Verticalization and Densification in ´Estación Central´: An Ethnographic Analysis of the Real Estate Impact on Immigrant Habitats in Santiago, Chile.

Based on an ethnography conducted from 2015 to the present, this study examines an unprecedented process of verticalization and densification in Estación Central, a central district within the Santiago Metropolitan Area in Chile. Various factors converged in this district, including the “regulated (de)regulation” of urban policies (Aalbers, 2016), which enabled the development of large-scale real estate projects, characterized by buildings over thirty floors tall and housing more than a thousand residential units. These high-density apartment blocks are predominantly occupied by immigrants from Colombia and, especially, Venezuela, as part of new migratory waves that arrived en masse in the country starting in the mid-2000s.

The buildings were constructed as an investment opportunity for individual owners, following the logic of asset-based welfare (Doling & Ronald, 2010), and were promoted with the promise of fast and sustained returns driven by demand for housing in central, well-connected areas. However, the intensive use of residential units, buildings, and the surrounding public areas, combined with recent economic shifts, has led to visible degradation in these real estate projects. Immigrants, meanwhile, reside as transient tenants in these spaces and face complex dynamics, ranging from a sense of integration due to proximity with others from their homeland to the challenge of adapting to small and costly living spaces.

This research focuses on this specific housing morphology, constructed under a logic of maximizing profitability in minimal spaces, and explores the impact this model has generated on private immigrant spaces, as well as common and public areas. The work contributes particularly to the concepts of financialization (Rolnik, 2019; Aalbers, 2016), urban trauma and slow violence (Pain, 2018).