Villa El Nacimiento. Santiago, Chile: Urban testing and its residents' resources

The option for the quantity and peripheral location of social housing that marked the housing policy in Chile in the decades of the 90s and mid-2000s generated multiple socio-urban problems for the inhabitants. It led to the configuration of segregated peripheries in almost all the country's cities. The direct consequence of these interventions was the complexity of the daily urban life of residents, the sustained deterioration of their living spaces, and their social coexistence. Assuming the concept of “test” —which refers to a complex situation of a historical and structural nature that affects the lives of individuals and forces them to mobilize responses—the urban experience of the beneficiaries of these policies can be considered a priori, a test. Through a qualitative-exploratory study carried out in 2020 in Villa El Nacimiento, a progressive social housing population built in 1992 in the commune of La Pintana, we seek to know what the essential components of the urban test were and the responses that were mobilized to face it for a group of residents. The results confirm the weight of the urban in how the poor are structurally produced by the society of which it is a part, while individual effort and home ownership stand as the main supports.