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Paper short abstract

Based on ethnographic and cartographic research in periurban Quilpué, this paper shows how wildfire risk is co-produced through kinship, urban expansion, memory, and affect. Post-fire rebuilding reveals tensions between everyday dwelling practices, family networks, and technocratic risk governance.

Paper long abstract

The 2024 Great Fire of Valparaíso revealed not only the material impacts of wildfire, but also long-standing struggles over space, governance, and belonging in periurban neighborhoods such as Pompeya Sur in Quilpué. In areas shaped by irregular urbanization and transgenerational land occupations, post-fire interventions have intensified spatial control and risk management, often clashing with residents’ everyday practices of dwelling and rebuilding.

Drawing on ethnographic and cartographic research, this paper argues that wildfire risk cannot be understood as an inherent environmental condition nor as an arbitrary event. Rather, risk emerges as a co-production of kinship relations, urban expansion, migratory trajectories, and environmental transformations. By tracing how families in Pompeya Sur have expanded, subdivided, and reconstructed their homes across hillsides and ravines since the mid-twentieth century, the paper argues that kinship operates not only as a social system, but also as a mode of spatial production that both parallels and contests dominant urban planning logics.

Practices of dwelling, building, and rebuilding, often carried out in tension with post-disaster governance frameworks, reveal how residents rework space beyond official rhythms of intervention and control. Family networks appear simultaneously as resources for remaining in place and as forces that complicate technocratic approaches to risk and displacement. Engaging relational and non-dualist perspectives on territory, the paper proposes understanding risk as a dynamic relation shaped not only by human-environment relations, but also by memory, affect, and everyday negotiations over land. In doing so, it contributes to debates on displacement and urban contestation in Latin American cities.