Abstract

Rapid urbanization is placing cities of the global south at the core of the developmental agenda of the twenty-first century. This intense transformation process poses both challenges and opportunities for thinking and acting on the future of cities. In Latin America, this process has modified and increased the scale of the urban environment by occupying extensive landscapes towards the periphery of urban areas. On top of that, the current urbanization models generally promote the development of spatial relationships that are detrimental to the environmental and social sustainability of cities. Thus a physical and morpohological deterioration of cities is observed, especially in their central areas. The center of a city is usually defined by a higher concentration and mix of land uses and related activities in a prominent location within the urban area. Historically, it is understood that centers grow, shrink, shift and diversify; and their limits are often diffuse within the territory. The need for city centers to be revitalized has drawn attention to how little is known of the process by which centers are generated and sustained. The challenge is to understand centrality as an everchanging process determined by the relationships between activity and movement. The aim of this paper is to explore a key aspect of centrality: the concept of 'live centrality', which is characterized by the presence of uses such as retail, markets, catering and entertainment, as well as other activities which usually benefit from the movement of people. The case study for the analysis presented here is based on Valdivia, a midsize fluvial city in southern Chile. The research is based on the process of 'movement economy', using space syntax as method to explore the spatial patterns and activities that exist in the city. A syntactic analysis of Valdivia was performed using Dephmap. A GIS platform was then used to perform a spatial analysis of the data gathered. The study explores how different spatial configurations are influenced by the process of live centrality and how this plays a critical role in the formation and location of centers, both at a local and city scale. Also, the presence of different activities that define a centrality are identified and measure. Results indicate that retail activities tend to concentrate around areas of a higher morphological integration. Furthermore, a high correlation is observed between the distribution of these activities and the location of the topological center of the city. Finally, integration analysis demonstrates that the location of the historical city center does not coincide with the topological center, thus confirming the hypothesis that the expansion of the city is linked to morphological deficiencies of their centrality process.