Chile changes the face of the epicenter of the social epidemic with a million-dollar spare part

Plaza Italia, the legendary roundabout in the center of Santiago, emblem of urban segregation and epicenter of the 2019 social epidemic, is numbered: a million-dollar project seeks to redesign the degraded area, but without “forgetting” the her great symbolic load.

Gone are those years of the last century when Plaza Italia, renamed by protesters Plaza Dignidad, was the pride of the city, with leafy trees and stately buildings nearby.

Today, both the busy roundabout and nearby Alameda, the capital’s main thoroughfare, look very different.

“The state of our Alameda is deplorable. It is dirty, painted, full of tents and street vendors and very dangerous. Today, more than motivating the pride of the people of Santiago, it motivates sadness and despair,” said the governor of the province. told EFE Metropolitan Region, Claudio Orrego.

This was explained by Orrego, one of the main promoters of the project a great clearing will arise instead of the square, where a third of the population of Santiago passes every day, because the goal is “to give priority to the pedestrian over the vehicle”.

Marches and social furor

Plaza Italia became world famous in October 2019, when Chile was experiencing the most serious wave of protests since the end of the dictatorship (1973-1990) in favor of better basic services.

But that “social hotbed”, Orrego underlined, “is just another chapter” in his story.

The triumph of the “no” to the continuity of the dictator Augusto Pinochet in the plebiscite of 1988, Chile’s third place at the 1962 World Cup or the student marches of 2006 and 2011 are other milestones.

“Like many large squares such as Taksim in Istanbul, the Martyrs in Beirut or the Puerta del Sol in Madrid, Plaza Italia is our place of commemoration,” Pablo Allard, dean of the Faculty of Architecture at the Universidad del Desarrollo told EFE. .

In the Chilean imagination, so is the roundabout the invisible border between the rich and poor neighborhoods of Santiago and it is customary for the inhabitants of the capital to identify places based on whether they are “above or below Piazza Italia”.

The expression, according to Allard, was born in the late nineteenth century, when the city began to expand and the upper classes began to leave the center.

His future death is somehow an attempt to overcome inequality in Chile, one of the countries with the worst data in the region.

“One of the main accelerators for reducing inequality is the city, public space and infrastructure. And this project has a very clear objective in this sense,” Chilean Minister of Public Works Juan Carlos García told EFE.

The project

Initially conceived in 2014, the project was kept in a drawer by former president Sebastián Piñera (2018-2022) and has now been recovered thanks to an alliance between the central government of Gabriel Boric and the regional government (of different political affiliations), as well as several municipalities.

“The goal is to create together (a) a better quality of life, cleaner, brighter and safer public spaces, which we know are the priority of our citizens,” said President Boric on December 26, during the official relaunch of the plan known as “New Alameda Providencia”.

With a budget of 151,200 million pesos ($140 million), The initiative involves the construction of a 24-kilometre cycle path in three years, the connection of the nearby Forestal, Balmaceda and Bustamante parks and the improvement of the facades and sidewalks.

The project, not without controversy, also had “an unprecedented citizen participation process,” according to Allard, who was a member of a technical group that validated the plan.

Although all institutions agree to redesign the area without “forgetting” its symbology, the big challenge now is to find a way to reflect what happened here three years ago: an unparalleled social earthquake in democracy, from which the country has not recovered and which different political and social sensitivities interpret in divergent ways.

For some it was a rebellion in search of dignity, which caused about thirty deaths and much pain and meant a change in the future of the country.

For others, however, it was a violent, almost criminal movement, which constitutes a “black page” of history that must be erased.

“It must be done democratically. It cannot be that a small group imposes its way of interpreting history on a majority,” Orrego urged.

Source: EFE

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