SPATIAL JUSTICE, SOCIONATURAL DISASTERS AND POLITICS OF SPACE

In Volume 28, N°2 (2019) of Journal Cuadernos de Geografía: Revista colombiana de geografía our latest work in collaboration with my dear friend and colleague Dr. José Sandoval Díaz has been published, entitled "Spatial justice, socionatural disasters and politics of space: Sociopolitical dynamics in view of the floods and recovery processes in Copiapo, Chile" (Astudillo Pizarro, 2019). In this article we have proposed two aims, one theoretical and one empirical, with  the first one we wanted to explore the theoretical and conceptual bridges between the field of spatial justice and the sociological disasters and risks, recovering the Lefebvrian notion of Politics of Space; while in relation to the background, we made an empirical and comparative contrast examining the sociopolitical dynamics of organization and mobilization in three localities in Copiapó, in the Atacama region (Chile), which were severely affected in the May floods of 2017. This empirical analysis accompanies the post-alluvial process, and sought on the one hand to test the previously assembled theoretical reflections, and on the other, to relieve the dimension of the agency of communities and populations within the framework of post-alluvial processes in the 2017-2018 period against socionatural and political constraints. 

It is an ethnographic work with important spatial components, which also incorporate elements of the ethnography of virtual spaces that expand the ethnographic field to the new instances of sociability and virtual communication, highlighting the role of these instances and technological mediations in the framework of the production of new public spheres and the dynamics of response of the communities in the processes of problematization of the risks and the maturation of a socionatural understanding of the disasters that incorporates a critique of the subsidiary State´s role and the market economy.

Those dynamics of organization, mobilization and enunciation show that, both the consequences of the floods and the problematization of the risks are crossed by different demands of spatial and environmental justice, which problematize the distribution and distribution of the risks, the demands for the recognition of territorialized communities and procedural forms of justice in which legitimacy emerges in tension with normative legality, shaping emerging forms of risk governance. Localities, communities and populations that place their focus on claims in the State, also making visible the ghostly role of the market in the intensification of risks for populations and communities.

The notion of Space Policies, taken from Henri Lefebvre, allowed us to problematize those dynamics from above and from below, whether from the policies of space production, financing, decision, design and execution of territorial ordinances and rearrangements, to multiple practices of negotiation, resistance, appropriation and mobilization of local actors against these structural conditions, interspersing theoretical elements of structure and agency in our analysis.

The sociopolitical analysis shows that territorial planning constitutes a new focus of dispute, processes in which rescuing the notion of "critical agents of urban planning" proposed by Marcelo Lopes de Sousa, we show how communities mobilize "with", " in spite of ”, and“ against ”the State against space policies that sacrifice the population against possible risks and proven effects after the floods of 2015 and 2017 in the region studied.