Ad Hoc Tools for Urban Renewal: The San Borja Remodeling in Santiago, Chile, 1967-1976

Conceived, developed, and built in Santiago de Chile between 1967 and 1976, the San Borja Remodeling project was the flagship of the first years of the Urban Improvement Corporation (Corporación de Mejoramiento Urbano, CORMU), a State agency created in 1966 that would become an active actor in the renovation of Chilean cities. Despite the project's significance, not only in terms of its scale and location in the centre of the Chilean capital city but also for having pushed the capacities of both the State and private companies, previous research has not addressed the full variety of tools brought together to carry out a project of this magnitude and ambition. This article describes the complexities of the San Borja project in its development. It argues that the ambition to renovate a central area in the capital city led its designers to shape and rely on ad hoc design and legal tools to make it possible. Rather than imposing a totalizing design for the city, there was a pragmatic approach aimed at developing an incremental urban renewal plan led by the State, far from both centralized planning and neoliberal urbanism.