Town planning vs urbanization: different ways of making city

Abstract

Communal Regulating Plan is the urban planning policy tool Chile, whose formulation intended to regulate land uses, conditions for building and subdivision of land, roads and structuring the city limits. It is believed that this instrument is imperfect since it does not incorporate in legislation a key dimension of urbanism: urban morphology, defined as three-dimensional spatial system of the city. By contrast, the empirical analysis demonstrates that factors such as urban form are responses from the free play of economic forces and social model of the space. Consequently, what dominates is a pattern of development rather than a planning project, which are very different ways of making city. This article aims to demonstrate that urban form, derived from the application of the instrument in a commune like Maipú metropolitan perimeter is one of the unintended impacts of the regulatory plan, but that could be incorporated into a new urban planning tool.