A park for the mining town: public space, real estate investment and urban growth machine in Copiapo

Chile's export boom has transformed northern cities, generating rapid urban growth, changing structures and promoting emblematic projects, including public spaces such as Kaukari Park in Copiapo. This responds to some shortcomings of the city, as the deficiency of public spaces in terms of quantity and quality, but it is also an expression of a logic of urban growth, intrinsically linked to the reproduction of capital and to financial liquidity. In this sense, it is that the present work aims to recover the conceptual proposal of the "growth machine", questioning its applicability to the case of mining cities, under the influence of an export boom. It does so by discussing the conceptual link between the momentum generated by the mining boom, the materialization of liquidity in real estate investment and the construction of public spaces. To illustrate this reflection, an exploratory analysis of the spatial-temporal distribution of building permits in Copiapo, and of certain elements of the discourse on public space projects, particularly Kaukari Park, is presented. The results illustrate how the discourses on this particular park are articulated with a premise of growth and it shows the orientation of building permits submitted by companies and specifically the real estate sector towards large infrastructure projects. It can be assumed that this produces economic benefits for certain agents, but a new centrality is also being built and the park project promises to meet some citizen demands.