Introduction From the 1990s onwards, most large Latin American inner-city areas have experienced different forms of urban restructuring. Santiago is no exception to this rule. Since 1991, the property-led urban renewal market of Santiago has been quantitatively successful at producing upper-and middle-income housing units in high-rise blocks, also continuously expanding the market towards areas of large rent gaps. This real estate market depends largely on local master-plan rezoning enforced by independent municipal governments alongside a nationalstate subsidy aimed at the acquisition of these residential units. However, it has also been recognized that Santiago’s market of renewal produces ground rent dispossession and large-scale socio-spatial displacement, i.e., gentrification by ground-rent dispossession (or GGRD) as the land price paid to owner-occupants is usually below market prices (López-Morales 2011). Since 1990, with the sole exception of Pedro Aguirre Cerda (PAC) comuna, ten of the eleven inner-city municipalities of Santiago have redrafted their local urban master plan, specifically amplifying floor-area ratios (FAR), in order to attract the high-rise real estate market into their areas. PAC is currently not only a territory well connected to the metropolitan center but also a historic working-class area located in the southern inner-city area of Santiago. It contains the emblematic La Victoria población,2 which emerged in 1957 as the first of the many areas involved in the politically structured mass squatting movement in Chile and Latin America. During the military dictatorship (1973-90) there was political obliteration and military repression of its hitherto organized social movements, in addition to deliberate policies of increased social segregation (Finn 2006a, 2006b). The combination of insufficient state-led social housing, low social access to the rental market and iron-handed government opposition to land seizures (Gilbert 1993, 2002) dramatically increased overcrowding in the inner city, which had already been high. Currently, Santiago’s inner city shows more than 50 percent of families sharing residence, with the housing shortage in La Victoria población is estimated at approximately 600

units, or 18 percent of a total of 3,200 dwellings. The high rate of overcrowding and the lack of green areas are problems occurring not only in La Victoria but also in the whole Pedro Aguirre Cerda comuna, which is the municipality of Santiago containing the fewest green areas, with a rate of 1.2 m2 per capita, yet with a current rate of owner-residence at approximately 80 percent. Starting in 2003, there has been an aggressive institutional attempt from PAC local government to make radical modifications to its local urban master plan. A first step was to hire a private consultancy firm (PCF ) with this precise aim. Should PAC’s new plan have been legally approved, it would have cleansed several traditional low-income areas, enlarging the rent gap aimed to attract middle-and high-rise renewal and thus increasing the average social composition of the PAC district. However, PAC’s local community realized that by accepting the changes in the urban and building codes contained in the new master plan, larger rent gaps would not necessarily mean that higher land prices would be paid to traditional inner-city, low-income owner-residents as a form of ground rent. In fact, the opposite was the case. The issue of disparity between the ground rent potentially achieved by real estate operators and the actually much lower ground rent cashed in by owner-occupants is core in Santiago. This is because 80 percent of the urban population of Santiago is currently ownerresident and most households in PAC are multi-nuclear, making the actual low capitalized ground rent far insufficient in use value terms for those numerous, agglomerated households to find replacement accommodation elsewhere in a highly segregated and expanding city of 65,000 hectares, leading to large-scale displacement (López-Morales 2009, 2010b, 2011) This chapter describes and analyzes the collectivized and institutionalized insurgency by the people of PAC, which was not only able to stop the top-down redrafting of the master plan attempted by PAC’s local-level municipal government but was also able to produce a bottom-up alternative-draft master plan. This plan was able to control the potential ground rent increase in four key areas of the comuna and produce more adequate policies for the area, forcing the municipal authority’s external technical apparatus to reach a compromise and draw up a different proposal. The chapter begins with an illustration of the official definition of social participation in Chilean urban local planning codes, and the actual involvement the people were allowed to have in PAC. The following sections illustrate the political capacity of PAC residents to overcome those structural limitations and decisively intervene at technical and political levels, the political and technical support by external actors that enhanced the PAC community’s operative knowledge, the means that PAC grassroots could count on for their struggle (essentially, independent local mass media) and the evaluation of the process carried out by the PCF. Matters of social participation are vital in this analysis because, as this chapter shows, Chilean national law decisively reduces social rights to participation in urban planning processes, disfranchising local communities from effective participation. In the case of PAC, the top-down first draft developed by the PCF and the municipality involved very limited levels of popular participation. A

working hypothesis is that the local government of Pedro Aguirre Cerda (PAC) was implementing a managerial-elitist model of policy delivery, pursuing stateentrepreneurial goals (Harvey 1989; López-Morales 2010b; Shin 2009; Macleod 2002) and seeking to attract large-scale, privately led renewal, generate ground rent dispossession and therefore spatial exclusion (i.e., gentrification), with great power concentration in the hands of municipal officials. The chapter is based on a mixed-method case-study analysis that draws on ethnographic analysis at neighborhood level and a secondary dataset of land value and property records, including qualitative information collected in the field, documents and the main actors’ narratives about the process, focusing on the often contradictive discourses from national-and local-level government, and private sector officers. Results indicate that the case of PAC, along with many others in Santiago, shows how the city is being contested by increasingly organized and empowered social forms of local-level urban activism that claim an expanded and more particularized right to the city (Holston 2009; Marcuse 2009). This activism is capable of dealing with structural factors such as the uneven accumulation of ground rent, the loss of economic and cultural heritage as a form of built environment and the negative environmental effects and high levels of displacement caused by large-scale high-rise construction.