The ways of thinking about the use of the territory, of designing the common spaces of coexistence and residence, requires today more than ever the articulation of citizen interests and technical-political interests, they can no longer continue to be the same as before in the face of the failures of territorial planning.
The rates of territorial inequality in Latin America and the world – expressed either in the proliferation of communes with less development, in the increase of environmental sacrifice zones, or even in the analysis of the differentiated behavior of Covid-19 in the territories – have increased in large part due to the lack of dialogue policies between communities and entities that plan the use of the territory to mitigate in some way the excessive commodification or deregulation of land use.
In this regard, it is urgent for public policies to develop a territorial approach, to address the decoupling that exists today between citizen interest and urban planning, between the technical-norm and citizen interests.
Unfortunately, we have several illustrative examples. Recently, the inauguration of a new section in the Costanera Norte of the Metropolitan Region of Chile was stopped by the mayor of the impacted commune in coordination with the Ministry of Public Works, after the neighbors of the sector requested a series of mitigation measures for its opening.
Although the project had been approved by the municipality in 2012, it did not have a consultation with the residents of the residential sector near the extension, who organized and presented a petition that included a table of provisions to be made to accept its inauguration.
In this type of situation, there is a challenge to the traditional relations of administering power, both for subnational and national governments since they are put in check by citizens before decisions of public interest and indicate that if there is no effective dialogue between technicians and citizens there is no possible sustainable development.
Another example of this reconfiguration of territorial power, we find it when a group of neighbors adjacent to a highway that literally “divided in two” the commune, looked with some disdain at the deterioration of the acoustic barriers that the concessionaire company had arranged as a mitigation measure against the acoustic impact of road traffic, complying with the norm, or at least they do not help its proper maintenance.
Why didn’t the community take care of the noise barriers? We believe that it is impossible for the community to appropriate a good for public use that was designed entirely by development technocrats without citizen consultation through or without even having known whether in the second case for the affected community this measure aggravated rather the condition of territorial segregation that already affected them and locked them spatially or geographically rather than protecting them from noise!
The governance paradigm has been installed and to achieve this, the dialogue of knowledge is required.
Recently in Chile, due to the social and health crises that have occurred in the last two years, new forms of protests and citizen practices have emerged that seek new ways of intervening in territorial spaces, questioning development planners about the application of new theoretical and epistemological perspectives to address urban space.
In this way, the increase in the conditions of proximity, of demands for greater social integration, of accumulation of citizen sensitivities regarding the care and preservation of the environment, of the increase in the questioning of extractivist practices, of land seizures, among other situations, challenge the planning instruments and those responsible.
However, there is an important gap between the reflection of citizens and those in charge of implementing territorial public policies. These demands and in some cases, innovative forms of collective expression of discomfort, are increasingly supported from academic spaces, but to a lesser extent from technical or public policy spaces, which complicates a coherent and comprehensive institutional approach to the urban problem.
The social crises that have affected Latin America have undoubtedly called into question the paradigms and disciplinary assumptions on which development planning and its working methods are based. For some representatives of more extreme positions, there would be a global crisis of planning.A traditional government which has based its guidelines on rigid and normative positions at the service of the market, which has led to strong real estate development but also deep territorial inequalities and people who are homeless or who claim access to the territory through illegal seizures.
It is true that territorial planning in the Latin American case has not been successful in its objectives of providing democratic uses of space, but today there is sufficient scientific knowledge from the social sciences and availability of participatory methodologies that can help solve the numerous “blind spots” of traditional urban planning.
By incorporating these elements, better planning for the well-being of our territories will be guaranteed and in this way urban planning will be able to better fulfill its deontological mission.
The content expressed in this opinion column is the sole responsibility of its author, and does not necessarily reflect the editorial line or position of El Mostrador.
