For a Proper Home: Housing Rights in the Margins of Urban Chile, 1960-2010
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.
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For a Proper Home: Housing Rights in the Margins of Urban Chile, 1960-2010
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.
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For a Proper Home: Housing Rights in the Margins of Urban Chile, 1960-2010

For a Proper Home: Housing Rights in the Margins of Urban Chile, 1960-2010

by Edward Murphy
For a Proper Home: Housing Rights in the Margins of Urban Chile, 1960-2010

For a Proper Home: Housing Rights in the Margins of Urban Chile, 1960-2010

by Edward Murphy

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Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780822963110
Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
Publication date: 01/05/2015
Series: Pitt Latin American Series , #349
Edition description: 1
Pages: 360
Product dimensions: 6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Edward Murphy is assistant professor of history and global urban studies at Michigan State University. He is the coeditor of The Housing Question: Tensions, Continuities, and Contingencies in the Modern City and Anthrohistory: Unsettling Knowledge, Questioning Discipline.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Introduction 1

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

Conclusion 264

Notes 273

Glossary and Acronyms 305

References 307

Index 335

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