Abstract

Chile has made progress in policies aimed at reducing and preparing for socio-natural hazards, especially in urban areas affected by earthquakes and tsunamis. Less attention is paid to risk exposure in informal settlements, especially those located at or beyond urban area boundaries. Based on a study of cities in northern Chile's extractive region and 45 interviews with institutional actors and community leaders, the results reveal five interlinked mechanisms that socio-politically construct risk: institutional fragmentation and responsibility gaps; tensions between housing policy and risk management; social production of risk and forced relocation; community agencies; and risk tolerance. The article contributes to overcoming the dichotomy between physical-technical and social approaches to risk, demonstrating that socio-natural threats indiscriminately cut across formal and informal spaces and that vulnerability is unevenly distributed according to each group's capacity for urban negotiation. The sociopolitical construction of risk emerges as an analytical tool to understand how risk is configured and sustained over time in extractive neoliberal urbanization contexts.