Critical approach to extralegal mercantile production of housing in a neighborhood of Santiago, Chile

Since the beginning of 2000, extra-legal leases have notably increased in Poblacion Zona Norte, a working-class neighborhood from the early 1930s, located on the historic periphery of the city, at the northeast of the municipality of Independencia. There, its inhabitants build and sublease and rent precarious homes for the undocumented immigrants, workers without contract, and insolvent, who cannot access legal mercantile production due to bank requirements. To understand this phenomenon, the origins and characteristics of the neighborhood and the practices done by those who live there are analytically described. This review is based on information collected during 2018 and 2019 through qualitative interviews and a contextual interpretation. The analysis of the information collected was carried out from the theory of production of space and the theory of value criticism. The first postulates that space is the product of social practices done by value -creating agents (of use, of change); and the second, allows us to explain that the feasibility of extralegal mercantile production is related to the possibility of the inhabitants of the North Zone Population to build with low costs, be owners (or act as such) and set prices based on the restrictions that imposes the formal mercantile production. The relevance of this study lies in the fact that it allows us to understand why the undocumented, insolvent, and informal are concentrated in neighborhoods on the historic periphery of the city, in homes with serious habitability problems.