BOISIER, SERGIO
Purén (Chile), 1939
By Luis Mauricio Cuervo González
Born in a village in southern Chile—founded by Pedro de Valdivia, taken by the Mapuche until 1882, and refounded by European settlers—Sergio Boisier is one of the most notable Latin American thinkers, with a wide influence in the fields of research and territorial management.
He graduated as an economist from the University of Chile (UC) and later became part of a small group of professionals who studied at the University of Pennsylvania. Walter Isard, one of the founders of that research center, proposed the reinvention of economic science by explicitly introducing spatial variables and, in one of his major works, developed a new economic theory of general equilibrium. In the first part of his intellectual career, Boisier embraced the concerns of regional science and emphasized theoretical work and quantitative analysis methodologies. He served as head of the Division of Quantitative Analysis and head of the Regional Planning Department of the Chilean National Planning Office during the 1960s. From the 1970s onwards, he became associated with the United Nations (UN), first in the office of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) in Brazil, then in Argentina and Panama with the UN Technical Cooperation Office, and later at the Latin American and Caribbean Institute for Economic and Social Planning (ILPES) in Santiago, Chile.
The culminating work of this first period, which likely marks an imaginary boundary with the second phase of his intellectual work, was published by ILPES in 1974, titled “Industrialización, Urbanización, Polarización: hacia un enfoque unificado,” included in Planificación regional y urbana en América Latina (Mexico: Siglo XXI/Editorial Universitaria de Chile, pp. 7-38). In this work, he combines a critical analysis with an alternative proposal, adapted to the territorial and institutional context of Latin America, in response to the then most influential regional policy orientation—the proposal for development poles. This phase of creative adaptation was followed by an attempt to formulate a comprehensive and assertive vision of regional planning in Latin America for this specific context. The institutional, political, and social dimensions gained relevance in his analyses. Given the historical conditions of the moment, they articulated a vision of the regional context built on processes of social pact and political negotiation, associated with the national context. Quantitative analysis thus lost the prominence of the initial moment and became subordinate to this more integral vision.
Today, his intellectual pursuits are marked by the preeminence of speculative work in the noble sense of the term. This involves an exercise of thought without constraints or restrictions, free from dogmas or orthodoxies, animated by encounters with new scientific theories and new epistemological questions, such as complexity theory. Currently, in political terms, the ethical dimension is the main nourishment for his proposals and inquiries. In “And if development were a systemic emergency?” by Fabio Giraldo (Ciudad y complejidad. Bogotá: Creación Humana, 2003), one can find one of the most polished examples of this new, unfinished, and promising phase of Boisier’s intellectual work.
