HOUSING PROJECTS IN THE METROPOLITAN CONCEPCION AREA. INSTITUTIONALIZATION OF THE MODERN CITY, 1939-1973

This work covers the developmental rise and fall period. It ranges from 7939, the year of the earthquake and propagation of modern movement in the south of the country, and 7973, when the political crash finished off the housing strategies of the democratic State. The area, strategic for domestic production, allowed numerous projects under the charge of a variety of entities: some, agencies of the State; others, belonging to the regional industry. All of them involved basic essentials corresponding to a collective and contemporary form of housing. Its features indicate the appropriation of the rationalist vicissitudes. They reveal the modernization of popular domain cloaked by the functional and political utopia of the developmental environment that made up part of the urban image of this land. The leaving of this mark had nuances of decisions taken locally, the physical, geographical and territorial surroundings, all actors that imposed determining facts on the construction of the projects. Three factors: the State and its social welfare inspiration, the industrialists and their impulse to be a Good-Samaritan, and the architectural factors with their mission to modernize, all bring together form, the people and the land. This interconnection sustains the identifying relationship of local modernity.