Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Editorial nº 40.

Editorial nº 41.

Currently in the historical centers of the Mexican cities converge modernizing tendencies expressed in their physical form, commercial activities and social tensions. The article analyzes the anchoring of urban renewal in the historic center of the city of Toluca, through the Paseo Molino complex, which marks a milestone in the production of vertical housing, shops and services in a sector that does not know similar backgrounds. Through semi-structured interviews and exploratory tours, the urban environment of the project, the agents and mechanisms of the appropriation of urban land and the prospective of the expected impacts are characterized. The urban anchor expresses levels of intervention and degrees of public and private decision that configure a different mode of urban management through the intensification of urban use and mechanisms that establish the trust to guarantee profitability. It concludes in the importance of the rearrangement of government and private sector relations to face the continuity of the past that goes back almost two centuries, and which will henceforth constitute a factor that could curb the multiplication of modern urban interventions in the historic center of the city of Toluca.

This article presents the case of a public space project in Recoleta, Santiago de Chile, which consolidates and generates a longitudinal and integrated green spatiality of different urban scales and social groups. Focusing on the problems and challenges of urban integration, the text reviews the historical evolution and the 9year process of the project, proposing an analysis of two areas of integration: socio-spatial integration and the challenges of sectoral integration and of the different levels of decision making involved in an urban intervention. The analysis addresses the planning stage and the commission formulation of the project; urban management from the local level; and, the design strategy of the public space to achieve an integral design and a landscaping proposal that values the natural attributes of the place, incorporating the use of native flora that is still incipient in our country.

Contemporary art centers are considered motor parts of urban transformation, which has been observed in many cities around the world. The objective of this article is to analyze the Centro Nacional de Arte Contemporáneo Cerrillos, -Cerrillos National Center of Contemporary Art-, (CNACC), as the engine of transformation of the city. It is a qualitative and descriptive research that analyzes a unique case of institutional type. For the collection of information, a multi-method strategy is deployed: analysis of historical documentation, urban and architectural planimetric analysis and ethnographic study. As a result, the central aspects of the history of the building and the sector, the relationship between the CNACC and the city are presented, the building is characterized, and the experience of the inhabitants is reported. Then the CNACC's capacity to operate as a transformation engine is established based on five elements: connectivity, readability, accessibility, paths and permanence, and flexibility. It is concluded that the Cerrillos National Center of Contemporary Art has the structural or basic conditions that give it the necessary potential to become an engine of transformation of the city.

The social housing policy in Chile, for decades has had users with negative neighborhood satisfaction and appropriation perceptions, added to neighborhoods that in their physical component have deteriorated over the years. This situation has brought different modifications to the housing policy since 2001. In this context, the aim was to explore the perceptions of satisfaction and forms of appropriation of users in their neighborhoods, by using a case of the current housing policy, and also to analyze the physical situation of the built environment. The case study is a previous local committee and currently a housing area called Villa General Bernales, whith people who lived in the Peñoncito slum in the Puente Alto district, and they moved to this new neighborhood in February 2016. The methodology includes qualitative methods, where a process of participant observation and a series of in-depth interviews were carried out. Some of the main results show a high level of satisfaction and neighborhood appropriation from the neighbors, and a neighborhood that has been maintained over time.

The objective of this work is to analyze the housing policies in Villa 20 of the city of Buenos Aires, Argentina, for the neoliberal period 1984- 2018. Specifically, an analysis of the state intervention’ role in a longitudinal manner and its relationship with the informal popular habitat and its neighborhood organizations is done, emphasizing in briefs and urban regulations. This analysis includes a key normative background such as the current Law No 5705/2016 of "Redevelopment, Zoning and socio-urban integration of Villa 20". The relationship between housing policy and its effects on the socio-urban grid is problematized by using the question: What type of housing policies generated integration or, on the contrary, reinforced residential segregation? A methodological multi-method strategy was adopted, incorporating data from primary and secondary sources, including census data, semi-structured interviews with key informants as well as non-participant observation. the law and its execution. As a main finding, it is suggested that although the national democratic opening made progress in legal terms, they did not applied to a concrete housing improvement of the `Villas ́, which is showing a lack of relationship between the law and its enforcement.

Urban growth places mobility as a multifactor problem and complex to solve. Among its less weighted aspects is the subjectivity of the phenomenon, specifically how people perceive their mobility and how participatory they can affect the definition of the city and transport planning. In this problematizing context emerges the study "Formulation of a Sustainable Mobility Plan for the Metropolitan Area of Concepción", applied in the Biobío Region, Chile, and based on a citizen participation approach. Among its most outstanding findings is the role of the emotions of individuals, specifically what refers to the fear and insecurity that condition their movement through the city, beyond the situation of transport and infrastructure that it has. The foregoing would invite to rethink the meaning of the current plans and policies of urban planning, in order to specify a sustainable model of mobility.

Governmentability can be understood as the creation of institutions, strategies and legal and political instruments through which power is exercised. The objective of this article is to reveal aspects of capital accumulation and social control based on the construction of social housing in the outskirts of Mexico City. The implementation of a credit system granted by the national housing agencies for the purchase of homes, the generation of the yearning for access to home ownership, are mechanisms that have had an impact on the reproduction and accumulation of capital, while the generation of debt and the confinement of sectors of low-income population in the urban periphery, are part of a mechanism of control of society. Based on a review of the concept of governability and through the use of data on credits granted by public institutions and financial entities, a discussion on housing policies is proposed as mechanism that served to accumulate capital and social control.

Considering the relational effect of the methods with which we gather information about what surrounds us, the article explores how from the capture and representation data referring to the materiality of buildings in Chile, a distributive behavior is drawn that is also a way of different disposition to the one that develops around the architectural typologies and the types of cities. The instruments and observed data help, insofar as they record the reference of the buildings without considering their final form or function, they allow the observation of a properly infrastructural quality of the subject.