The south of the world: Coyhaique, fictions of a city for tourism

Abstract

In this article we present and analyze the induction of a public policy of the Chilean State for the creation of a tourist destination, which encourages an imaginary of territorial integration in the plane of subjectivity to the national culture, which maintains important lags in the material realm, labor and economic. The city of Coyhaique, the main urban center of the Aysén region in Chilean Patagonia, is a model of a type of regional economy that only exploits its natural landscape resources. The thesis that we develop here is that there is an incompatibility between urban subsystems and the mode of exploitation of the natural landscape resource associated with high-income foreign consumers. Public policy does not have an adequate development platform, which harmonizes both subsystems, underpinning in a political imaginary of tourism, that hidden the daily needs of its inhabitants.