Towards variegated ‘Peripheral Municipalisms’: The experience of Valparaíso and Recoleta, Chile

Abstract

In the context of a renewed interest in new forms of municipalism, this paper seeks to contribute by critically analysing two cases of the municipal experience in Chile: Valparaíso and Recoleta. By coining the notion of ‘Peripheral Municipalisms’, our aim is to give voice to a diversity of municipal endeavours in the Global South marked by highly precarious forms of local government. In both case studies, municipalist strategies are used as tools to challenge deep-rooted neoliberal structures. Through a qualitative methodology, based mainly on document analysis and semi-structured interviews, we analyse particular forms of municipalism based on the remunicipalisation of public services and broad-based citizen platforms. These institutional reforms and participatory practices have enabled more just futures by challenging dependency on central government and building a more egalitarian urban process. The article calls for more situated studies on municipalist forces in the Global South in order to continue building this translocal movement from comparative experiences, going beyond ‘model cases’.

Politicising proximity: Radical municipalism as a strategy in crisis

“…Joubert’s (2023) is the only case study of historical practice in this issue, a gap for future research to explore. A third of the papers, however, compare two distinct cases – one compares four (Béal et al, 2023) – to begin to tease out differences and generate new theory (Bianchi, 2023; Bua and Davies, 2023; Milan, 2023; Sareen and Waagsaether, 2023; Sarnow and Tiedermann, 2023; Toro and Orozco, 2023). Nonetheless, connections between cases remain relatively under-analysed in relation to the policy mobilities, assemblage and mobile urbanism methodologies of urban studies (Leitner et al, 2019) – a major oversight of this special issue, especially considering municipalism’s transnationalism and translocal movement-building.…”

“…But this is not the only polarisation that hinders its political potential. As the contributions to this special issue demonstrate, divisions and contradictions abound: between the public and the common (Bianchi, 2023; Russell et al, 2023); between direct and representative democracy (van Outryve d’Ydewalle, 2023); between spontaneous grassroots organisation and institutionalised structures (Pinto et al, 2023); between innovating participatory processes within the green-left and building cross-class coalitions and counter-hegemonic visions (Béal et al, 2023); between green growth and degrowth (Sareen and Waagsaether, 2023), between urban centrality and peripheral urbanisation (Toro and Orozco, 2023); between territory regulated as state space and territory conceived as non-state self-government (Arpini et al, 2023); between embodying the slow time of feminist prefigurative practices and mastering the fast time of masculinist grammars, turned against hostile forces (Sarnow and Tiedermann, 2023); between dealing with the path-dependencies of history, utopian and dystopian, and engaging in future-oriented movement-building (Milan, 2023); between overhauling the state machinery and leveraging local government to deliver policy programmes (Bua and Davies, 2023); between transforming the state form through rupture and prefiguring new state forms through interstitial experimentation and symbiotic hacking (Joubert, 2023; Thorpe and Morgan, 2023); between reconfiguring capitalist supply chains and developing autonomous counter-logistics (Minuchin and Maino, 2023); between care as an economic sector for productivity and care as an ethics for reimagining the city (Kussy et al, 2023). So it seems that just as municipalists work to prise open the cracks in capitalism, so too do fissures and fault lines appear in radical municipalist strategy itself – a hypothesis just as challenged by the intersectional contradictions of colonial capitalism and the patriarchal nation-state as it is poised to sublate them.…”

“…As municipalist praxis has proliferated, so too have descriptors and typologies, with multiple municipalist monikers springing up across this diverse field; prefixes range from ‘new’ (Roth, 2019a, 2019b; Russell, 2019) and ‘democratic’ (Shelley, 2022) to ‘autonomist’, ‘platform’ and ‘managed’ (Thompson, 2021b) to ‘pragmatic’ (Warner, 2023) and ‘entrepreneurial’ (Thompson et al, 2020) to ‘degrowth’ (Vansintjan, 2018) and ‘post-growth’ (Schmid, 2023). With the publication of this double special issue, we can add many more: care municipalism (Kussy et al, 2023), southern municipalism (Pinto et al, 2023), peripheral municipalism (Toro and Orozco, 2023), territorial municipalism (Arpini et al, 2023) and weak municipalism (Béal et al, 2023). All this typological creativity certainly suggests a vibrant, ‘pre-paradigmatic’ scholarly field of empirical enquiry trying to keep up with fast-moving, diversifying experimentation on the ground (on pre-paradigmatic fields, see Nicholls, 2010).…”

Writing the Latin American city: Trajectories of urban scholarship

“…Several local experimentations took place in both capital cities such as Caracas under the Radical Cause Party and Bogotá under the independent government of Antanas Mockus, and intermediate cities like Rosario in Argentina under the Socialist Party (Baiocchi and Gies, 2019; Irazábal, 2009). Most recently, Valparaiso and Recoleta in Santiago (Chile) have experimented with the re-municipalisation of public services and introduction of broad-based citizen platforms (Toro and Orozco, 2023), and Rosario has witnessed the production of popular infrastructures during the pandemic (Minuchin and Maino, 2022). Thus, the making and unmaking of the local neoliberal state keep unfolding while the scholarship on the region provides key insights to conceptualise local governance.…”

“…In the 2000s, the region experienced a re-politicisation of long-standing inequalities expressed in the rise of several movements against freemarket capitalism and the emergence of new political issues and demands where more relevance was given to the 'community' as a powerful locus for organising and using new forms of transgressive direct action (Arce and Bellinger, 2007;Silva, 2009) 2009). Most recently, Valparaiso and Recoleta in Santiago (Chile) have experimented with the re-municipalisation of public services and introduction of broad-based citizen platforms (Toro and Orozco, 2023), and Rosario has witnessed the production of popular infrastructures during the pandemic (Minuchin and Maino, 2022). Thus, the making and unmaking of the local neoliberal state keep unfolding while the scholarship on the region provides key insights to conceptualise local governance.…”