Work environs

10 July 2012

Fellow urban nerds, this one's for you. (Also, I telepathically determined that those reading this blog enjoy entries with pictures, so I will try to incorporate photos more regularly, as you can see below).

It's about time I described where I work. As an urban planning student, I'm far more intrigued by the community around my office than my actually building. Counter-intuitively, my office is located in the suburbs (though still technically Santiago proper) while my apartment is an hour away in the city center.

My office building in Vitacura

In a sentence, Vitacura - the "communidad" in which I work - is a wealthy surburban community undergoing schizophrenia, as it rapidly develops in a haphazard and contradictory way, leaving calm and quiet a distant memory. Or, it would be like watching San Marino experience a boom of development while all zoning regulations and building restrictions and area plans were thrown away.

Broad boulevard with parkway (and sculptures) in the middle.

Swanky modern residence in Vitacura (or is it Santa Monica?)

The community obviously had a plan at one point, as it is composed of small residential streets, wider avenues, and a few broad boulevards with pleasant parkways running down the middle. The wide avenues are now incongruous mixes of building types - corner shopping plazas, moderate office towers, car repair shops, single-item specialty stores, posh restaurants, high-rise apartment complexes, and mansions converted into art galleries or boutiques. My office, a moderate and unassuming 4-story structure, sits next to a couple specialty (i.e. arts; French-language) schools on one of the main streets. But once you turn the corner, the area suddenly gives way to sprawling, fancy single-family homes on large blocks that wouldn't be out of place in wealthy pockets of Southern California.

How upset are these residents watching those goliaths go up behind them?

What might be amusing, if my urban planning instincts weren't screaming in frustration, is witnessing the chaotic development transform this community. Towering condos are presently going up alongside one-story single family homes on quiet side streets - surely infuriating the original residents. (I could go off on this matter for a while, but I'll save that for another entry, or maybe different blog entirely). Small parklets have been carved out on corners or edges of city blocks - a welcome change for Santiago, though I'm not sure for whom these parks are intended (probably not the pairs of smooching teens on lunch break from the nearby high schools). Vitacura, like all of Santiago, sprawls with a car-first mentality, yet strives to provide a first-class transit system to serve a large number of commuters. Thus there is an impressive bus network that blankets the whole city, supplementing the subway, yet the streets are congested with too many cars and buses have no dedicated right of way, creeping sluggishly along and packed with passengers. Likewise, certain street designs appear to suggest that THIS IS A PEDESTRIAN ZONE where cars should slow down and take heed, but actual pedestrians like myself are befuddled or frustrated because the streets have few, inconvenient crosswalks and make us resort to darting across traffic lanes.

Street design unfriendly to cars or people. Cars must slow down for the speed bump, while pedestrians are hemmed in by railings and can't actually cross at the corner where they are trying to go.

Pleasant corner park, with fountain

I suppose my morning walk - after I take the stuffed Metro to the crammed bus to my office's street - sums up the neighborhood well. After riding along a pretty parkway with sculptures scattered throughout it, I am dumped into a bus stop in front of a gas station. I pass boutiques as well as a bike shop operating out of the first floor of an apartment tower (this baffles me since I see only a handful of frightened cyclists careening down sidewalks - there are no bike lanes to speak of). I pass a fancy new office building for Lexmark and a charming corner park - both with fountains flowing in the middle of winter. I pass a megadevelopment furiously under construction, and then I pass my favorite, a former mansion now transformed into "Museo de la Moda"  - featuring cars parked vertically IN its lawn and currently featuring a Back to the Eighties exhibit. Volver, indeed.

Museo de la Mode