As part of our community relations activities, we have held a series of meetings with neighborhood organizations of Santa Inés and representatives of condominium management committees of the Las Salinas sector, with the aim of building, from a shared territorial analysis, a vision for the neighborhood integration of both sectors, in view of the future development of the Las Salinas neighborhood. Our Master Plan considers establishing the accessibility of the Santa Inés neighborhood to the coastal edge, by means of the habilitation of the street and ascent 19 North, through the urban park in the lower part and the hillside park system, respectively. In this way, it is intended to reverse the historical topographic and road gap that means the original condition of this settlement on the plateau, increased by the Alessandri Avenue, but whose biggest barrier is directly related to the existence for 80 years of industrial activity adjacent to the coastal edge, which constituted the oil companies. Something that has been referred to as “the Viña plug”. This attempt to reverse a historical gap and activate an urban connection between neighborhoods implies the need to listen -from those who have been the protagonists of this history- to the neighborhood dynamics, conflicts, shortages, opportunities and desires that have accumulated during the decades of existence of this, one of the most characteristic neighborhoods of Viña del Mar. A new legal tool has allowed us to deepen our urban dialogues and create this new work space, with the particularity of envisioning the future activation of complementary interventions, beyond the possibilities discussed within the Master Plan of Las Salinas Neighborhood: Law 20.958 or Law of Contributions to Public Space. This new framework for collaborative work is the result of a correction to the road mitigation system and today considers – as its name implies – the obligation to generate contributions to public space, in addition to a new system of mitigations for projects in the field of mobility, based on “universality”, “proportionality” and “predictability”. The Contributions Law allows, in short, to establish a set of comprehensive measures for the development of neighborhoods, which, if dealt with in advance and by consensus, can be a balanced complement from and for the project that activates the process. This Working Group brings together actors and neighborhood leaders who have participated separately in our past urban meetings, but whose will to form a critical and informed mass unites them, to allow resolving over time the multiple urban elements at stake at the inter-neighborhood level. But, most importantly, this union also reveals the will of the inhabitants to break the historical gap through dialogue, direct conversation and encounter. Neighborhood actors who represent their communities, but also express in some way or another, from their own local diversity, a good part of the essence of the inhabitants of the city today.
