Socio-spatial restructuring and segregation of the housing: the cases of Santiago of Chile, Mendoza and Buenos Aires

Abstract

The changes in the world economic dynamics, mainly in two past decades of the 20th century, have developed important transformations in the production and appropriation of the urban space processes, especially in the metropolitan areas of Latin America. Those transformations are reflected in the socio-spatial restructuring of the city as a consequence of the segregation process increase. For this reason we analyse the forms of urban habitat, establishing the implications of the housing, not only as a simply product, but also as a condition for the urban space (re)structuring. Therefore, we adopts as methodology the research in the field - in the metropolitan areas of Buenos Aires and Mendoza in Argentina and of Santiago in Chile - as a starting point for the analysis of that phenomenon. We start, then, from a concrete reality, since the metropolitan areas are presented as favourable spaces for the territorialization of the new economic, social and political dynamics.