Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book aims to bring together a selected group of reflections engaging the urban development and the complex reality of the neoliberal urban production of Santiago de Chile. It offers visions and reflections around the irreducible tension beyond the neoliberal and radical dichotomy and suggests an alternative understanding of the urban conditions, its compulsive repetition, fragmentation and seclusion, and its hallucinatory totalising managerial discourses in Santiago. The book draws from Michael Foucault and Giorgio Agamben reflections on governmentality and dispositif attempts to frame the perspective on neoliberalism as discursive practice that produce subjects as well as a series of 'conduct of conduct' and a form of existence or a form of life. It discusses main idea that Santiago's neoliberal mobility regime plays an increasingly important role in the general political settlement that defines Chile's neoliberal institutional arrangements.