Methodology to determine more sustainable locations for social housing complexes in Valdivia, Chile

Abstract

Within the multiple decisions related to the development of social housing neighborhoods in Chile, the location of the complexes is especially relevant because of their potential to facilitate, or not, social mobility, access to better opportunities, and urban integration (Sabatini and Brain, 2008). In this sense, the housing policy has been insufficient, although it has incorporated specific incentives to improve the location, they are centralist application parameters that do not contribute to improving the condition of new neighborhoods in smaller cities, making the generation of incentives with a local approach.

The Differential Location Grant (SDL) is part of the housing policy that seeks to address the deficiencies in housing and urban matters that have been perpetuated for more than 30 years in Chile. However, this policy has not fulfilled all its objectives, since its location parameters allow the location of social housing in sectors with poor access to equipment networks. Although it is requested to report the distance of travel for aspects such as transportation, health, and education in the formulas to obtain this incentive, they do not include, among others, measures for travel to places of employment (Brain et al., 2010).

This is how it becomes valuable to investigate less explored variables in this decision-making, such as massive databases related to geo-referenced data. These are a powerful source of information to gather new responses and approaches to urban issues (Pentland, 2009).

Taking into account that today there are numerous data sources for most of all cities, realities such as displacements, flows, land uses, among others, can begin to be modeled with high accuracy, in near-real time, with lower costs and Highest reliability. The volume of information provided by mobile phone antennas makes them capable of describing traces in different time-spaces (day, week, month) and for different groups, exposing how much, how and where people move in a city (Hoteit and col., 2014).

Using the urban ICT capabilities, sustainability indicators have been described for areas of residence and destinations (Integration, Connectivity, and Diversity) and proposals for proximity and morphological criteria to locate new neighborhoods or improve existing ones from urban regeneration actions.

In contrast to the current criteria of location and forms of urban characterization, this work represents a novel and valid approach to know the urban reality in a contextualized manner and complementary to the current instruments, but with the potential to replace them.