The Role of Planning Policies in Promoting Urban Sprawl in Intermediate Cities: Evidence from Chile

Abstract

Urban sprawl has been studied principally as a phenomenon produced by a lack of or weakness in urban planning, as a consequence of real estate liberalization. This article examines the Chilean case, and proposes that the state has been the engine of this phenomenon through spatial planning instruments that have both neoliberal and neostructural features, and that are best defined by the concept, new public management. The analysis tracks urban sprawl in four intermediate cities, which have experienced high rates of growth since 2000, using photointerpretation of satellite images between 2003 and 2011, and the creation of a typology to define land uses and housing types. The results show that intermediate cities follow similar trends to the capital city, Santiago, and face similar problems, in particular the concentration of services in the urban core. These similarities are produced by the application of general planning instruments: Article 55 and Decree Law 3516. While most research on urban sprawl focuses on private agency, this article highlights the role of the state in its production. It is therefore relevant to explore the nature of public agency in urban sprawl processes in different metropolitan and intermediate cities, and how planning policies can be adapted to curb the phenomenon.Sustainability 2019, 11, 7165 2 of 17 onwards, but rather the oxymoron of 'planned urban sprawl', whereby the State was the principal promoter of this model of urban sprawl. It was not a deficit of social, economic, and political control over different interest groups that led to this process, but the inverse: A high level of control and the production of instruments to facilitate this process. In this sense, the Chilean experience flies in the face of the argument that urban sprawl is produced by uncontrolled, unplanned growth on the urban periphery. In this case, it was co-produced by the authoritarian State in collaboration with private interest groups who were committed to the liberalization of land and the dismissal of the limitations imposed by urban and regional planning principles; this experience provides a strong example of what has been defined as new public management.Furthermore, while there is considerable literature on the Santiago case, the experience of intermediate cities since the 1990s has provided evidence of a replication of this Santiago model of urban sprawl in wider Chilean urban development as a product of the persistence of instruments that date from the dictatorship period. This is relevant, since Santiago presents serious problems of access to services and segregation, which are accentuated as a result of dispersed urbanization. In intermediate cities, instead of promoting models of urban development that contrast with the primate city and its ills, there is inertia due to the dominant planning instruments that have led to a mirroring of that experience.The analysis presented here is drawn from the urban policy and planning instruments, and evidence of urban sprawl in intermediate cities: The conu...

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