View from the top where a little café is located. Showcasing the cerro on one side and the city on the other.
Today on our last stop of the day we visited UC lo Contador Campus ( school of architecture). The Chilean guide and professor at the school was absolutely amazing apart from letting us into all the amazing spaces on campus. Specifically, I was incredibly impressed with his comment about collective efficacy in Chile. He mentioned how Chile had been facing natural disasters -mainly earthquakes- for the past 10-15 years and that this was incredibly hard on the government. Moreover, that a continuous flow of natural disasters put a huge strain on the government. This caused a huge financial strain on the government which led the governments funds to dry up. This strain existed because of the continuous renovations thay needed to be done on the buildings and projects affected by natural disasters like earthquakes. Normally, this would be a huge issue and questions about government’s level of leadership would be in question. However, it was poetically mentioned that this caused a blessing for the community. This created what we know as collective efficacy. The community came together to unifórmalo spear head the problem head on. As a collective effort they rounded up funds and support from architects as well as a few supportive politicians to raise money and ideas on how to combat this issue. This shows how Chilean people are so much different than the United States where our culture is very individualistic. Here we see the strong bonds created in social circles but also the importance of community and how that relationship is incredibly important in times like these. However, what I enjoyed the absolute most was the fact that this bind still continues to grow. That as a community in times of new the Chilean community comes together to combat issues regardless if it affects them on an individual level or not.