Urban Society in Tension: The Santiago’s Commune

Abstract

The tensions between Chilean civil society and its political class came to a definitive clash on 18 October 2019, when the historical period known as social explosion began. From that moment onwards, the control of the city of Santiago is in tension between a majority of social actors occupying the streets and the authority represented by the political power in the institutions and the police in the streets. Plaza Baquedano, in the centre of the city of Santiago, was the spatial epicentre of such tensions. This chapter reviews October’s 2019 events in light of Rancière’s notion of politics to illustrate ways in which the political dissensus is spatialized and can also transform the very meanings of space. The events of Plaza Baquedano are discussed in the light of Rancière’s theoretical framework and somehow referring, allusively, to the Paris Commune as a historical milestone distant in time and space but with similar important signifiers. The neoliberal contestation in Santiago, the place where neoliberalism emerges, puts its future in crisis. The tensions in the commune of Santiago could inspire similar processes elsewhere in the world, where free-market ideology is challenged. Neoliberalism can be overthrown by contesting its spatial symbols, and the Chilean case offers some evidence of this possibility.