ABSTRACT
The history of Chile is the history of its capital, Santiago de Chile. Santiago was founded by the Spaniard Pedro de Valdivia in 1541 but it was not until the end of the eighteenth century that it began to emerge along a Europeanstyle city plan (Loveman 1988:98).1 De Valdivia arrived at what is now Santiago from the Mapocho River, which he used as one of the reference-points for the city. Today the river forms one side of the roughly triangular-shaped downtown, bounded on the other sides by the Via Norte Sur in the west and the Avenida del Liberator Bernardo O’Higgins to the south. At the center of the triangle is the Plaza de Armas, the downtown core. This central area is congested by the modern traffic that struggles through the inadequate narrow streets and by the pedestrian activity that gravitates around the abundant shops, restaurants and expensive hotels on the streets emanating from the Plaza de Armas. There are few high-rises in this city prone to earthquakes; thus for the most part the city’s expansion has been lateral. The urban sprawl extends in an indefinite extension of the colonial grid-system (Violich 1987:257). Insufficient housing has been the outcome of Santiago’s rapid urban development. The downtown area has heterogeneous residential areas with high-density low-, middle-and upper-class housing (Violich 1987:286). Squatter settlements, known in Chile as poblaciones callampas,2 have developed both in and around the city. They generally can be found in marginal land-use areas such as the banks along the Mapocho River which are prone to flooding (Blouet and Blouet 1982:242-3).
