Open House Santiago on Boundaries
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Open House Worldwide is a network of more than fifty independent nonprofit organisations hosting Open House festivals worldwide. Open House cities vary in size and scope, with hyperlocal interpretations and initiatives, but all work to advance a shared mission: to make architecture and cities more open, accessible, and equitable.
Elis Shin, curator of Open House Worldwide, recently spoke with Robert Newcombe of Open House Santiago (OH! Stgo) to hear about his boundary-pushing plans for the upcoming festival. Robert is an architectural designer and co-director of Fundación Aldea, a nonprofit organisation in Santiago, Chile, dedicated to creating a space for dialogue and collaboration between those who design the city and those who inhabit it. Since 2017, Robert, together with co-directors Soledad Díaz de la Fuente and Magdalena Novoa, and their team at Fundación Aldea have been opening doors to the public for OH! Stgo. The next edition on 17-27 August 2023 is set to be their largest yet and with an ambitious goal: to push the festival's geographic boundaries and open the doors to at least one site in each of Santiago’s fifty-two comunas (boroughs).
Centro Comunitario Matta Sur. Photo: Aryeh Kornfeld
Elis Shin: Open House festivals are known for offering a dizzying number of activities for the public to enjoy. But I was struck to hear about your new goal to expand OH! Stgo’s geographic impact. What’s driving you to explore the relationships between urban and rural environments?
Robert Newcombe: We have been motivated since the start of OH! Stgo to avoid reinforcing pre-existing urban segregation and inequalities, and have tried to ensure that we include exemplar sites in the periphery and the city centre. Santiago, as with many other cities in Latin America, is characterised by history and geography that makes the urban-rural divide very complex. Sometimes it serves more as an administrative tool than as a real frontier, and other times, the difference is very stark. Nevertheless, rural areas are often made quite invisible, despite the richness of their local spatial and cultural practices and interactions with the city.
As directors of the festival, we have always been keen to include all comunas (boroughs) of the Región Metropolitana, which includes the city of Santiago and many surrounding rural areas over a large area. Increasing the inclusivity of the festival means inviting the entire Metropolitan Region to participate. Previously we haven't reached the total – the highest number in any festival was 33 of 52 comunas. There are 12 untouched comunas entering this year's event for the first time.
How, then, do you define the boundary of a city?
Rural areas are not extensions of an endlessly expanding city. They are independent settlements embedded in specific rural landscapes. At the same time, the rural and urban interaction is complex, and sometimes those definitions don’t quite fit the Latin American reality. In Santiago’s case, the bigger urban-rural system is bounded by the government administration of the Metropolitan Region, which includes the rural and urban in many forms, including informal settlements and what we call rural towns.
The relationship between urban and rural is important to address and debate. Identifying and including sites from rural areas surrounding the city’s limits in Open House helps create a space for this dialogue.
Many rural communities and their municipalities are keen to have the opportunity to show what they have to offer and to be considered part of a wider understanding of the capital. Inter-municipal conversations can strengthen inter-municipal collaboration and help make a case for continued public investment across the region.
Communities of different sizes have different needs to thrive. How are you ensuring the festival has a positive impact on the entire region and responds to the unique needs of different communities?
The festival is a platform for celebrating urban and rural conditions.
One specific day during the festival's ten days will be dedicated only to rural sites (Sunday, 20 August). We will explore how rural centres' needs differ from urban areas, how they are influenced by the proximity to the capital and the importance of high-quality design for these communities. We believe that it is important to learn from good examples of local solutions for issues in rural contexts, just as much as in urban contexts.
A holistic and community-centred approach is vital. This year’s festival is fortunate to be developed in collaboration with the regional authority, the Government of Santiago. We have been engaging with every single municipality, often with their departments of culture, tourism and urban planning, to help us identify sites for the festival.
Our plans for OH! Stgo are also informed by the experience we’ve gained with Castro Abierto (Open Castro). Over the last few years, Fundación Aldea has also been running a parallel festival in the South of Chile, in an archipelago called Chiloé. Like Open House but smaller in scale, Castro Abierto features a mix of urban and rural sites.
Memory site: Villa Grimaldi Park for Peace
What else can OH! Stgo participants look forward to this year?
The central theme of the 2023 festival is “The City and its Memories.” It includes over 40 spaces (from a total of over 150) linked directly or indirectly with the state coup and the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-88). This year, on 11th September, Chile will remember the 50th anniversary of the coup.
The scope of memories ranges from human rights and Santiago’s pre-1973 Welfare State to the city’s evolving relationship with water and how the transition from dictatorship to democracy influenced the city's design.
To give a few examples, looking through the lens of human rights, the festival recognises the struggle of victims’ relatives, activists and human rights organisations to preserve spaces used by the state to illegally detain, torture, murder, and disappear opponents to the regime. These memory sites are now critical places that serve as material evidence of crimes against humanity under the dictatorship, as reparation in the context of transnational justice and as learning sites to never forget these atrocities and foster democracy, citizenship, and human rights.
Looking at Santiago’s urban vision before 1973 through neighbourhood plans, social housing policies and urban development implemented between 1920 and 1973 highlights progressive and innovative projects for the Chilean capital that inspired other Latin American cities. It was an integral vision of Santiago based on equality and resource redistribution under the Welfare State that was truncated with the coup and its neoliberal restructuring.
To look at memory in the context of the growing climate crisis, we also share the city’s relationship with water and natural systems through time, especially how increasing droughts impact Santiago and its ‘island hills’, wetlands, mountains, and valleys.
Open House Santiago (OH! Stgo) returns on 17-27 August 2023. Visit ohstgo.cl for more information.