Chile’s municipalities urged to play greater role in urban projects

Chile’s municipal and regional administrations must start to assume a more active role in the structuring and development of urban improvement projects, according to a senior official. 

“Without municipal leadership, urban management wouldn’t be possible in Chile, especially in long-term processes,” Vicente Burgos, head of the housing ministry’s urban development office, told BNamericas.

Burgos said regional governors should also have a leadership role, although he admitted they currently lack the capacity to do so. 

The official made the comments on the sidelines of an urban rehabilitation seminar held by Columbia Global Centers in Santiago. 

Chile held its first elections for governor last year, and since then the regions have begun to structure their own projects, though they accept they are far from the national government’s ability in terms of scale and investment. 

At the same event Sebastián Salas, research fellow at Columbia University’s graduate school of architecture, planning and preservation, told BNamericas there should be at least some type of organization or system to coordinate the three government levels – national, regional and municipal.

“We need to advance our institutions. There’s a series of instruments that we still don’t have,” he said.

In his presentation, Salas said that over the past 30 years Chile’s urban planning was dominated initially by building large social housing projects far from city centers and without access to public transport, hospitals, schools and other key services, and after 2015 it shifted to hyper-densification within central areas. 

He said this has resulted in overpopulated neighborhoods with poor capacity to attend local needs, and warned that unlike municipalities or regions, neighborhoods do not have a defined planning policy. 

“There has to be a leader, and sometimes it has to be the closest territorial authority, which is the mayor,” he said.