Abstract

In the last years, a new process leaded by organisations from the civil society have considered neighbourhoods as a new object of heritization. The emergence of the neighbourhood as a phenomenon valorized as cultural heritage, has occured in the context of urban transformations stimulated by real estate. This process has resulted from new significances of the urban environment, on its different scales, and as a result of the new relations between the neighbourhood and the city. Starting from the analysis of the neighbourhoods of Las Flores and Suárez Mujica, in Santiago, Chile, this article examines this new sense of heritization. It proposes that it has been a response to main urban transformations while has occured without the processes of urban planning. Yet, this paper proposes that the neighbourhoods considered National Monuments has shifted from the classic attributes, identified by the current Chilean National Monuments Law, to new values related to ways of living and other intangible aspects.