sometimes at the wrong time and sometimes in parallel, it has always worked in the development of technologies that give fast and good quality solutions to the needs of massive habitation. This challenge has led to a long and fruitful period of activity and application in the country. !
the Society to Promote Manufacturing (1883) were founded³, which at- tempted to provide general foundations for industrial activity. Only when the Saltpeter crisis became evident, towards the middle of the 1920s, did President Arturo Alessandri Palma embrace pro-industrialization ideas and, in an attempt to placate state spending, promoted public administration to consider creating new resources for the nation and to reduce costs from national production, substituting imports⁴. In that regard, the political discourse of the "national industry" was key to the economic reorientation of the nation: “ …Let us protect national industries, let us invigorate production by all means and in all ways since the people's greatest and supreme desire is based on their power and ability to provide for themselves, thus reconquering the most important and most coveted of freedoms: economic freedom.… ”⁵ From 1900 onwards, social demands, economic instability, population growth in the cities, and the overcrowded population forced the State to provide a concrete housing solution, formalizing the housing problem as a State issue with the enactment of the Workers' Housing Law in 1906⁶. Hence, with the precepts of rationalization as a discourse, the Executive sought to implement efficient and effective architectural and construction solutions in which the nascent national industry would be a leading factor, through incentives to private capital. If saltpeter was the structure that shaped governance until the early twentieth century, the substitute political skeleton was industrialization as a response to the need to plan cities and build housing for workers. Therefore, the case of housing is part of a series of results of political decisions that looked for the nation´s productive development through the standardization of land use planning. Initially, following the Workers' Housing Law (1906), the creation of the National Savings Bank and its administration through the Mortgage Credit Fund (1910), small-scale, low-rise housing developments (one to two stories) were the first to meet the need for new housing.T hese complexes, in general, were private solutions encouraged by the State, developed by housing funds or provident funds⁷. Examples of this period are the León XIII Population⁸, built between 1881 and 1910, and the Huemul residential complex built between 1881 and 1910⁹, built by the Mortgage Credit Fund in 1911. The housing solution considered a serial modulation that looked to standardize spaces in order to provide better hygiene and comfortable conditions using local materials and labor. These projects increased the production of materials from smaller-scale workshops or factories, founded mainly by immigrants, such as the Lecannelier (1875), Ceppi (1887), and Dahl (1921) wood factories or the Puchoco brick refractory plant (1865). Until the beginning of the 1910s, the Mortgage Credit Fund alone built more than 50,000 square meters of housing, becoming one of the main real estate managers in the country 10 . By the 1910s, the 1906 Act had a higher number of demolitions of unsanitary dwellings than the number of new residential structures, resulting in a negative balance in the housing supply 11 . This required important reforms such as the Law of Cheap Housing (1925), the Housing Law (1925) and the Fund for Popular Housing (1936), whose objec- tives were to strengthen incentives for private capital to build residences. 3 Sofofa was founded in 1883 in response to the need to assert the rights of the Chilean industrial sector and transform Chile into an eminently industrial country. 4 These ideas took shape during the government of Pedro Aguirre Cerda, after the Chillán earthquake in 1939, with the creation of the Production Development Corporation (1939), whose purpose was to promote national industry. 5 Session from the June 1st National Congress, Presidential Message Arturo Alessandri Palma. Library of the National Congress, 1924 (p 57) 6 Hidalgo, Social housing in Chile, 55. 7 One of the prerogatives of the 1906 Law was precisely to encourage the formation of societies to build housing for workers. 8 Protected by the National Monument Law as a Typical Zone by the 1997 Decree No. 477. 9 Protected by the National Monument Law as a Typical Zone by the 2016 Decree No. 26.
HOUSING IN CHILE: (RE)ACTIONS OF PUBLIC INSTITUTIONS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY By: Mauricio Sánchez + Santiago Canales
After the Pacific War, the need to consolidate the new nation-state made it necessary to create internal resources in order to progress and required the government at that time to take actions to economically stabilize a country that until then had only incurred expenses, without any investment guidelines. This diagnosis was intensified with the collapse of the saltpeter industry in the first post-war period, marked by successive drops in the mineral's prices. Although Saltpeter provided wealth to build infrastructure projects on a national scale, it also provided the basis for "the parliamentary structure on which the nation's form of govern- ment was founded"¹, consolidating a fragile link between productive development and political management. Thus, while the global eco- nomic situation worsened due to the 1929 world depression, social pressure and the demand for legislation to address housing problems increased locally² while at the same time economically destabilizing the political structure of a state with very high fiscal expenditures and no savings plan. During the saltpeter boom, it probably had the physical appearance of industrialization as a result of the railroad line construction and its technological metallic structures. The ideas of fostering industrial activity started to be promoted when the School of Arts and Crafts (1849) and
1 Rodrigo Hidalgo, Social housing in Chile (Santiago: RIL Publishers, 2019): 108. 2 The main issues were related to the increase in the cost of living, unemployment, health and quality of work.
10 Hidalgo, Social housing in Chile, 89. 11 Hidalgo, Social housing in Chile, 93.
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