The new dwellers of southern cities: Social diversification and uncertainty in Santiago inner city

Abstract

Who the new dwellers of the fast-changing inner cities in the Global South are has been largely overlooked in the literature. The political economy underpinning inner-city change, particularly the rent-gap mechanism, has been the predominant lens for analysing these processes. That is the case of the Santiago inner area, Chile, where a densification process tallying more than 600 dense high-rises has been widely studied. However, the question of who actually inhabits these towers remains unanswered. This article underscores the need to have a deeper understanding of the new urban residents in Latin America due to the profound changes in the social fabric, including the emergence of the ‘vulnerable-to-poverty’ class and the strong wave of intra-regional migration, which directly affects housing needs and preferences. To address this gap, I combine survey data from 1406 high-rise residents and in-depth interviews with building administrators to test the following hypothesis: the new high-rises are the residences of those who, despite overcoming poverty, still struggle to settle. To test this hypothesis, I characterise the high-rise residents according to their social class, level of economic insecurity and intergenerational social mobility. The results show a process of social diversification of Santiago’s inner-city residents. These buildings host residents who follow crossed-life trajectories. While some have moved up the social ladder, others have moved down, accessing these residential buildings via formal and informal strategies. And yet, regardless of this disparity in life trajectories, the unifying element of these new residents is their pervasive experience of economic insecurity.