Contemporary cities increasingly organize themselves into separate worlds, each social group remaining within its own familiar bubble, confined by homophilic tendencies that filter out difference and prevent encounter. In Valparaíso, Chile, this condition is made spatially explicit through topography. The vertical distance between El Plan, the flat lower city, and the Cerros, the steep hillside neighbourhoods, is not simply a matter of elevation but of accumulated disadvantage. Altitude correlates directly with reduced access to education, mobility, and civic resources. The city's hills are territories of unequal citizenship.
Yet Valparaíso cannot be understood through fragmentation alone. Alongside structural inequalities, the city contains extraordinary cultures of informal adaptation, collective production, and cultural resilience. It already contains collective capacity. What it lacks are shared spatial frameworks through which that capacity can intersect more equitably across social difference.
This thesis investigates to what extent architecture can act as a mediator between formal institutions and informal practices to produce a co-productive commons in Valparaíso's vertically stratified fabric.
The architectural proposal is located on Cerro Cordillera, a strategic urban hinge between Plaza Sotomayor and Plaza Echaurren, adjacent to Ascensor Cordillera and the metropolitan train terminal. The intervention transforms an existing bottleneck into a vertically distributed civic framework of six interconnected terraces, housing arts and crafts workshops, educational spaces, a community kitchen, productive cultivation terraces, and an informal market.
Seven spatial principles guide the design: palimpsest, porosity, port orientation, proximity,, prolonged movement, material rootedness, and framework over object. Materials including existing stone and brick, locally sourced radiata pine, textile roofing, and adobillo vernacular earthen infill ground the intervention in regional building traditions and collective construction processes.
Through co-production, the conditions for commons emerge. Shared infrastructures of making, food, and education create the metabolisms through which homophilic bubbles can be opened, weak ties can form, and collective entanglement becomes spatially possible.
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