Abstract

This chapter situates urbicide as an intentional process that requires the devastation of the public, the destruction of the private and domestic, to decompose the urban structure and the city, generating a (re)production of urban space, in some cases precarious. This interpretation logic situates verticalization processes and their “precarious” expression as a spatialization of urbicide. Beyond its identification and documentation, it provides patterns of localization, diversification, and even intensification in contemporary urban production that transcend the city of Santiago de Chile, expressing a process of recursive urbicide in the logic of production of urban space. This methodology is structured in two main parts using quantitative methods. The first focuses on the analysis of the evolution of verticalization in the Santiago Metropolitan Area (AMS), explained through three hypotheses. The second develops the argument of how verticalization has transcended from precarious areas and communes to precarious silos, a new way of understanding the precariousness of affordable high-rise housing. We use the building permits for new construction and regularization of new construction of high-rise buildings of more than nine floors (National Institute of Statistics, INE) to construct the evolution of verticalization and its transition towards precariousness with an index in the AMS from 1990 to 2019. © 2023, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.