Acceleration, displacement, relegation

Abstract

Socio-natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis or fires have the most obvious effect of the material damage of the city. But they are also opportunities for the renewal of urban capitalist production. The aim of this paper is to test the relevance of the notions of acceleration, displacement and relegation to analyze the urban transformation that take place after a socio-natural disaster, through its use in the analysis of a specific case: the Valparaíso fire of 2014. We propose that acceleration is not only a descriptive category of the current post-disaster urban transformations, but it constitutes an analytical category necessary to understand the logics of concerted action between the public sector and the private sector. The displacement does not simply refer to a form of re-location but refers to territorial dynamics aimed at maximizing the capital gain. The relegation becomes relevant because it allows to account for both the situation of lack of social and territorial facilities, and the subjective dimension of the displacement experience.