Abstract

During the last decades, the province of Chacabuco, in the north of Santiago, has been profoundly territorially transformed due to the installation of urban mega-projects for well-off social segments in contexts that until then were eminently rural. From the perspective of suburban political ecology, we analyze the different economic, political and metabolic strategies with view to the water and land resources through which large eco-nomic-financial groups, supported by the state, have produced an unequal landscape of archipelagos. The methods used in this work include press review, semi-structured with private, public, and community actors, and an analysis of water rights records in the office of Real Estate Curator in the province of Chacabuco. In empirical and conceptual terms, we demonstrate that the production of the new urban periphery and its patterns of socioterritorial and environmental fragmentation are not the result of abstract forces of globalization, but of deliberate actions of commodification, concentration (of property rights) and financialization of natural resources like land and water.