In a context shaped by neoliberal policies, urban design in Santiago, Chile, has been progressively limited to private, internalized spaces. Specifically, through the shopping mall model, which, rather than serving as a suburban solution, has transformed into a vehicle for developing central, pre-equipped areas. Urban shopping malls are large-scale consumption artifacts that not only aggregate a significant amount of infrastructure, programs, and services to meet daily demands, but also represent a "real" opportunity to create urban spaces with a spatial and symbolic richness unavailable elsewhere in the city. However, this complexity comes at the expense of the urban experience. Housing, understood as the center of domesticity, has lost its fundamental relationship with the city and today is merely an isolated component of urban design, the result of an undifferentiated proliferation of housing units, buildings, and blocks that serve no function other than accommodation.
The 2018 AA Visiting School in Santiago will study and challenge the conditions for architectural and urban design within this neoliberal context through design projects that speculate on new artifacts by decompressing the spatial and functional nature of the shopping mall. These projects are conceived as a series of strategic interventions and operations within the city that, ultimately, aim to rethink the relationship between housing, infrastructure, and urban design.
