Everyday verticality: Migrant experiences of high-rise living in Santiago, Chile

Abstract

Over the last three decades, Santiago, Chile has experienced rapid urbanisation. The city’s expansion has prompted the proliferation of high-rise residential buildings, mediated by spatial segregation along class lines and fragmented urban governance. Concurrently, economic opportunities in Chile have drawn regional labour migrants, resulting in an unprecedented increase in migratory flows. Drawing on ethnographic research, this article charts the everyday experiences of migrants in high-rise residences. As new arrivals seek housing, social networks channel migrants – particularly Venezuelans – into shared high-rise apartments, producing specific buildings as vertical enclaves. Lived experiences within the confines of verticality are frequently shaped by the challenges of overcrowding. As migrants craft daily practices to mitigate these limitations, their routines make full use of limited space and meaningfully engage with building common areas, public spaces and neighbourhoods. The everyday practice of verticality articulates links between high-rises and surrounding sites, neighbourhoods and the broader urban fabric.

Introduction: Verticality, radicalism, resistance

“…From the regulatory schemes that are written into planning law to curtail urban development (see Burte, 2024) or encourage high-rise construction with detrimental effects on residential populations (see Ebbensgaard, 2024), the power verticals on display throughout this special issue find expression in policing strategies, legal proceedings and evacuation procedures (see Adey, 2024). By drawing attention to the subtle workings of power in and through crooked vertical and horizontal planes, the papers in this volume direct attention towards manifestations of resistance in the everyday lives of those bodies that refuse to evacuate according to standardised safety procedures (see Adey, 2024), that mitigate the limitations posed in over-crowded, dense migrant enclaves (see Sheehan, 2024) or which inhabit vertical landscapes in ways that contradict or pervert hegemonic habituses of verticality (see Filiz, 2024; Harris and Wolseley, 2024; Roast, 2024). By foregrounding the everyday encounters with and embodiments of variously competing and overlapping power verticals – and the rendering ordinary or mundane of its effects – this special issue advances an agenda for thinking more radically with verticality in urban studies.…”

“…The attention that urban scholars have paid to the power dynamics sustaining vertical warfare and high-rise construction has been as much concerned with the technical procedures that give shape to volumes (Elden, 2013; McNeill, 2020; Weizman, 2002) as with the conditions of possibility for social life to unfold within them (see this volume, Adey, 2024; Burte, 2024; Ebbensgaard, 2024; Sheehan, 2024).…”

“…In response to this predicament, this special issue moves beyond the limitations of binary critiques to present and interrogate multiple verticalities, highlighting context-specific meanings and practices that, in line with Bier (2022), seek to ‘decolonise’ verticality, or the third dimension, by considering varied conceptions and practices of verticality outside the conventional canon (see in this issue Burte, 2024; Filiz, 2024; Roast, 2024). The special issue aims to extend, broaden and challenge current debates on verticality by considering differential verticalities as spaces of potential that offer conceptual and epistemological potentials for developing more socially and environmentally just vertical futures (see in this issue Adey, 2024; Burte, 2024; Ebbensgaard, 2024; Harris and Wolseley, 2024; Sheehan, 2024). In doing so, the issue draws on the wider move towards diversifying and pluralising debates on verticality through comparative area-studies perspectives that are located in and explore verticalities from (with apologies for the use of loaded and reductive compassisms) ‘southern’ (Arrigoitia, 2014; Goodman, 2020; Simone, 2014) and ‘eastern’ perspectives (Guan, 2020; Murawski, 2019; in this volume Roast, 2024; Tamburo, 2020; Zubovich, 2021).…”

“…rooted, grounded and meticulous, but not reductively rhizomatic or horizontal) approaches to verticality, the selection of papers reveal an inherent morphological tension to vertical urbanisms. Arranged according to two main themes (Power Verticals and Vertical Resistance) this volume, on the one hand, seeks to decentre, destabilise or ‘decolonise’ verticality (see in this issue Burte, 2024; Filiz, 2024; Roast, 2024) while, on the other hand, offering alternative frameworks from which to conceptualise verticality in relation to urban injustice (see in this issue Adey, 2024; Burte, 2024; Ebbensgaard, 2024; Harris and Wolseley, 2024; Sheehan, 2024).…”

Writing the Latin American city: Trajectories of urban scholarship

“…Similarly, Santiago (Chile) has witnessed an unprecedented increase in migratory flows in the last decades and more recently has received migrants from Venezuela. Using an ethnographic approach, Sheehan (2022) explains the production of vertical enclaves where migrants share high-rise apartments and engage with building common areas, public spaces and neighbourhoods despite the challenges of overcrowding.…”