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Circunvalación
22'01/ 2010
Circunvalación examines Santiago’s new urban highways and their impact on the urban landscape, neighborhoods, and communities. Traveling the Circunvalación Américo Vespucio, this video explores new urban highways through the observation of urban space and interviews with people involved in and affected by this massive project. Through the navigation of landscapes and narratives, we can evidence the conflicts arising from the country’s great economic development and the way urban space is created in Santiago. On one hand, new highways constitute an essential element for territorial ordering and planning; on the other, they reflect urban processes defined by inequality, an inevitable consequence of the advancement of global capital. The contradictions arising from Santiago’s new urban highways signify an opportunity for the examination of dominant discourses, which portray the city as a source for economic growth and present new highways as a symbol of progress and the modernization of the state.
Urban infrastructure should be conceived within a framework that contributes to create social and territorial equality. The daily experience of urban space in the city should be a priority in the formulation of infrastructure projects, beyond economic, technological, and functional requirements. In order for this to happen, we need to revise public policy and reformulate the paradigm defining the role of the state in the production of urban space.
Besides observing a specific urban phenomenon, this work seeks to reveal underlying material and social processes through the analysis of the particular, the subjectivity of the inhabitant captured through an ethnographic encounter. It also attempts to create new approximations to the urban sphere, through open and interdisciplinary explorations that take into account the multiple dimensions of urban space.
