The social construction of urban climates and its relation to the covid-19 pandemic in Santiago de Chile

Abstract

Santiago de Chile, like all Latin American cities, registers important socioclimatic differences in its interior that result from the appropriation, privatization, and commoditization of climates due to the lack of adequate urban planning and management and the exercise of power by the real estate market, characterizing a study object proper of critical physical geography. Surface temperature conditions, land covers and uses, urban morphology and ventilation simulations at neighborhood scales represent significant levels of environmental segregation and injustice inside the city. The conditions of origin and diffusion of the Covid-19 pandemic are spatially correlated with such urban climatic differences and with socioeconomic determinants that have been built together with the city that require specific and massive public actions to reverse the current scenario of socioclimatic unsustainability and injustice.