Informal economy and spatial configuration in Quilicura , Santiago

This paper analyses how spatial changes have affected the land uses distribution in Quilicura, a peripheral low-income area of Santiago de Chile, which has been growing very rapidly during the last twenty years. In this context, the first part of the paper examines the land use assignation at a global scale, where changes in the accessibility of certain areas have created strategic locations on the grid for large scale commerce, which then has created a new form of communal centre. The second part of the study examines the grid implications on land uses distribution at a local scale, that is, its consequences for the consolidation of commercial activity on local streets and neighbourhoods. This issue has been divided into two areas: the domestic or small scale commerce, associated to residential activity, and the informal economy, represented by street markets. One of the main findings of this paper refers to a sort of implicit logic that commands the installation of street markets. In fact, they tend to work parallel to the formal economy, covering the district rather homogeneously, and creating welldefined zones of influence that do not tend to overlap between them. This logic operates somehow opposite to a random process, in the sense that each maximizes its area of influence and, at the same time, minimizes its overlapping, creating a sort of “informal syntactic logic” of great efficiency. Moreover, the results suggest that street markets may have been playing a decisive role, not only in the definition of local economies but also in the definition of local identities. 1. The construction of centrality in a peripheral district: the case of Quilicura Quilicura is an industrial and low-income residential area located to the Northwest of Santiago, Chile. Although it has been more than one hundred years since its foundation, Quilicura has still maintained a rural character, because historically it has supplied agricultural produce to the city. Such character has its roots in the district’s relative isolation from the capital, as can be seen in Figure 1. Since 1970,