Abastract

This thesis is a first step that intends to interpret, by observing different urbanizations of the city of Santiago, which are the formal characteristics thereof, and how they determine the city's final shape.

Thus, the purpose is to recognize the morphology of the urbanizations by identifying their different structures in order to establish categories that will allow construing the urban shapes related to the periods during which the city has developed. Common reading of the whole development of the city subsequent to the foundation process contrasts with the infinity of situations that intertwine operations of new urbanizations with existing occupations. This gives rise to the initial question of this research.

What shape has taken the city of Santiago?

This question may be approached from two standpoints; first, from the description of the historical expansion process of Santiago, and second from the reading of the structural keys of the city's urbanization morphology; to this end, four aspects have been established for development of the same.

The shape of the expansions, and the historical urban facts that have contributed to the city's development.

The readings recognizing the city as a whole.

The sectors considered as critical in Santiago.

The formal characteristics of the urbanizations of the city.

The shape of the urbanizations is possibly the actual shape of the city. Each urbanization maintains different levels of autonomy but in turn each finds its way to be intertwined to the others. Santiago has a first foundational urbanization that, when looking at its long transformation process, has determinant formal characteristics. The regular weave and well-defined homogeneity does not manage to extend directly beyond its boundaries, but constitutes the city's distribution principle, which will be repeated in time but will never have the same characteristics again.

After its foundation, the city underwent a long expansion process that is far from the formal characteristics of the original urbanization and struggles in an expansion which extends across the territory, starting a new process that, although related with the former, describes a transformation of the block layout and morphology, followed by an expansion having new elements and different operations proper of the urban development of the city of Santiago.

This study is focused on collecting the elements that give shape to the urbanizations and on observing how they intertwine with the city as a whole. The intention is to interpret and recognize its formation process and relationship with the original layout by identifying first whether there is a formal transference to the new urbanizations during the different expansion periods of the city, and then, if such transference exists, how it takes place.

The city will be studied from the perspective of its urban shape and its expansion and transformation processes, as well as the ongoing variations affecting the same, which consists of reviewing and reexamining the shape of Santiago providing analysis material aimed at facilitating a new reading of the city.

Thus, the shape of the city will be reexamined through urban readings.