to form a city-region, with an expansive dynamic which resulted in the annexation of nearby urban settlements (de Mattos 2004). However, it is in the last decades that sprawl has become excessive.

Despite a decline in the population growth trend, between 1991 and 2000 Santiago’s contiguous surface expanded 24% (12,000 ha) (Ducci 2002). The area growth ratio has actually become twice the population growth ratio (de Mattos 2004). For De Mattos, there are five tendencies that reflect the symptoms of a city in continuous dilation: migration from the centre to the periphery; higher relative growth of surrounding urban centres; multi-centralization; new hybrid or suburban spaces; and new ‘artefacts of globalization’ (big box developments) as generators of new ‘centralities’.

As it was already analysed, the peripheral growth of the city, mainly in the south-west, was a result of a housing policy that created a Precariopolis, a monofunctional and fragmented area, that although includes basic services, lacks basic facilities such as schools, health centres, and recreational and shopping areas (Hidalgo 2011). In addition to this, the more recent physical expansion happened with the migration of middle, upper-middle and upper socioeconomic classes in search of ‘more square meters at a lower price ... surrounded by an environment opposite of metropolitan modernity ... and often better connected than within the city in terms of road infrastructure’ (Hidalgo 2011: 155). This type of residential developments are closed and securitized and are built resembling American gated communities (de Mattos 2004), where self-segregation and isolation from other social groups is wilful and selective (Ducci 2000). In fact, the use of some of the

15

16

urban facilities (i.e. the recreational areas) is explicitly for residents only, and even with the design of ‘private’ shopping centres poor people are implicitly stigmatized and excluded. For Hidalgo, the coupling of this type of development with the previously mentioned franchised highways is the basis of what he defines as a ‘real state privatopolis’ (Hidalgo 2011).

The outcomes of the urban development of Santiago as a Precariopolis and Privatopolis are several and severe. They include the lengthening of commuting trips and its impacts in quality of life and air pollution, the privatization of public space, social segregation, reproduction of poverty and the unequal provision of urban amenities and services, and they could be the base for forthcoming (and current) social conflicts (Ducci 2002). Indeed, Harvey points that the recent mass protests (2006, 2011) in Santiago are a kind of ‘urbanbased class struggle’ (2012: 115).

[The mass protests have] ‘morphed from students demanding from the state free and egalitarian educational provision into an anti-neoliberal alliance of movements demanding of the state constitutional reform, improved pension provision, new labor laws, and a progressive personal and corporate tax system to begin to reverse the slide into ever greater social inequality in Chilean civil society’ (Harvey 2012: 153).

The status quo of the administrative geography Since the last political-administrative reform in 1974 and its subsequent modifications, Chile is formed by 15 regions, each with regional governments led by an

Intendente appointed by the country’s President. The Intendente heads the Regional Council, whose members are elected by the local council members from all the municipalities in that region. The accountability and democratic representation of these authorities has been criticised (Morales & Navia 2008), along with the fact that decisions at the regional level, which include allocation of important resources, seem to be mostly guided by political-partisan views. The 15 regions are divided in 54 provinces led by Governors who are also appointed, and each province is in turn composed of comunas, where a directly elected Mayor and municipal Council are the main authorities. Chile has an astounding total of 346 elected Mayors and municipal Councils. The Metropolitan Region, where Santiago is located, has a 52 comunas, urban and rural. What is known as Greater Santiago is composed of 34 comunas, however the built up area of the Santiago mega city extends to 44 since it includes urbanized ‘islands’ in the outskirts.

The extreme fragmentation described above and the lack of a single urban development policy or vision, are aggravated by the number of government bodies, from national, regional and local levels, which intervene in the city making process. There is a multiplicity of agendas, no clear coordination, or overall vision.

One of the main arguments for opposing the establishment of a metropolitan authority is the urban primacy of Santiago (Abuauad & Cuadros 2012), which relates to both the share of the national economy and the size of the electorate. A metropolitan authority would be too strong, since Santiago concentrates near 34% of the national GDP, similar to cities like Buenos Aires, London and Paris (McKinsey_Global_Institute 2011; World_Bank 2011), and has around 35% of the

35 36 34

21

22

30

23

24

29

12

10

26 25

28

39

40 43

Administrative fragmentation. Santiago mega city is divided into 44 comunas. The literature still refers to 37, however is clear that built form extends beyond.

11

7 8 9

20

31

41

13 2

1

6

37 38

3

4

5

19

32

14

16

17 18

33

27

15

44

42

N

5 km

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44

Santiago Providencia Recoleta Independencia Quinta Normal Estancion Central Pedro Aguirre Cerda San Miguel San Joaquin Macul Nunoa La Reina Las Condes Vitacura Huechuraba Conchali Renca Cerro Navia Lo Prado Cerrillos Lo Espejo La Cisterna 17 San Ramon La Granja La Florida Penalolen Lo Barnechea Puente Alto La Pintana El Bosque San Bernardo Maipu Pudahuel Quilicura Colina Lampa Padre Hurtado Penaflor Calera de Tango Talagante El Monte Isla de Maipo Buin Pirque

Santiago’s hinterland. The central regions of the country (Region Metropolitana and Region de Valparaiso) concentrate more than half of the country’s urban population. Lately, Santiago’s surrounding towns and cities has become functionally integrated to the central production system. The raise of motorization has contributed to the development of the major axes of connections between cities (‘tentacles’ shape). Real estate developments in the coastal area are mainly directed to the second-home market for people of Santiago.

Los Andes

Greater Valparaiso

Colina

18

Litoral Central

San Antonio

N

10 km

Region Provincia Comuna

A r g e n t i n a

P a c i f i c

O c e a n

Source: Angel et al. 2012

Melipilla

Rancagua

national population, with the next largest cities (Greater Concepcion and Greater Valparaiso) concentrating just 5%. Glaeser (2002) suggests that the extreme concentration of the population is more a result of specific government policies which favour one place at the expense of another, rather than a natural consequence of the city’s advantages (Glaeser & Meyer 2002). Whatever the reasons for Santiago’s urban primacy, the issues we have examined so far lead us to believe that the absence of a metropolitan authority is not just a sign of ungovernability and democratic deficit which affects the city’s inhabitants, but aggravates and reproduces the already extreme disparities within the city. The establishment of a metropolitan government could contribute to equalize this uneven urban development.

However, despite the fact that a government for Santiago has been discussed in academic and political circles for decades, there has not been enough political will to implement such a radical change, and it has yet to become a top priority for the public opinion.

19

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The question of a metropolitan territory

‘So universal is this [dynamic] capitalist condition, that the conception of the urban and of “the city” is likewise rendered unstable, not because of any conceptual definitional failing, but precisely because the concept has itself to reflect changing relations between form and process, between activity and thing, between subjects and objects’ (Harvey 1989: 6).

Concerned with giving direction to the accelerated expansion of London, Peter Hall begins his classic piece ‘London 2000’ (1963) indicating that ‘[t]he first problem with London is to define it’, and the subsequent difficulties and challenges of dealing with the inaccuracy.

In a different geographical context, and several decades later, this statement still holds and can be easily applied to rapidly changing cities such as Santiago, whose present built form, as we have seen, comes from a pattern of urban growth that implied the combination of rapid urban expansion and the conurbation of surrounding settlements (de Mattos et al. 2004). We argue that Santiago needs an intermediate scale of administration that integrates the actual range of scales and territories which form the metropolis. Nevertheless,

we acknowledge the difficulty of finding the proper fit between the urban footprint and the functional extent of the city, especially given Santiago’s urban primacy.

As Castells theorizes, for a mega city ‘the rest of the country [...] increasingly becomes the hinterland for the functions and power that emerge from [it]’ (1998).

Defining boundaries becomes all the more difficult.

Like most cities of emerging economies, Santiago’s built form has exponentially increased. Between 1991 and 2000, Santiago’s urban surface grew 24% (12,000 ha) concentrating near 35% of the Chilean population (de Mattos 2004). This has not only given rise to complex urban conditions related to housing demands and transportation, but has also challenged governmental decision-making, due to the misalignment between the administrative boundaries and the lived city. The above, given that the built-up area of the city came to be governed independently by 44 different territorial jurisdictions that drastically differ in their socio-spatial profile. Moreover, under the highly centralized unitary Chilean government model, these changing urban scenarios ‘imply that social and economic policies created at the national level no longer make scalar sense for the complexities of large individual cities’ (Burdett & Kaasa 2011: 44).

The widespread use of terms such as ‘metropolitan area’, ‘metropolis’ or even ‘megacity’ or ‘city-regions’, by no means reflects a common meaning. We will use the term ‘metropolitan area’ because it is widely used to describe the consolidated ‘Greater Santiago’ (32 comunas of the Province of Santiago, plus Puente Alto and SanBernardo), and the urbanized area attached to it. Despite the fact that in general, different concepts are used depending on historical and geographical

contexts and theoretical stance, a shared feature of the definitions seems to be the need to express the growth of the city beyond its original limits, from the moment when ‘city’ is no longer equivalent to ‘urban’ (Klink 2008b; Rodríguez & Oviedo 2001). We are not suggesting there are no important differences between the various conceptualizations and definitions, but we would argue they all somehow relate to the complexities of urbanization under capitalism remarkably formulated by authors such as Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey.

From the ‘completely urbanized society’ of Lefebvre’s urban revolution (Lefebvre 2003), to capitalism’s endless geographical expansion in Harvey’s ‘spatial fix’ (Harvey 2001), we understand how the world seems to be urbanized to the level where the term ‘city’ becomes insufficient to account for lived reality. Moreover, ‘cities […] are changing to the point that the category (‘the city’) has become theoretically and practically obsolete’ (Castells 1998: 1).

The metropolitan problem Rapid, wide-spread, capitalist urbanization results in what seem to be, sometimes quite palpably, ‘ungovernable’ cities. Currently, many forms of governing cities are not able to provide acceptable solutions to the growing problems associated with large cities: pollution, segregation, lack of basic services, and crime, among others. Certainly, several of these problems are better addressed at other levels of government because they involve national policies or wider-reaching social or economic dynamics. It could be argued, though, that even what might seem like clearly ‘metropolitan problems’, cannot be adequately dealt with in fragmented, weak or non-existent urban administrations. But cities are not

only overwhelmed by problems they produce; they are also vigorous development engines that play a key role in the local and global economies. The search for an urban category beyond ‘city’ is therefore not only a theoretical concern but also a practical issue for governance and development.

But what defines a ‘metropolis’? What distinguishes them apart from mere ‘cities’? The criteria to define metropolitan areas vary in different countries, and may include population, size of the territory, physical proximity among different localities, density, and commuting patterns, among others. Some, like minimum population or density numbers, can seem quite arbitrary, such as the one million threshold to define metropolitan areas in Chile proposed by senators Alvear and Frei (2012). Rodríguez and Oviedo (2001) identify the gravitation around a main centre as a significant common condition, but claim this does not currently apply to many large cities which have several activity centres. We have referred to De Mattos’ argument regarding new centralities and the ‘artefacts of globalization’, but the debate around whether cities are mono or polycentric is a highly controversial one and the claim in particular Santiago is polycentric is far from unanimous (Rodríguez Vignoli 2008).

The lack of consensus regarding the monocentric nature of Santiago leads us to agree with Rodríguez and Oviedo (2001) about the complications derived from defining metropolitan areas in this way. We find Klink’s approach less problematic, although not altogether satisfactory. He describes metropolitan cities as being defined by ‘the occurrence of intense interdependencies and externalities/spillovers among local territories, while these territories have a collective identity through

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their common functional socioeconomic, political, and historical characteristics’ (Klink 2008b: 78). While we will not explore the issue of urban and territorial identitybuilding processes here, we believe it is important to question the notion of collective identity as a key element in defining metropolitan areas. Such a definition would rule out Santiago as a metropolis if we were to follow the evidence convincingly suggested by researchers such as anthropologist Francisca Márquez (Márquez 2011; Márquez & Pérez 2008), who analyse the diversity of urban identities found in Santiago as a phenomenon related to urban segregation and social disintegration.

If we understand urban spaces no longer as selfcontained units but fragmented, interconnected and dynamic geographies, it is actually Castells’ definition of ‘megacity’ that seems more precise in characterising the specificities of the metropolitan phenomenon. We find it particularly useful because of its critical perspective on the role of cities in the global economy and its social and political implications. Castells claims the formation of ‘megacities’ is one of the most important changes the world is undergoing. Megacities are not only cities of large size (he suggests a threshold of 10 million inhabitants) but which have strong coherence and ‘constitute a complex unit of production, a single labour market and a specific system of power, beyond their extreme cultural and social differentiation’ (1998: 2). So even though we speak of ‘metropolitan area’ when referring to Santiago, and despite the fact that it has a population smaller than 10 million, we find Castells’ definition more productive, among other reasons, for his emphasis on differentiation as opposed to the homogeneity suggested by Klink’s definition.

Governing metropolitan areas could be maintained

to be even more complex than defining them. Urban expansion makes urban boundaries rapidly obsolete and this constantly changing scenario is one of the reasons why metropolitan cities are perceived as impossible to govern. This is particularly true for Santiago, whose urban growth pattern has been portrayed as an ‘oil stain’ (Ducci 1998). The nature of the political boundaries will always seem rigid and insufficient to define the ‘operational’ reality of a city, which is defined by the dynamic quality of social and economic processes.

This ‘effective territory’ is sometimes referred to as a city’s ‘functional area’, particularly when alluding to economic processes and/or commuting patterns within a spatial unit. This way of understanding what defines a metropolitan area could be viewed as more adequate than other seemingly arbitrary thresholds such as land use, density or population.

The functional criteria are one of the most widely used ways to define metropolitan areas. In the case of Santiago, there have been proposals for defining the metropolitan area according to functional criteria such as commuting or ‘pendular movement patterns’ (Pradenas 2006), whereas others such as Chuaqui and Valdivieso (2004) have taken a more pragmatic stance, privileging political viability above other considerations.

It is interesting to note the diversity of disciplines from which proposals for the reform of Santiago’s government have come from: political science, law and geography, each certainly reflecting their field’s particularities. More striking perhaps is the absence of an explicitly urbanistic proposal.

Chuaqui and Valdivieso focus on matching a new city government mechanism to the territory of the Santiago Province, similarly to what Aylwin (1991) had

proposed in the context of the wave of government reforms brought with the dawn of a regained democracy.

Their proposal is based on legal and political feasibility criteria, recommending the coordination of existing mechanisms and strengthening the role of the Provincial Governor, rather than creating a new metropolitan area institution. We find that by reducing the area of action of a new Santiago government to the province of Santiago, this proposal disregards the importance of some of the fastest growing comunas such as Colina, Penaflor, Lampa or Puente Alto, and fails to account for the fact that ‘the urban stain has burst beyond the administrative limits of the Great Santiago, extending significantly towards the west side of the Santiago basin’ (Ducci 2002: 5).

Pradenas (2006) demonstrates the significance of defining the territory (or as he calls it, the ‘metropolitan event’) which a new institution is meant to govern, and the way in which this definition should account for key metropolitan issues such as urban expansion, levels of quality of life, transport, among others. He criticizes Chuaqui and Valdivieso for leaving out of their spatial definition certain peripheral comunas, which he claims have a strong gravitation towards the centre of the city, which acts as a development-generating nucleus. He also correctly points to the value of using the comuna as the basic territorial unit but making exceptions to include parts of large comunas, particularly in the periphery, with small populations which are nonetheless strongly dependent on the city centre. However, and as Lefevre (1998) claims, it is questionable to reduce the metropolitan territory to commuting patterns and overlook the importance of understanding space as a social construction.

Clearly though, a metropolitan area, however it might

Administrative misfit. The proposal for the development of the Province as a metropolitan government would leave out near 20% of the mega city population. The issue becomes more serious when considering poverty levels, which are high for San Bernardo and mid-high for Puente Alto.

Source: Angel et al. 2012

Colina Lampa

23

Padre Hurtado Puente Alto Penaflor

San Bernardo Provincia Comuna

N

5 km

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be defined, comes closer to the ‘functional’ territory than individual boroughs or municipalities, but they are by no means a perfect fit. Moreover, ‘the effective economic space is simply far too big to merit serious consideration as the basis of an acceptable political and administrative unit’ (Travers 2004: 157). The ‘economic city’ tends to cover the larger region beyond the urban agglomeration’s boundaries, and this is nowhere clearer than in the case of London, whose functional region extends across the whole Greater South East and covers around 40% of the population of England and Wales (Travers 2004). The pre-eminence of the capital and its surroundings is even more dramatic in the case of Santiago, as we have seen previously, given the extent of its urban primacy. The significance of the Chilean capital city in demographic and economic terms could practically be seen as a case of the rest of the country becoming ‘the hinterland for the functions and power that emerge from mega cities’ (Castells 1998: 1).

‘[…] the spatial scale over which urban economic processes occur will always be different from the spatial scale with which politics can function and citizens can identify. So there is no ‘perfect’ solution to the problem of metropolitan governance but rather different attempts in our various cities to cope with this common problem.’

(Travers 2004: 4-5).

The search for a match between the jurisdictional and ‘functional’ areas has been a predominant motive for the creation of metropolitan governments. Yet, the permanent expansion, contraction and fragmentation

of the city’s boundaries, and the sheer size of the functional (economic) region, render the quest for such a match a useless pursuit. Governance arrangements in metropolitan areas seem destined to struggle with seemingly arbitrary or inadequate boundaries. Lefevre (1998) suggests a different definition of ‘functional’ validates the search for correspondence between institutional and functional territory as a motive for metropolitan government reform. We disagree with his interpretation of the functional territory as being linked to a concept of ‘community’ which he attributes to Wood (1958), however. The latter claims that ‘if an aggregate of people in a given area achieve economic autarchy, if social intercourse extends over the area, and if common mores and customs exist, the basic foundations for a genuine community are present’ (Wood 1958: 111). We find this definition of community as an ideal form of city life highly problematic, particularly in light of slightly more recent ideas such as the ones convincingly put forward by Iris Marion Young (1990). She critiques the concept of ‘community’ as a deeply anti-urban ideal of social and political life, since it ‘denies the ontological difference within and between subjects’ (Young 1990: 231). The urge to preserve identity associated with it fosters exclusion of what is deemed a threat, as we see in the ‘neo-communitarian’ lifestyle of gated communities in Santiago (Márquez & Pérez 2008). This impulse to suppress difference is in direct opposition to the ‘being together of strangers’ which she identifies, with much clarity, as one of the main virtues of city life. We agree with Frug when he argues that this value should in fact be at the core of empowering cities:

‘Indeed, a powerful city is desirable, in my view, only if it becomes transformed, modifying not only its ability to foster greater participation in its decision making but also its ability to engender more openness to unfamiliar strangers’ (Frug 1999: 23-24).

London: evolution of boundaries and the containment of the first metropolis To examine the current urban government structure of London it helps to look back at its historical evolution.

According to Travers (2006), there have been six major reforms to London’s government. The first Londonwide body was the Metropolitan Board of Works (MBW) established in 1855, whose main task was the integration of the water management system to tackle the pollution of the river Thames and metropolitan-wide transport infrastructure issues (Castro et al. 2003). Afterwards, from 1889 the government of the London County Council (LCC) followed over roughly the extent of the built-up London of 1888 which approximately represented the territory of the MBW. Despite its unchallenged authority (Rao 2006), according to Hall the delimitation of the administrative area (that corresponds to today’s London 12 inner boroughs) became obsolete as a definition of London almost as soon as it was established (1963).

In fact, given the government-promoted growth and expansion, the LCC ‘was increasingly becoming irrelevant to the metropolitan problem’ (Rao 2006: 216).

Equally, Hall (1963) claims that the creation in 1965 of the Greater London Council (GLC) area, although it added 20 new boroughs of outer London to the GLC administrative boundaries in order to expand

its ‘geographical locus’ (Rao 2006: 217), was just as inadequate as its predecessor as a definition of the greater London conurbation. However, the GLC had the advantage of covering a wider area that incorporated the London suburbs and seemed more appropriate for a truly metropolitan authority even though its core– the City of London–refused to join. Despite ‘functional London’ extending further away from its administrative limits (Rao 2006), and just as it happened with the LCC, the GLC represented a specific built-up area as a result of the fencing effect created by the metropolitan green belt established in 1938 (Hall 1963), which meant a more accurate physical definition of the consolidated urban area and thus a clarity of its administrative territory.

The GLC was abolished in 1986 by the Thatcher government, and a period of highly fragmented government followed (Rao 2006). Several kinds of public institutions were created to inherit the roles of the GLC, which ruled over the same territory but lacked an overall leadership. The City of London, the core and only area of the metropolis that was exempted from the GLC’s administration, ended up taking the leader and guiding Greater London’s future (the city itself and its vast surrounding urban area) with a private-sector and business creation logic (Rao 2006). In other words, the abolition of the GLC allowed the emergence of new organizations promoted by The City, such as London First, which brought together London borough leaders and private-sector interests. This way Greater London came to be led by the interests of an unelected entity– The City–that earlier, had managed to stay away from the overall metropolitan coordination that was aimed by the creation of the GLC in 1965 (Hall 1963).

Until the creation of the Greater London Authority

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Administrative geography progression. The evolution of the administrative limits of London, which in some cases were extemporary, it describes a functional and political coherence.

Source: Burdett ed. 2008: 31

26

1885

1889

Metropolitan Body of Works

London County Council

1965 Greater London Council

2000 Greater London Authority, 2000 (1)

N

10 km

(GLA) in the year 2000, ‘London was the only capital city in Western Europe that lacked city-wide government and an overall strategy’ (Rao 2006: 218). At this point, after 14 years of metropolitan government absence, this new proposed body was directly elected which gave it high levels of legitimacy and leadership. However, despite the evolution of London as a mega city that matches the descriptions of Castells (1998) and Soja (2000), the administrative territory over which the GLA ruled was the same as the one of the GLC. As a matter of fact, it could be suggested that the physical fit between the GLC and the GLA is due to the existence of the green belt, apart from the obvious legacy derived from the continuity of the country’s administrative division. In fact, Travers (2005) observes that had it not been for the imposition of the green belt around London, the urban expansion encouraged by the tube and rail system would have created ‘the relentless sprawl found in many other cities’ (Travers 2005: 13). Indeed, the same rail system that serves the London region has a commuter catchment area six times the area of the GLA (Travers 2005). This literal jump over the green belt illustrates the huge powerful attraction exerted by the mega city coupled with the difficulty to contain its urban expansion.

As a result, from the territorial point of view and still acknowledging the levels of arbitrariness of any physical definition, the GLA area inherits its geographical extent from an entity that was created 35 years before, over a completely different urban landscape. Certainly, similar conjectures to the ones expressed by Hall (1963) could be made, given the misfit between the delineated administrative area of the GLA and the megalopolitan nature of the London Region. Equally, if Castells’ reasoning is to be followed regarding the ‘rest-of-the-

Leap and magnet. The containment of London’s urban sprawl by the ‘green belt’ contributes to the definition of a physical unit. However, in functional terms, the highly developed rail system allows for a massive catchment area. The struggle is to be constantly improving the transport system, while dealing with an increase in urban land prices and London’s disproportionate centrality within the region.

Source: Burdett et al. eds. 2011: 21 (1), 23 (2)

27

Green Belt (1) GLA Boundary Regional commuters (2)

N

10 km

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country’ as the mega city’s hinterland (1998), then the GLA’s effective administrative territory would become practically the whole United Kingdom. Therefore, it might seem that for the implementation of a coherent spatial development strategy there is the need for a fixed limit such as the provided by the green belt which defines a uniform unit despite the ‘functional leaps’ that eventually guide urban development.

After all, the establishment of the GLA has led to the generation of a clear city-wide strategic scale that counterbalances the boroughs at the local level. Despite the criticisms for being a ‘Zone 1 plan’ the early years of the London Plan represented an injection of physical vision back into London planning. However, this was only possible due to the continuation of the neoliberal system inherited from the previous stage of governance.

Ken Livingstone, the first Mayor, acknowledged that in order to achieve anything, he needed to work within the prevailing orthodoxy (Carmona 2012). This means that even though the creation of an intermediate scale of government generated a spatial counterbalance for London, its urban impact is highly dependent on the way power is unfolded over the territory. It could be argued that an entrepreneurial city government, given its nature, tends to follow the private interests of the most powerful, in detriment of the public good.

It is certainly what Harvey contends is the case in the United States. Regarding the consequences of urban entrepreneurialism, he claims that the ‘public-private partnership’ model ‘amounts to a subsidy for affluent consumers, corporations, and powerful command functions to stay in town at the expense of local collective consumption for the working class and poor’ (Harvey 1989: 12).

(4)

The case for metropolitan government

Governability and governance The motivations behind metropolitan government reform are explored productively through the concept of ‘governability’, which Lefevre defines as ‘the state of a territory (for instance, a metropolitan area) where it is possible to produce public policies and collective action capable of solving problems and developing the territory’ (2008: 137). It concerns the capacity to address both the present and the future, of entities which include but are not limited to political authorities or government bodies. For the same author, the term ‘governance’, on the other hand, refers to ‘the capacity for metropolitan areas to establish tools, mechanisms, instruments, and arrangements to make these territories governable’ (Lefevre 2008: 137). Through governance, then, a city may achieve governability. Furthermore, Lefevre only considers as governance the arrangements which are aimed at attaining governability. We find this clarification useful to avoid the vague, catch-all quality that can sometimes be attached to the concept.

At this junction we believe it is necessary to make certain precisions about our understanding of

governance, since it is so widely used but can have quite different meanings. In addition, and despite the fact that we are focusing on city government reform, we don’t see it as being limited to the sphere of the state, and identify ‘governance’ as a productive way of exploring the way cities are (and could be) governed. Governance is sometimes addressed in normative theories, for instance when it is related the ‘heterarchy’ or ‘the horizontal selforganization among mutually interdependent actors’ (Jessop 2000: 15). This view suggests that cities should be governed in a pluralist way. For Jessop, for instance, governance in the form of public-private partnerships is a desirable way of attaining development and addressing the failure of both the state and market, despite its inevitable tendencies towards failure (2000).

Governance can also be addressed in descriptive or empirical manners, sometimes with either positive or negative connotations, depending on the ideological stance of the author. For instance, it can be seen as a way of governing cities which by including participation of non-state actors may foster collaborative decisionmaking and deliberative democracy. The OECD, for example, claims that improving governance can help cities pursue economic competitiveness in conjunction with social cohesion, and praise the emergence of what they call ‘entrepreneurial cities’ (2001). Governance can also be seen as a retreat of the state from the production of space in favour of business interests and at the expense of the urban poor, however. In fact, it is often interpreted as the dominance of the private sector in public action.

David Harvey deploys all his critical flair denouncing the entrepreneurial turn in city governance which the OECD promotes. To him, in the context of inter-urban competition, it ‘contributes to increasing disparities in

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wealth and income as well as to that increase in urban impoverishment […]’ (1989: 12). Even so, he indicates urban entrepreneuralism’s potential to challenge hegemonic capitalist dynamics transforming itself into a ‘progressive urban corporatism’ (1989: 16).

An allegedly more ‘neutral’ descriptive approach is seeing governance simply as ‘the exercise of power […]

– not as an attribute that is exclusive to the institutions of government, but also an attribute of civil society and the market’ (Rodríguez et al. 1999: 1). This is not a unanimous assumption, though. The World Bank, which claims to have popularized the term, largely defines it along economic lines and focuses on it as a capacity found in governments and public sector management (1994).

In fact, the World Bank explicitly ignores the political implications of governance, overlooking what we believe to be precisely the key aspect of the concept. In our view, ‘governance’ implies a shift from understanding political agency as being clearly demarcated and grounded only in the state, to being in the context of complex relationships between connected actors and at different scales.

We understand government in the context of governance, which we do not conceive as an idea from which you can strip away the political dimension. In fact they seem inextricably linked if we take an urban regime analysis perspective and follow Clarence Stone’s understanding of politics as ‘a process of shaping arrangements’ (Stone 2005: 312). Such arrangements go beyond the state-society division, and can indeed take the form of state/market/civil society hybrids. This does not necessarily mean, however, that governance is some sort of participatory or equality panacea. Jessop (2000) details several causes for governance arrangements to fail and in doing so clarifies that governance merely sets

a different stage for traditional struggles derived from capitalism to take place:

‘Capitalism has always depended on a contradictory balance between marketised and non-marketised organisational forms.

Although this was previously understood mainly in terms of the balance between market and state, governance does not introduce a neutral third term but adds another site upon which the balance can be contested […]’ (Jessop 2000: 19).

Fragmentation versus consolidation Metropolitan governments are a fairly recent phenomenon, which emerged in the 1960s and underwent significant changes in the 1990s. Despite the huge diversity of models and processes, the literature – mostly centred on experiences in Europe and North America – distinguishes two periods when the creation or reform of metropolitan governments was in vogue: the 1960 and 1970s, and from the end of the 1980s onwards.

Most of the first ‘experiments’ disappeared after receiving much criticism, others managed to survive for a brief period, and few have managed to subsist and consolidate themselves (Lefevre 1998; Rodríguez & Oviedo 2001).

The first generation is composed of experiences aimed at giving a government structure to a predefined functional territory, and consisted mainly of top-down impositions from central government, based largely on technical justifications such as economies of scale and efficiency (Klink 2008b). The second phase is mostly European and it is a renewal of metropolitan governments related to ‘governance’ and involving ‘more complex systems of

actors, and different forms of action, based on flexibility, partnership and voluntary participation’ (Lefevre 1998: 9). Additionally, it is linked to the strengthening of territorial identities and economic competitiveness in an increasingly globalized context (Rodríguez & Oviedo 2001; Travers 2004).

Current European models fall under the second generation of metropolitan government, which developed in the context of wider processes such as decentralization reforms and what is referred to as the ‘transnationalisation of the state’ (Lovering 1995).

Urban government reforms in Europe seem related to a certain retreat of central government from public matters, but as we shall see with the case of London, this does not necessarily mean that the central state stops exercising significant control over crucial issues for metropolitan administrations. Generally speaking, though, metropolitan reforms are related to, on the one hand, wider decentralization processes and devolution of powers from central states to lower tiers of government, and on the other, to the fact that with globalization, countries have had to yield power ‘upward’ (Travers 2004) and have ‘began transferring responsibilities to the supranational level (the European Union), thereby eroding their capacity and legitimacy from above’ (Klink 2008b: 95). The latter phenomenon is strictly European, and as Rodríguez and Oviedo suggest, it is important to keep this in mind when looking at cases of metropolitan government reform and the way such arrangements have been empowered or strengthened, compared to similar attempts in Latin America.

Despite Latin America being one of the most urbanized regions in the world, there are few metropolitan governments, and its large cities tend to be governed

in an extremely fragmented way. For several decades now the region has been developing decentralization processes, with a range of efforts and results across the continent (Rojas et al. 2008). In general, though, the ‘promise of decentralization’ (efficiency, democracy, better quality services) ‘has proven difficult to fulfil in practice’ (Roberts & Wilson 2009: 12). It is important to note that the Chilean decentralization process has been distinctly limited, partly since only the central government has the power to propose bills for discussion in parliament, therefore controlling the pace and depth of reforms (Mardones 2006). In addition, the ambiguity in the use of the concept sometimes leads to very different practices being called decentralization when in reality they are merely territorial deconcentration of central government functions, or even privatization of services (Boisier 2004; Mardones 2006). More importantly, decentralization in Chile has largely been focused on transferring competences to municipalities or local governments, excluding the city wide or metropolitan level. Taken to an extreme, this ‘parochial governance’ could be seen as contributing to the deepening of urban fragmentation and the reproduction of inequality and segregation through practices such as exclusionary zoning, for instance. Nevertheless, and at least theoretically, decentralization can be conceived as a process which fosters empowerment for interlocal cooperation rather than individualistic or ‘selfish’ autonomy (Frug 1999; Frug & Barron 2008; Young 1990).

One of the main theoretical disputes around the subject of metropolitan governments took place in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, between the supporters of consolidation and those who advocated

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the benefits of fragmentation for urban areas. This controversy is known as the debate between ‘reformers’ and the public choice school (Klink 2008b; Lefevre 1998, 2008), and was mostly centred around the United States and later in the United Kingdom. Consolidation was the dominant stance in the 1960s, but after what were considered failed experiments, the debate favoured the public choice arguments, which ‘began challenging the underlying premises of the consolidation perspective based on free-market principles’ (Klink 2008b: 88).

We agree with Lefevre’s assessment of the usefulness of exploring the different rationales for establishing metropolitan governments and the models that have emerged from these two theories (2008), particularly when trying to draw lessons for the Chilean experience.

The need for metropolitan governments has been theoretically justified on a number of different grounds.

Sometimes it has been in the name of ‘efficiency’, both in terms of dealing with duplications and lack of coordination, and providing economies of scale. The economic argument for consolidation was particularly significant in the 1960s and 1970s, when ‘reformers’ claimed that less fragmented government units produced economies of scale in service provision. Public choice theorists argued otherwise, denoting the lack of empirical evidence demonstrating that consolidated city structures fostered economic development, and arguing that fragmentation promoted competition between local governments, therefore increasing efficiency.

Subsequently, and in a sort of theoretical pendulum, the 1990s saw authors challenging the supposed link between fragmentation and efficiency, and highlighting the significance of consolidation models through incremental, cooperative processes (Klink 2008b). At

this point it is important to emphasize that, in general, no matter what model is implemented, the justifications for metropolitan governments tend to be based on theoretical arguments rather than empirical evidence (Lefevre 1998).

Economic reasons for city governments are popular in the current context of globalised markets and financial crisis, where cities have become major agents of economic and financial development. Metropolitan governments, particularly the strong leadership of city mayors, are seen by some as a way of improving economic performance in cities, making them more competitive internationally. In the UK this agenda is promoted by organizations such as the Centre for Cities (http:// www.centreforcities.org/mayors) and it also seems to be behind the government’s support for the creation of elected mayors in British cities, according to the way the proposal has been endorsed by Prime Minister David Cameron (Hetherington 2012; Watt 2012).

The social argument for metropolitan governments tends to be less developed in the literature, but it is suggested that these forms of administration are better able to encourage redistribution within the territory and, above all, diminish social segregation and strengthen social cohesion (Lefevre 2008; Purcell 2002; Travers 2004).

‘Smaller government units will tend to separate and segregate themselves into rich and poor jurisdictions, creating a cyclical pattern of social separation. Metropolitan authorities, whose legitimacy derives from the whole population can take strategic decisions to balance development across

the whole city area as well as (explicitly or implicitly) redistribute incomes and/ or resources through their taxation and spending policies’ (Travers 2004: 156).

In addition, a comparative study of six of the largest cities in Latin America found a correlation between fragmented government structures and residential segregation patterns (Roberts & Wilson 2009). Additionally, in Chile major decisions on infrastructure and social investment in urban areas are taken by central government, and only the wealthiest municipalities are able to influence public investment (Rodríguez & Winchester 2001).

The literature does not seem to imply that the creation of city-wide authorities automatically results in a decline of inter-urban inequalities, but rather that metropolitan government models (by no means confined to the ‘strong mayor’ formula, as we shall see) can promote solidarity instead of competition among municipalities. The only way for municipalities in Santiago to improve their income under the current governance structure is by attracting investment towards their territory. Therefore, local governments end up competing with each other (Heinrichs, et al. 2009; Orellana 2011) instead of being equipped for the ‘inter-local cooperation’ we have referred to previously. It follows that a strong argument for metropolitan government reform is the need for mechanisms or institutions that are able to coordinate such cooperation among local jurisdictions. As Orellana (2011) claims, in the absence of a metropolitan government, the position of municipalities which concentrate wealthy population is strengthened at the expense of the majority of the municipalities, and this internal unbalance puts at great risk the city’s future

competitiveness.

In terms of political motivations, an important debate is around whether larger government units strengthen or weaken representation and accountability. For supporters of metropolitan governments, bigger jurisdictions are intrinsically more open, offering possibilities of more pluralistic politics, increased participation, and less chance for smaller elites to dominate or for corruption to develop (Lefevre 1998). According to public choice political theorists, however, larger government units weaken democracy by increasing their distance with individuals and ‘allowing vested interests to capture and colonize large governmental bureaucracies’ (Travers 2004: 157).

Neither political representation nor accountability seems to be inherent to a particular model of urban government, however. The dispute between fragmentation and consolidation models appears to be a confrontation between different sets of ‘values and principles regarding the role and functions that a government unit should fulfil’ (Lefevre 1998: 11). The arguments for fragmentation focus mainly on individual rights and economic considerations such as efficiency and competition, failing to adequately consider issues of social equality, solidarity, and the politics of identity (Lefevre 1998; Travers 2004). In the case of Santiago, we must agree with claims of the detrimental effects of inter-municipal competition, which invariably favours the areas with higher socio-economic profiles, and the need to balance the relationships between municipalities (Orellana 2011). This is at the heart of our interest in metropolitan governments.

A way of categorizing metropolitan consolidated government models is regarding whether they

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are ‘supramunicipal’ or ‘intermunicipal’, without either model determining the success or failure of a particular reform. In addition, the models are by no means static but can go through different changes over time. The supramunicipal model is known as the purest, quintessential ‘metropolitan model’. It usually introduces a new, independent, tier of government and its principles include: political legitimacy through directly elected authorities, financial independence, relevant responsibilities, appropriate staff, and precise competences over its functional territory. This is, evidently, an ideal and in reality there are merely stronger or weaker versions of the model, depending on which features they include and to what degree.

Rodríguez and Oviedo suggest London as one of the cities which comes closer to this ideal. Lefevre (2008) also includes London in his list of examples for this model, but makes the distinction between the GLC (1963-1986) as a strong form of the metropolitan model, and the GLA (2000-present) as a weak one.

Intermunicipal arrangements, on the other hand, are more common and the model consists of establishing an institution that is not independent from other government units, but actually depends on other levels, normally the municipalities (Lefevre 2008; Rodríguez & Oviedo 2001). There are several different intermunicipal models, according to the kind of cooperation among municipalities and to whether the arrangements are mono-sectoral or not, and whether they extend to the whole metropolitan area or not. Some general features include representatives indirectly elected by the member municipalities, on whom the legitimacy of the system rests. Other characteristics include lack of financial autonomy, varying powers according to agreements and

cooperation among municipalities, and competences which sometimes only over part of the metropolitan territory. As supramunicipal models, intermunicipal arrangements are diverse. Among the joint authorities with jurisdiction over the entire metropolitan area are the French communautés urbaines, which include cities such as Lyon or Strasbourg (Lefevre 1998, 2008).

(5)

Good government

In order to explore what might constitute ‘good’ metropolitan governance we will explore the question of legitimacy and how it is produced. Lefevre assertively claims that ‘the lack of legitimacy of metropolitan areas is likely the most crucial obstacle for metropolitan governance’ (2008: 158). It is important to begin by distinguishing that the nature of the power vested through legitimacy does not involve autonomy or sovereignty. As we implied when previously discussing decentralization processes, we agree with Young’s distinction between local empowerment and local autonomy. She defines autonomy as an agent’s capacity to hold ‘sole and final authority to decide on specific issues and actions, and no other agent has the right to interfere’ (1990: 249).

Empowerment, on the other hand, is defined as the ‘participation of an agent in decision-making through an effective voice and vote’ (Young 1990: 251). It follows that the creation of a metropolitan government should empower the city and its inhabitants in decisions which affect them, rather than grant it autonomy. Just as decentralization seen as the creation of autonomous localities is likely to produce more inequality, a metropolitan government reform centred in autonomy is both unrealistic (particularly in a unitary and highly centralized country as Chile), and undesirable.

‘To make urbanism work, people must identify with it’ (Brugmann 2009: 219). The statement regards Jaime Lerner’s vision of Curitiba’s success. But the importance of the politics of identity for the success of a metropolitan government reform goes beyond the way people might feel identified by specific concrete projects. The question of where territorial identity lies is beyond the reach of this dissertation, but we would like to state the importance of considering the issue in order to build a legitimate metropolitan governance arrangement. Lefevre actually argues that the lack of metropolitan identity is at the core of the legitimacy problems of metropolitan areas.

They are not ‘reference territories for the society as a whole’ (Lefevre 2008: 158). For Santiago, this might well be true if we agree with Márquez and Pérez, who claim that ‘one’s ‘territory’ today is no longer ‘Santiago’; it is defined as one’s barrio, or neighbourhood’ (2008: 1462).

Santiago is portrayed as an archipelago of identities and a city which has given up hope on having a ‘voice’. Our intuition, however, suggests that the archipelago does not rule out a metropolitan identity from which to build political strength, and that in fact there is an urban sense of being ‘santiaguinos’, even if it sometimes seems to mostly come out of a negative relationship with the city.

Legitimacy In order to understand the concept of legitimacy for a metropolitan government, we should acknowledge the three dimensions put forward by Lefevre (2008): political, functional, and social legitimacy. All three aspects are necessary, and arrangements based only on one type of legitimacy tend not to succeed, such as the European experiments of city government of the 1960s-80s. According to Klink (2008b), the top-

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down imposition of technical (functional) justifications generated wide-spread resistance and led such attempts to failure. Only the pressure from central governments sustained the new structures, and not for long. A legitimate government has authority granted by citizens through democratic elections but also through the social construction of governance. A metropolitan government should respond to a certain territorial identity and be the product of a collective process of construction of city ‘voice’. What Lefevre (2008) asserts is that political legitimacy cannot be given by the vote or by central government imposition, but must be produced through what most of the times will be long, complex processes.

Therefore, city government reform proposals should be inclusive and incremental in order to build a strong legitimacy component.

The UK central government, for instance, seemed to underestimate how much time and work it would take to set up the GLA, which was implemented very quickly for a reform of that magnitude: three years if counting from Labour’s 1997 election, although public campaigning for reform did not start until 1998, with the election having taken place in May 2000 (Travers 2004). The intricacies of the actual reform (green and white papers), the process that led to the election, and the challenges of transition and first few years of implementation bear witness to its complexity, illustrated by the fact that ‘the Greater London Authority Act was the longest Act of Parliament since the India Act of 1935’ (Travers 2004: 65). An important lesson to draw from this experience, and something on which both international and Chilean authors seem to agree on, is the importance of an incremental process and that any reform must be implemented gradually in order to maximize the

opportunities for success (Aylwin 1991; Lefevre 2008).

In general, political legitimacy is obtained through the creation of public institutions, as Lefevre (2008) suggests. We hold some of the challenges which he identifies for building political legitimacy in metropolitan areas to be highly relevant for a potential reform in Santiago. Firstly, metropolitan arrangements must be made acceptable to local governments. In the Chilean case, metropolitan governments would challenge the authority and/or competences not only of municipalities, but also of provinces and regional governments, not to mention central government bodies which currently make significant metropolitan decisions, as we have shown previously. It is not surprising then to find out that, in fact, there is a considerable degree of resistance and lack of consensus among Santiago municipalities regarding the idea of creating the figure of a city mayor (Chuaqui & Valdivieso 2004). It is vital that a potential metropolitan government promotes confidence among municipalities that the new institution will support local interests rather than trample over them. A desirable objective might be to devise a structure that could turn metropolitan decision-making into a form of intermunicipal decision-making (Frug & Barron 2008), but it could also be argued that this may get distorted and lead to ineffective metropolitan leadership if powerful municipalities hijack or boycott city-wide interests.

There is a political trade-off to be made between strong and effective leadership which needs to exercise certain degree of control over the municipalities (and arguably, be stronger than the sum of its parts), and maintaining local level empowerment.

But the resistance to metropolitan governments will not necessarily come only from local governments who

fear losing power or even being abolished. Particularly in centralist countries, such as Chile and the UK, there can occur a paradox whereby central government initiates and promotes the creation of a city government and at the same time becomes the strongest force in trying to limit its powers. ‘Blair’s enthusiasm for directly elected mayors’ (Travers 2004: 47) did not prevent that the strongest attempts to weaken the GLA came precisely from central government.

‘[…] the most determined efforts to affect the direction and content of the proposals came from the Home Office, DETR [Department of Environment, Transport and Regions] and other parts of central government. Such efforts were generally to reduce the potential power of the new mayor and assembly – for example, in relation to policing in London. The GLA that resulted from this mangling by parts of Whitehall was very much weaker than an effective city government needed to be’ (Travers 2004: 53).

Any power given to a Santiago government will be power lost by the central, regional or municipal levels. The strength of Santiago’s primacy could be actually seen as its biggest weakness, much like Travers suggests was the case of London:

‘Paradoxically, it is London’s economic strength and size which has, for centuries, ensured its political weakness. For the Queen in Parliament, and now for the

Prime Minister in Downing Street, London represents a rival and a threat’ (Travers 2004: 13).

It is unlikely that any level of government, and certainly not the central level in the context of Chile, will easily devolve any significant control to a metropolitan government. The limitations of the Chilean decentralization process to date leads us to believe this (Mardones 2006), while the evidence of metropolitan reforms abroad tends to confirm this tendency. The creation of the GLA, for instance, is not considered to have marked ‘a serious reversal of the centralist tendency in the British state, nor did it signify a major devolution of political and fiscal authority’ (Travers 2004: 142). A sign of this can be seen in that, instead of becoming smaller, the (central) Government Office for London grew after the creation of the GLA (Travers 2004). Nonetheless, and regardless of whether devolution is strong or weak, the role and political will of the central government is indispensable in initiating any reform. As we have seen in Chile this is particularly true given the way bills are presented to parliament, and the way investments in the urban territory are decided, among other factors.

In addition to the role of the central state ‘to start, promote, and institutionalize cooperation between local actors’ (Lefevre 2008: 181), both horizontal and vertical relationships between a potential city government and other government levels are also important. By this we mean the interactions with other regions and cities in the country, and with other scales of government within the metropolitan territory. It is important that any reform focuses on enabling the city to ‘pursue a substantive agenda for the future and to engage in

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political debate over what that future should be’ (Frug & Barron 2008: 52), while fostering cooperation with surrounding areas and other scales of government. This might seem utopian, but especially given Santiago’s urban primacy and the unequal development within the country’s regions, it is crucial that any metropolitan reform in the capital is carried out in the wider context of the deepening of the decentralization process not just in Santiago but also in other regions of the country. A city government for Santiago should not mean deepening centralization in the capital or deepening the uneven development between Santiago and the other regions.

There seem to be two basic ways of avoiding conflict with other government tiers in the Santiago territory: making the new metropolitan government match an existing jurisdiction or creating a new body conformed by representatives of municipalities and/ or higher government tiers. Aylwin’s proposal (1991) is a combination of both possibilities, and Chuaqui and Valdivieso’s (2004) follow the same design. The metropolitan government would be located within the existing Santiago Province and it would have a similar structure to the Regional Governments. Its main authorities would be the existing provincial Governor, who is appointed by the Chilean President, and a Metropolitan Council would be created, formed by representatives of the municipal councils and mayors, along with other members appointed by the president.

Our main criticism to this model stems from our conviction that indirectly elected authorities, and more so appointed ones, seriously undermine the construction of a legitimate ‘city voice’, in addition to the already discussed misfit between the provincial boundaries and the built-up area.

The second challenge for building political legitimacy that we find relevant for the Chilean case refers to the need to balance metropolitan empowerment with neighbourhood participation (Lefevre 2008). Compared to local governments, which are supposed to provide more possibilities for direct involvement of citizens in decision-making, metropolitan governments are seen to create more distance between political power and citizens. To compensate for this, Lefevre suggests that ‘metropolitan empowerment should go hand in hand with neighbourhood empowerment’ (2008: 164), which we see as desirable in the wider context of deepening democracy by acknowledging its scalar quality and creating demand for public transparency and accountability. The different territorial and political scales should be accounted for when promoting the engagement and active participation of the city’s inhabitants in the production of space.

In Chile, neighbourhoods are not government units, since municipalities are the smaller scale of government and they comprise several neighbourhoods.

However, and despite the ambiguity of the definition and interpretation of ‘neighbourhood’, it is the base for the smaller territorial unit recognized within local government (the unidad vecinal), which not necessarily matches with identities of ‘neighbourhood’, though. The unidades vecinales have legally recognized bodies called Juntas de Vecinos, which have a representative role and are seen by local governments as a way of informing citizens of their policies, rather than as a vehicle for effective participation (Rojas 2010). Despite their inherent limitations, they are the smallest, closest scale for inhabitants to exercise urban democracy and engage with city-wide issues, and we believe there is great

potential in strengthening their role and making them not only demand transparency and accountability from others but become more democratic and accountable themselves.

The above is closely related to the third challenge identified by Lefevre as ‘giving democratic status to metropolitan arrangements’ (2008: 165). We believe this is extremely relevant in Chile, particularly in light of the case of the Regional Governments, which provides a key example of an institution that despite its many virtues is strongly questioned from a representative democracy point of view (Morales & Navia 2008).

The recently approved direct election of councils and executive authorities is a necessary but not sufficient condition for deepening democracy, since ‘it does not solve the question of the political and social acceptance of these arrangements’. This leads us onto the social aspect of the legitimacy question, which is related to the way in which metropolitan areas can be established as ‘reference territories’. The importance of spaces of debate and education in active citizenship cannot be underestimated in terms of the collective construction of the urban territory. Similarly, and as we will try to show through the case of Bogota, public space can play a crucial role in creating a sense of belonging and therefore building the city as a reference territory for inhabitants.

Public space in Bogota: vision and order The city of Bogota was strategically founded by the Spaniards on the East side of an Andean plateau at an altitude of 2,640m (Rueda-García 2003). Predictably, because of its geographical constraints which contain its urban expansion, Bogota also benefits from a relative fit between the city’s administrative boundaries and

its built-up area. Since 1991, with an amendment of the National Constitution, the capital city is organized as a District Capital, whose territory is divided into 20 jurisdictions. Key urban projects developed under the administration of this new metropolitan government have been internationally recognized as connecting the physical reality of the city with the social dimension in various levels (Berney 2010; Cobo 2008). The urban change that happened in Bogota in the last decades is useful to illustrate an exemplary innovation in urban administration, particularly because the city is seen more as a project than as a plan.

Signals of the city as an urban project can be traced back to the proposals developed by Le Corbusier in 1951, as a commission for a plan of modernization of the city.

The ‘Plan Piloto de Bogota’ was a continuity of previous road infrastructure projects, however it also added a shift on the way projects were conceived; it was not just about projects for a plan but the city as a whole was the project. The urban and architectural forms were capable of assuming or absorbing the city as a project over the territory (Salazar 2008). Despite the inflexibility of the modernist rational approach, this vision incorporated notions of ‘social and welfare considerations that included social and spatial equity as one of its goals’ (Carmona & Burgess 2001: 19). Hitherto, the urban plan was considered that of the systematic regulation of the city through zoning and the fixation of building norms that determine urban morphology. Meanwhile, a project is closer to the notion of urban design as the architecture of the city, or ‘spheres of urbanistic action to promote vitality, liveability, and physical character’ (Krieger & Saunders 2009: 114).

Recently (1995-2003), the administration of three

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Bogota city boundaries. The fact that the majority of Bogota’s citizens live within the administrative boundaries (6.35 out of 6.6 million in 2000), allows for a wider impact of governments decisions, and thus potentially more even distribution of resources across the territory.

Source: Burdett ed. 2008: 24, 31

consecutive mayors ‘used public space as a setting and tool to reinvent a culture of citizenship’ (Berney 2010: 539). The transformation of the city was envisioned through the redevelopment of the ‘social and physical infrastructure of the city’, where ‘public space is viewed as an essential public infrastructure and service’ (Berney 2010: 539). Hence, public space is not only expected to provide the physical base for social encounter but is also in itself a structural element of the city and represents the purpose of a democratic political project.

‘An increased interest in urban design accompanied the attention to public space in Bogota. Rather than focusing on individual buildings, the city and its designers and planners focused increasingly on the fabric of the city and how that fabric serves their citizens. In Bogota, this process is conceived of as bringing together the plan (planning) and the project (architecture) to create city design projects that are more than the sum of their parts’ (Berney 2010: 541).

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Bogota District Capital (BDC) Boroughs (outside the BDC) ‘Localidades’ BDC

The new urban condition of Bogota began with the government of Antanas Mockus, whose focus was ‘on the social and political territory of public space’ (Berney 2010: 541). Even though the focus varied with Peñalosa– the following administration, it still remained under the overarching vision of public space as a planning ideal.

Peñalosa’s task was to ‘recreate and expand the physical territory of public space’, and ‘it is within the actual, material geography of the city’s public spaces that the mayors hoped Bogota’s residents would engage in the

process of community building and learning how to be a more unified and mutually respectful citizenry’ (Berney 2010: 541).

Like other rapidly expanding cities in Latin America, the crisis that Bogota was experiencing in the ‘90s made the city seem ungovernable (Salazar 2008), thus needed a radical change. As it was presented before, the solution was enabled by the creation of a new order to organize citizen coexistence (Mouffe in: Mostafavi 2008). This order was an urban order that considered public space as its main element. Yet, the public-space-oriented solution was also a reinvention and recreation (Berney 2010), in light of Krieger’s theorization about the shaping of public space being ‘considered the first order of urbanism’ (2009: 118). Unlike other Latin American mega cities such as Buenos Aires, Rio de Janeiro or Santiago, Bogota’s metropolitan government enabled the implementation of a citywide coordinated network of public spaces (transport system, libraries, schools, parks) that serves the majority of the city’s urban population (Burdett & Kaasa 2011). The result was the collective construction of a metropolitan territory which, despite the chaotic condition of Bogota on its way to becoming a mega city, could be connected through an overall city project that promoted the identification of the citizens with their social and physical environment.

Visible impact and accountability In terms of establishing a legitimate metropolitan democracy, a new metropolitan government should demonstrate its usefulness and benefits. A new governing arrangement should demonstrate its political relevance with tangible achievements, as we saw was the case in Bogotá. Perhaps nowhere is Travers’ claim that ‘directly

Public space network. A local culture of citizenship was reinvented and the authorities’ vision materialized in strategic urban projects, evenly distributed across the territory. These tackled the urban services of mobility, education and leisure, building a consolidated network of public spaces.

Source: Carmona & Burgess, 2001: 219

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BRT network Cycle routes network Libraries network (3 scales) Mertropolitan park N

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elected executive mayors can, if they are effective and if they have sufficient powers, make radical changes to a city’ (2004: 180) more relevant than in Bogota. However, and as the case of London shows, it can be extremely difficult for a new authority to generate such impact given the very nature of metropolitan governance and the limited powers city governments tend to be granted.

During the first few years of the GLA, it was difficult to see concrete measures on which to evaluate the new institution’s performance, apart from the congestion charging: ‘What the mayor found difficult to do was to identify things where he was able to say ‘we did this – now judge us on this’. On the key issues affecting London in 2000 to 2003 […] he could never quite get in the driving seat. Partly, this is a result of his limited powers under the legislation, but it also reflects a more deep-seated problem with governing London – its huge scale and complexity’ (Travers 2004: 112).

Being accountable to the city’s inhabitants is another aspect of metropolitan democratic legitimacy.

On this respect, Chile has made important progress in recent years, particularly through the creation of the transparency and access to public information law. The limitations of this legislation regarding local government accountability have been made clear by Ortega and Marín (2011), and similar considerations should be examined for a metropolitan government. For instance, we will see how the London experience shows that simply having elected Assembly members sit on the boards of service delivery bodies is not a guarantee of accountability. As a matter of fact it weakens it, since the assembly’s main scrutiny function is undermined by the obvious conflict between being both an executive and a scrutinizer.

In terms of specific mechanisms for accountability of supra-municipal institutions, the experiences of the Latin American Network of Just and Sustainable Cities (http://www.redciudades.net/) provide an extremely rich reference framework with the added value of the relevance of the Latin American context. This network brings together different civil society groups which promote social control of urban public policy, and monitoring city government accountability is one of their main concerns. We identify two experiences as especially compelling for the Santiago debate. One of them is the Nueva Región Cómo Vamos (http:// www.losrioscomovamos.cl), which is possibly the most developed experience of this sort in Chile and is therefore important to study for its local relevance but also because it relates to the recent creation of a new region in the country. The lessons that can be drawn from this experience in terms of the challenges and opportunities of establishing a new jurisdiction and administration in the Chilean context are interesting for a metropolitan reform in Santiago, even if the Nueva Región experience was at the regional rather than city level. The other experience which we find an interesting case in terms of city accountability is in Sao Paulo, and in particular regarding the way in which the organic law of the city determines the responsibility of the elected mayor to devise a goals’ programme and account on its follow up to the public (Municipal_Chamber_of_São_ Paulo 2008). The importance of the role of an active social fabric in setting goals, monitoring progress, and pressing for accountability, is clearly demonstrated by the role the Nossa Sao Paulo network (http://www. nossasaopaulo.org.br) has played in that process.

Heart, brain and muscle Effective empowerment for new metropolitan areas implies that the range of decisions that are made through democratic processes should be expanded (Young 1990), but it can be difficult to state precisely which decisions should be metropolitan responsibilities. The difficulty does not lie in technicalities but in the nature of the process, since defining the scope of metropolitan government is a political rather than a technical issue (Frug & Barron 2008; Lefevre 2008). It implies a social debate regarding values, development priorities, and the scales at which they are better addressed. There is no predetermined answer to the question of which functions should be allocated to a metropolitan government, and which to other levels of government. Moreover, ‘there is no natural order dividing topics into those that are local and those that are not’ (Frug & Barron 2008: 49).

It could be maintained that government structures don’t have natural, inherent abilities to address some issues better than others, but rather their capabilities will depend on the extent the legal and policy framework empowers or disempowers them. What is ‘local’ is a matter of interpretation, and becomes a platform for struggle. Frug and Barron claim that, in the United States, the concept of home rule, for instance, ‘means different things in different states’ (2008: 73) and in some, courts will narrow the definition of what is ‘local’ to avoid potential conflicts with state level regulations.

As we have seen, there is a tension between empowering the city-wide authority to an extent that allows it to be effective, without overriding local governments. Tony Travers (2004) offers an interesting take on this issue in London, suggesting the mayor should have more power over the boroughs. He claims

the GLA has few powers to direct the boroughs, which collectively (and including the City of London) spend almost three times the GLA’s budget. ‘Giving the mayor greater discretion over resource distribution and increased powers to direct the boroughs (particularly over matters where co-ordination is needed) could significantly improve the quality of London government’ (Travers 2004: 208). This is particularly important to consider for Santiago, given the dramatic inequalities lived across the city’s territory and the potential for an empowered and legitimate metropolitan government to act as mediator to rebalance inequalities (Orellana 2011). An authority would need a significant degree of ‘home rule’, with relevant faculties and resources to gear investment decisions and public infrastructure in order to balance Santiago’s socio-spatial landscape. In the next sections we will further explore the question of power and resources for city governments by drawing on the experience of other cities.

‘New York State has given New York City a heart, but no brain. Parliament has given London a brain, but no muscle’ (Frug 2005: 2). Frug’s concise yet evocative image summarizes what he holds to be each government’s main limitations. In spite of New York City’s ‘home rule’, it is the State that ultimately controls decisions regarding finances, transport, housing, economic development.

The city, however, is responsible for delivering and managing an overwhelming amount of public services including education, housing provision, waste collection, and prison facilities, among others. In London it is the boroughs which have remained with the responsibility to deliver most of such services, whereas one of the main functions of the GLA is embodied in the London Plan.

Frug calls ‘brain’ the ability of London to strategically

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plan its future growth and development, whereas ‘muscle’ refers to its limitations in terms of capacity to act and raise its own income. Such limitations are evident in Travers’ depiction of the powers of the Mayor of London:

‘[…] the powers of the mayor are largely those of patronage, persuasion and publicity. Patronage, through his or her ability to appoint to the functional bodies; persuasion, using limited control over resources, and position at the centre of what is a continuing system of network and multi-level governance; and publicity through exploiting the mayor’s legitimacy, accountability and democratic claim to ‘speak for London’’ (Travers 2004: 68).

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As reflected by the different natures of the governments of London and New York, one of the main alternatives when thinking of a city government reform is whether the new arrangements will be expected to be more focused on service delivery or on developing strategic vision and plans. This is not to imply the matter is simply resolved by artificially separating both roles within different levels of government. Governing large cities is always more complex than simply establishing that the city-wide government will plan and the municipalities will continue delivering services. As Tony Travers asserts when discussing the GLA reform, ‘it was never going to be a straightforward matter of assigning strategic responsibility to the upper tier, and service delivery to the lower’ (2004: 143).

Some literature in the UK tends to praise US city governments when criticizing what they perceive as

the general lack of power and leadership of UK local government (Hambleton & Sweeting 2004; Travers 2004). The idea of powerful US cities becomes questionable, however, if we consider the convincing evidence presented by authors such as Frug and Barron (2008) when claiming that US cities actually have very little capacity to govern themselves. In the United States, they argue, cities’ ‘home rule’ is very limited and the state governments actually make most of the key decisions, including defining not only how cities can collect revenue but also what expenditures they must make. Moreover, the legal framework regarding city income and expenses will determine to a significant extent what paths cities choose for their future development, in spite of what their citizens or elected authorities may wish for (Frug & Barron 2008).

Sources of income for city governments vary significantly in different contexts, but in general cities in the United States are considered to have more financial independence than cities in other countries, since they tend to have the ability to collect a diverse range of local taxes. However, Frug and Barron remind us that ‘although American cities are self-funded to an extent that many cities in the world are not, they do not have anything like the kind of local fiscal autonomy often attributed to them’ (2008: 75). Cities like New York, for instance, have a wide range of local taxes beyond property tax, but still rely greatly on state aid, which constitutes near 30% of their revenue (Frug & Barron 2008). In the case of Chile, we have mentioned that the combination of a local government fiscal structure greatly dependent on property tax, along with a housing policy that clusters low income and social housing in poor comunas, reinforces and reproduces socio-territorial inequalities.

It is beyond the scope of this dissertation to examine possible fiscal reforms, but an open, public debate is needed about the way in which the financial structure and revenue raising capacity of a potential metropolitan government in Santiago could empower the authority to tackle inter-municipal inequalities.

It is essential that the structure of the metropolitan institution, as we have mentioned earlier, fosters confidence and trust among other government levels and the general population. Besides procedures for ensuring external accountability to citizens, such as the goals programme in Sao Paulo, scrutiny functions within the government should be built-in. ‘The GLA was the first authority in Britain designed to separate ‘executive’ and ‘non-executive’ functions’ (Travers 2004: 117). The Mayor invested with the former and the Assembly with the latter, which mainly consist of the responsibility to scrutinize and hold the Mayor to account. This possibly reflects natural concerns about potential excessive concentration of power in one individual, in a country with a style of politics that favours collective rather than personal or ‘presidential’ leadership.

According to Travers, there is a general view that the GLA Assembly has been unsuccessful and has struggled to find an effective role. As we have seen, the focus on scrutiny was undermined by assembly members being nominated on boards of certain functional bodies such as the Metropolitan Police Authority and the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority (Travers 2004).

In addition, ‘[…] as the assembly did not have to create an executive of committee chairs (or a leader for that matter) there was no great pressure on them to create any kind of leadership group or operating system’ (Travers 2004: 135). Moreover, Travers suggests that politicians

might simply not be as attracted to scrutiny functions as to more active roles. This lack of coherence in the institutional design of metropolitan governments is not uncommon and seems to stem out of the tension between promoting a strong, effective authority, and curbing its powers to the point it cannot be effective. Another example of how this played out in the case of the first few years of the GLA is the issue of staff appointments. The GLA staff members, who write the Mayor’s strategies, prepare his budgets and oversee service delivery, are appointed by the Assembly instead of the Mayor’s office.

This resulted in the Mayor appointing a large number of advisors whom he trusted and who became very powerful, often bypassing GLA officers (Travers 2004).

The main problem of this system is that it sets conditions for potentially hostile working relations rather than ones based on cooperation and effectiveness.

The strong mayor model of government for cities is considered more typical of the United States, but arguments for and attempts of enhancing effective metropolitan governance through personal leadership can be found in cities such as London, Curitiba and Bogotá, to name some. In Latin America, the role of wellknown, strong leaders with clear vision has been crucial in the success of city governments such as the ones headed by Lerner in Curitiba (Brugmann 2009), and Mockus and Peñalosa in Bogotá (Berney 2010). Strong leadership of this kind can ensure that there is a visible, clear figure that can be seen as personally responsible for the city’s management and development. But this model has its risks, since it can easily become focused on personalities rather than on city issues. Similarly, successful experiences under certain mayors ‘[do] not prove the inherent superiority of the strong mayor model

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of government’ (Travers 2004: 179). The apprehensions towards potential concentration or abuse of power are perhaps, as we have seen, some of the most important reasons for central governments to limit city powers or to diffuse leadership and functions.

Lefevre (2008) argues that, ideally, three different types of leadership should complement each other.

Apart from individual leadership seen in strong mayor models, he mentions the case of Bologna as an example of collective leadership, and the case of Madrid as an example of institutional leadership. Bologna had a mayor but its effectiveness was in the group linked to the communist party (PCI), which controlled political positions and the resources needed to support the development of a metropolitan city. The Comunidad Autónoma de Madrid, on the other hand, is governed through a ‘neo-corporatist’ system composed of several councils and agencies which represent economic and social sectors (Lefevre 2008).

However, regardless of the type of leadership of a particular design for governance architecture, we agree with Travers’ notion that strengthening the metropolitan office is the best way to foster accountability.

‘If central government is concerned about the dangers of abuse of power by a strong mayor, the solution is not to weaken the office of mayor but rather to strengthen the office – to make it more relevant to the lives of Londoners, more important and more fought over, so that a strong democratic culture can be established and clear lines of accountability and responsibility created […]. The most effective check on potential abuse of executive power would be a vigorously contested mayoralty, with high turnout, informed debate and a strong range of candidates both for mayor and assembly’ (Travers 2004: 209).

(6) An urban politics of the inhabitant

Throughout this paper we explored the extent to which neoliberalism and market-led policies have resulted in a deeply unjust and uneven urban development in Santiago, with profound social and spatial consequences. In the absence of a legitimate governing arrangement at a citywide scale, the disparities between municipalities perpetuate a situation where those who need less have more, and vice versa. In this scenario, the increasing gap in the quality of life between rich and poor, and the ungovernability of Santiago as a sprawling and fragmented mega city, are matters of urgency. Particularly so, in light of recent findings which show that even though residential segregation in Santiago might be decreasing (mainly because of poor areas being “colonized” by the middle classes by way of gated communities), the effects of segregation in poorer inhabitants are worsening dramatically (Roberts & Wilson 2009).

Our analysis leads us to suggest that the most important design problem for Santiago is the design of a governance structure that can help rebalance inequalities and give the city a democratic voice. In this sense, design is deeply political, and the institutional result will only be as good as the process which led to it. An appropriate and effective institutional design for

a metropolitan government for Santiago should develop from a thorough interdisciplinary analysis and inclusive public debate about what capacities should this authority be expected to have, which specific powers it requires in order to exercise them, and which territory should be its jurisdiction.

The way the geographic question is addressed in the existing reform proposals is particularly unsatisfactory, since they all focus on overlapping a new metropolitan tier of government to the existing province of Santiago.

We do not think this is an appropriate solution to the city’s problems, nor does it create conditions for effectively planning its future, since many of Santiago’s main issues stem from the coupled dynamics of expansion of the built-up area and segregation of the poor in the peripheries. Excluding key areas of current and future metropolitan change from a potential citywide administration would be a mistake. The London case demonstrates that in order to define what is the extent of the territory to be governed, it is critical to bear in mind the historical evolution and political contexts that originated the administrative boundaries and how they were coordinated along with the expansion of the city. In addition, and despite its considerable limitations (Hall 1963), the regulation of the urban sprawl through the lawful establishment of the greenbelt helps not only to ‘encourage the intensive use of infrastructure’ (Carmona & Burgess 2001: 16) within the metropolitan area, but also contributes to create a clear physical definition of a unitary geographical unit over which the metropolitan government can coherently and cohesively exercise its power (Travers 2006). For Santiago, the main consideration is that the definition of the metropolitan territory should not be arbitrary but respond to the

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The city as a political project. Built form of Santiago superimposed over the territory, shows the need for a political urban reform coherent with the social reality, and the need for a radical utopia.

Source: Authors, based on GORE

socio-spatial processes that are shaping the city and the lives of its inhabitants.

Based on what we have explored until now, we suggest the reach, form and content of a metropolitan authority is not a predetermined matter but should rather be the product of a broad social process based on building a legitimate political project. Experiences in Bogota, again with their own limitations, illustrate the way a political project was carried out as a city project.

Public space was used for the social construction of the metropolitan territory (Lefevre 1998) which unfolded its social dimension through the promotion of citizenship and social dynamism, and its physical dimension through the creation of public-oriented infrastructure with high degrees of culturally significant symbolic values. The reinvention of Bogota could only happen under an exceptional political state in which the shaping of different types and scales of public space play a crucial role in reinventing urban public life. Creating conditions for the blossoming of active urban citizenship, rethinking policies and legislation to reflect the social value of land, and investing in public infrastructure which reflects and embodies democracy, are only some of the most crucial challenges Santiago must face in order to rebalance its unequal development.

A metropolitan reform process should integrate ideas about how different urban groups and institutions relate to each other and how those relations can be organized to promote justice. The major challenge is not technical, but political. This is the way we interpret Koolhaas’ confrontation when he thrusts upon us the paradox of the disappearance of urbanism right at the time when urbanization has become global (1995). We look back to Lefebvre (1996) and understand the urgency for a

reappearance of urbanism as a radical urbanism of the inhabitant, a utopian and possible way of overcoming the dominating technocratic vision and putting politics back in the city. ‘Only social force, capable of investing itself in the urban through a long political experience, can take charge of the realization of a programme concerning urban society’ (Lefebvre 1996: 156) The pragmatic concerns about a government reform should iterate with values and practices of an urban politics of the city as oeuvre (1996), understood as an invitation to ‘understand better how politics of identity and difference will articulate with an urban politics of the inhabitant’ (Purcell 2002: 106). The urbanism of the inhabitant is the possible and also the utopia, it is imagining and creating the city which, as Jane Jacobs said, allows ‘strangers to dwell in peace’ (1961: 72).

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