Imagine travelling through the Central Valley in Chile , at any day, going from one village to the next. Through the window, you would see a landscape as beautiful as it is strange. It could be described as a space of contradictions due to the coexistence of agricultural and suburban patterns, crops, hamlets, infrastructures, roads, agro-industries and sawmills… an incoherent display of parts and pieces that deploy an image situated far from the nostalgic, homogeneous idea of the rural that has stubbornly persisted since the time of colonial large estates. Instead, it is perceived as a broken rurality, in which some traces of the order imposed by the haciendas  are still visible, as well as remnants of the agrarian reform process  of the 60s, both mingled with the result of a new on-going process that reversed the reform creating new large estates dedicated to production for global markets. 

 

Beside cities funded by the Spanish, most towns and villages in the Central Valley emerged as public expansions of the model of the haciendas. In other words, urbanized landscape was deployed from the Casa Patronal and onto the houses of the labourers. That is to say that the public, in the form of space, is usually derived from the hacienda as a donation to the public, rather than being part of a project to coherently shape public spaces in rural areas.