For a proper home : housing rights in the margins of urban Chile, 1960-2010 / Edward Murphy.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Murphy, Edward, author.

Series:

Pitt Latin American series

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Housing--Chile.

Housing.

Property.

Right of property.

Housing--Law and legislation.

Chile.

Housing--Law and legislation--Chile.

Right of property--Chile.

Property--Chile.

Physical Description:

ix, 343 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Pittsburgh, Pa. : University of Pittsburgh Press, [2015]

Summary:

"From 1967 to 1973, a period that culminated in the socialist project of Salvador Allende, nearly 400,000 low-income Chileans illegally seized parcels of land on the outskirts of Santiago. Remarkably, today almost all of these individuals live in homes with property titles. As Edward Murphy shows, this transformation came at a steep price, through an often-violent political and social struggle that continues to this day. In analyzing the causes and consequences of this struggle, Murphy reveals a crucial connection between homeownership and understandings of proper behavior and governance. This link between property and propriety has been at the root of a powerful, contested urban politics central to both social activism and urban development projects. Through projects of reform, revolution, and reaction, a right to housing and homeownership has been a significant symbol of governmental benevolence and poverty reduction. Under Pinochet's neoliberalism, subsidized housing and slum eradication programs displaced many squatters, while awarding them homes of their own. This process, in addition to ongoing forms of activism, has permitted the vast majority of squatters to live in homes with property titles, a momentous change of the past half-century. This triumph is tempered by the fact that today the urban poor struggle with high levels of unemployment and underemployment, significant debt, and a profoundly segregated and hostile urban landscape. They also find it more difficult to mobilize than in the past, and as homeowners they can no longer rally around the cause of housing rights. Citing cultural theorists from Marx to Foucault, Murphy directly links the importance of home ownership and property rights among Santiago's urban poor to definitions of Chilean citizenship and propriety. He explores how the deeply embedded liberal belief system of individual property ownership has shaped political, social, and physical landscapes in the city. His approach sheds light on the role that social movements and the gendered contours of home life have played in the making of citizenship. It also illuminates processes through which squatters have received legally sanctioned homes of their own, a phenomenon of critical importance in cities throughout much of Latin America and the Global South"-- Provided by publisher.

"This book examines the dramatic forms of social mobilization, state-directed repression, mass development projects, and socioeconomic exclusion that have marked struggles over low-income urban housing in Santiago, Chile, during the past half-century"-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Part 1 Unsettled Foundations

Chapter 1 The Urban Politics of Propriety through Revolution and Reaction 23

Chapter 2 Property, Governance, and the City: A Longue Durée Perspective 40

Part 2 Insurgent Ownership

Chapter 3 A Place in the State: Housing Activism and the Seizure of Land, May Day, 1969 71

Chapter 4 Specters in the Revolution: Dilemmas of Home during the Chilean Path to Socialism 101

Part 3 Reactionary Turns

Chapter 5 Locating States of Emergency: The Politics of "Normalization" after the Military Coup 135

Chapter 6 Aesthetics of Order: Forging Spaces of Distinction amid Neoliberal Expansion 164

Part 4 Domesticated Peripheries

Chapter 7 Containing Protest in the Transition to Democracy 193

Chapter 8 Fractures of Home and Nation: Property Titling after the Dictatorship 219

Chapter 9 The Indignities of Home in the Margins of Modern Urban Life 242.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780822963110

0822963116

OCLC:

900158333