Reconstruction work under way in Constitución.
Reconstruction work under way in Constitución. © Gideon Long

Five years on from the 2010 earthquake, Gideon Long revisits the city flattened by a tsunami to find out how a unique collaboration between local residents, businesses and government is driving Constitución’s recovery

As the days passed, Hormazabal pondered the future of his home city. How would Constitución recover, and how should it be rebuilt?

In Santiago, Andrés Iacobelli was asking himself the same questions. Days before the quake, Iacobelli had been named Chile’s undersecretary of housing. Now, before he’d even got his feet under the desk, the country faced a monumental rebuilding task.

Iacobelli realised the state couldn’t do it alone and needed help from the private sector. So he spoke to Arauco, a major forestry firm that employs thousands of workers in Constitución, and to his friend and former colleague Alejandro Aravena, an architect at Elemental, which specialises in social housing projects. Within days, a plan for Constitución started to emerge.

Arauco agreed to finance a “sustainable reconstruction plan”, known by its Spanish acronym PRES. Elemental would oversee the plan’s implementation – but they would do so by consulting local people, as citizen participation was to be paramount. Elemental brought in a consulting firm, Tironi Associates, to advise on this participatory approach, and Arup, a London-based engineering and design multinational. State input came from both the local and regional governments, plus the housing ministry in Santiago.

The team set themselves a target: 100 days to draw up the PRES. “That’s an eternity if you’re living in a place that’s been devastated, but it’s very little time to redesign an entire city,” Aravena says. In total, the PRES projects were budgeted at $150m, 70% of which would come from the state.

Early in the process, Elemental built an “open house” in the city’s main square and made sure their ever-evolving plans were on display there. Anyone could drop in, take a look and make suggestions. There were regular meetings to which the people of Constitución were invited. “I went to every one,” says Dolores Chamorro, a 78-year-old who has lived through her fair share of Chilean earth tremors. “It was fantastic, having these young architects come in to really make us think about the kind of city we wanted.”