Social cohesion: fears and policies of the city

This article supports the importance of the spatial variable in the design and the implementation of social policies: it shows that these policies are inseparable from the space where they are applied. Through the space they express persistent inequalities. Santiago serves as an example of the urban space as a conflict arena within several different interests. In this context, fears allow to observe the social and cultural dimensions of the city's fragmentation city. For this, different fears are identified and one discovers that fears of excluded social groups are different from those of the mainstream, and therefore, each group generates different urban frontiers. This article concludes that urban policies present an inertia that maintains and strengthens social inequality and that current social policies cannot alter those conditions, because they do not take into account that they operate in a space marked by that inertia and by the different frontiers.