Deliberate improvisation: Planning highway franchises in Santiago,Chile

Abstract

In the 1990s Chile and its capital, Santiago, experienced a transformative wave of large infrastructural development thanks to a post-authoritarian commitment to growth with equity. Celebrated as progressive neoliberalism, growth with equity signaled Chile’s political commitment to market-led development but with targeted forms of state-led resource distribution and interventions in the public realm. This meant the adoption of public—private partnerships (franchises) as the preferred instrument for developing public works, namely highways. Despite political fallout over the projects, especially in cities, franchise planning has been successful — it has produced a country and capital city with a world-class infrastructure. The program’s success, however, is not entirely rooted in its market approach to public works delivery. Franchise planning has worked thanks to a tightly planned business model and a political will to improvise plans to address the social dimensions of large projects. Franchised highways and the protests they have triggered are analyzed as an instance of deliberate improvisation. Deliberate improvisation is the conscious decision to plan without a plan, a political choice that signals the power of the state to define what should be planned, how and when. Deliberate improvisation highlights three key aspects of contemporary Chilean development: the state’s belief in its own power to manage people and place; the privileged position of markets in urban development and the political vulnerability of communities directly affected by large projects. Theoretically, deliberate improvisation bridges the analytical and procedural traditions in planning theory.