The end of indigenous territory? Projected counterurbanization in rural Protected Indigenous Areas in Temuco, Chile

Abstract

Indigenous land is permeable to uses and practices that differ greatly from what current regulations establish. At the international level it is possible to see how real estate, agribusiness and forestry projects are diminishing these communities' capacity to control and manage their territories. A similar situation can be seen in Chile, where Mapuche communities have experienced a loss of territory to these external productive agents. However, a new actor has appeared on the horizon of permeability of indigenous territory: the amenity migrant. In this sense, and less evidently in the international literature, the counterurbanization process based on amenity uses in legally protected indigenous lands opens up a new front in the conflicts over peri-urban lands. The objective of this paper is to explore and discover the future impacts that the processes of suburbanization through counterurbanization will have indigenous lands in the vicinity of the city of Temuco, regional capital of La Araucanía (Chile), which are already visible. Considering a series of variables theoretically related to the projection of natural amenity on rural land and applying a logistic regression model, the results indicate that the future of the Títulos de Merced, the main mechanism recognizing property over indigenous lands, will be affected by the expansion of leisure plots, the modality through which amenity practices in Chile are disseminated. With this evidence, the implications that this situation has for Territorial Planning Instruments are discussed.