Socio-spatial differentiation in a Latin American metropolis: urban structure, residential mobility, and real estate in the high-income cone of Santiago de Chile

The High-Income Cone (HIC) is characteristic of the urban structure of Latin-American metropolises, consisting of a delimited area of the city where inhabitants of high socioeconomic status are located, consolidating the patterns of social segregation and inequality that are typical of those societies. Despite the urban transformations experienced by the metropolises of the continent in the last decades, little study has been done to understand the internal dynamics of HICs, which are usually considered a socially homogeneous space. This article delves into the internal complexities of the HIC of Greater Santiago, investigating its residential mobility processes and distinguishing between traditional and recent inhabitants, or ‘inheritors’ and ‘achievers’. Our results indicate the presence of parallel processes of residential mobility, where ‘achievers’ are concentrated in the apartments located in the pericentral zone of the HIC, while ‘inheritors’ move to the houses located in the extreme east. This process of permeability and filtering is conditioned by the recent trends of neoliberal urban densification and expansion, where the construction of more accessible buildings allows the arrival of certain people to the pericentral areas of the HIC, while the more exclusive houses and gated-communities far east are more accessible for inheritors.