Resilient Community Planning from Socio Spatial Practices of Communities at Risk: The Case of the San Ramon Fault in Santiago, Chile

Jorge Inzulza Contardo (Universidad de Chile)
The 2030 United Nations Agenda for Sustainable Development is one of the key tools to promote sustainable urban environments. Particularly, the eleventh goal endorses sustainable cities and communities including “opportunities for all, with access to basic services, energy, housing, transportation and more”. However, this purpose remains a main challenge by considering a global increase of urbanization (54.2% in 2016 according to the World Bank) and also in the impact of natural events that end in catastrophes such as earthquakes (18 mega earthquakes have occurred between 2004 and 2014 or 1.8 per year as average). Santiago of Chile with 7 million-people is a key example of this risky scenario, as this city is located at the foot of the western flank of the Andes mountains and its eastern border is located at the piedmont where an accelerated urbanization has occurred during the last four centuries. This paper explores how the urbanization in the Santiago piedmont is affected by the active San Ramon thrust fault system which is associated with geological hazards, and how communities are confronting this risk with specific resilient actions. As methodology, the paper combines quantitative and qualitative methods to register socio spatial practices of two communities including urban mapping techniques of risky residential areas and interviews with long standing residents. As main findings, the paper shows how specific design practices to reverse risk and bottom-up strategies of these communities have been more effective than urban regulations developed for the metropolitan region in this context. The conclusions emphasize on the importance of including disaster risk in urban planning as proposed by the National Disaster Risk Management Policy for Chile 2016, and of promoting more environmental design research at the global scale as encouraged by the EDRA50 conference.

This research is supported by CONICYT Chile - Fondecyt Nº 1190734.