Before channels were built and shortcuts made things easier for merchant vessels, before industrial society transformed movement itself into surplus labour, and not long before the empire started to crash under its own weight, one could easily point out Valparaíso on a world map. It was a mandatory stop for travellers, for business and for political hegemony. But it was not only the loss of its strategic position as it vanished from commercial shipping routes that made it fall into slow oblivion. The fétichisation of its architecture has made Valparaíso’s unique way of understanding everyday life into another commodity in Capital’s Financial Markets – just as Cuzco, Salvador de Bahia, Venice or Habana are still on the map but far away from their original culture, while from a close distance their inhabitants look at how they are being pushed aside. Today, Valparaíso exists only as an illusion or trace for the ‘porteños’, who have witnessed in the past decades how effectively and fast consumer society can move forward, destroying all specific reality and expressions of human environment that the city and its people historically produced. This is the second tragedy of Valparaíso, one hundred years after the first; it is no longer the lack of investment that makes its soul quiver, now it is that same investment that makes it sink into decadence. Its urban geography, which had always resisted as an appeal to human desires, ingenuity, feelings and struggles, is currently being recast by property speculation’s logic of space. If money comes in the poor go out, that is the basic rule for gentrification.
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Rodrigo Barros
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