Managing the citizen: privatized public works and the bureaucratic management of citizenship in post-authoritarian Chile, 1990–2005

Abstract

Chile's transition to democracy in the early 1990s posed a challenge to the country's newly elected governments: how to manage conflicts and contradictions generated by the simultaneous liberalization of the economy and political arena. In the mid-1990s, residents of Chile's capital city, Santiago, emerged as an unexpected barrier to a market-driven model of urban development. Their protests and claims of authoritarian planning shook elected governments, prompting bureaucratic reforms meant to manage the assault on a coveted state program and the definition of (urban) citizenship. This article examines the construction of the concept of urban citizenship in Chile through the lens of the state's response to organized protests at the neighborhood level against highway projects. It focuses on the bureaucracy charged with the daily management of government policies and the political tensions they generated, illustrating the messy, unpredictable translation of macro-state policies into micro-strategies of social management and definition of rights.