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.
