“Cada uno en su metro cuadrado”, un reporte sobre desigualdad territorial en la Villa Parinacota. / “Cada uno en su metro cuadrado”, a report on territorial inequality.

This paper presents the results of an in-depth case study about the increasing marginalization of poor urban dwellers in Villa Parinacota, a peripheral social housing complex in Santiago de Chile. Thanks to the implementation of a mixed methodology - which combines a mainly qualitative and ethnographic approach with the analysis of quantitative data - the research gives a detailed insight of the ways the neighborhood territory interplays with broader processes of social exclusion. Concepts as territorial segregation, peripheral location, uneven accessibility to services and stigmatization are analyzed jointly. By doing so, the paper offers a contribution on the discussion about territorial inequality, and suggests downsizing the role of geographical factors while centering in political and identitarian ones. In Parinacota, feelings of exclusion are mainly triggered by the symbolic position attributed to this place, not because of “distance” or “isolation,” but because of a widespread feeling of “abandonment”. So, the ways residents experience the territory, their subjective conceptualizations of exclusion and even the values promoted by public policies consolidate a territory-based discrimination. Broader political considerations follow, the subsidiary character of social policies in Chile has an important role in the all process: with its focus on the single individual, they led to the misrecognition of marginalization socio-economic causes, and represent by themselves a driver for the reproduction of discriminatory social representations.