Chile urged to avoid gentrification due to PanAm games infra development

Chile is spending some US$550mn on infrastructure for the 2023 Pan American games, including US$51mn on a housing complex in Santiago’s Ñuñoa district, which will partially go to low-income families after the games finish on November 26.

But these plans risk gentrification and could lead to failing the families in need, Nora Libertun, an urban planning and design lecturer at Harvard University, told a webinar in response to a question by BNamericas.

“It would be useful to have a demographic analysis of the [district] and the expectations for the neighborhood; seek out what’s the current capacity. Because when you talk about gentrification, it has to do with density, how many people will you try to accommodate, the amount of public spaces, connectivity, etc.,” she said.

Libertun added that authorities must be aware of gentrification risks in the neighborhoods that host the sports infrastructure. “It is also important to know the history of this place, which kind of families are living in this place.” 

Joaquín Tomé, head of the urban economic studies center at Argentina’s Universidad Nacional de San Martín, said that when Buenos Aires hosted the 2018 Summer Youth Olympics, officials were careful to not repeat the errors of Rio de Janeiro’s 2016 Summer Olympics organizers and declare a state of exception to speed up permitting.

Under this approach, infrastrucure could be built quickly, but it also resulted in mass evictions and caused social unrest. 

“In Río de Janeiro, we realized the consequences of the state of exception in a Latin American context. Our institutions aren’t so accountable when it comes to these mega events,” Tomé, who also served as Buenos Aires province’s social development undersecretary, said.