to design the territory

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A big part of the country’s provincial and communal organizations don’t have a structure of their own to arrange the occupation of the territory, and to play the role of a supporter for the different systems that converge on a same space. To articulate, to establish, to integrate, to order and utility constitute the basic alphabet of the territorial ordering.

the territorial mesh

The announcement of a work plan enrolled in the celebration program for the Republic of Chile’s second century, announced by President Ricardo Lagos, takes to us to meditate about the methodologies needed to optimize the results of the public interventions over the territory. The complexities that this country’s geography imposes to the systems that interact in the physical space, take to us to translate this reflection to the very basic objectives of the territorial ordering.

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A. - To articulate. In the last years, we have attended to the interesting rebirth of the territorialistic point of view from some specifically oriented organizations. The problem comes when these visions are oriented in an unilateral way, with little compatibility with other stakeholders that converge in the same space. No discipline has the instruments to operate the territory alone, the territory cannot be reduced to a single vision, no matter if it’s an environmental or a city-planning one, it can’t leave the other facets aside. In their role as greater vision,  and physical and administrative expression of the sectorial policies, the instruments of territorial ordering are called to solve the incompatibilities and to sort the partially obtained results.

E. - To establish structures. Part of the conflicts that are expressed in the difficulties for the productive or social systems, have their origin in the absence of a territorial structure of provincial and communal scale. The administrative dimensions of the whole country lack their own mesh or basic skeleton in which we could fit the pattern of urban establishments and the productive system, for example. This lack of structure often reveals the mutual incompatibility between the territory and the systems which operate over it,  causing conflicts and deteriorations.

I. - To integrate. By its physical form alone, the territorial structure of the

country has no meaning if there is no integration among it’s border with the neighboring countries. Furthermore, the measures  adopted to arrange the use of the territory must occur through the design of structures of trans-fronteer  integration. The railway branches constructed between XIXth and XXth centuries, always had a trans-andinian vocation that is necessary to recover. In front of the argentinian and bolivian proposals for the transpatagonic and gas railway layouts, the country must have its own project, aiming to integrate and to optimize these foreign actions.

O. - To order. The exagerated centralism that  the national scale exhibits, reproduces itself in the regional, provincial and communal levels. This affair deteriorates the reception capabilities of the territory, sometimes by overuse and others, by the underutilization of the same ones. In these cases, it lacks a directive to arrange and hierarchize the intervention of the levels that operate on the territory.

U. - Utility. As a conclusion, it is necessary to emphasize the instrumental and administrative utility of having a forecast on the higher administrative levels in order to formulate a territorial project acording to the regional characteristics and their receptive capabilities, for the are vital factors of the development process. At this point, we can no longer let anything to lay anywhere. On the contrary, to design the territory must be the basic action to improve the quality of life of the society. jfs 09.2002.