Living together and apart: Reimagining care in a segregated neighbourhood of Santiago,Chile

Abstract

Based on an ethnography with children and families in a segregated neighbourhood of Santiago, Chile, this article explores how care is practiced amid urban violence and inequality. Through a combination of drawing and walking methods, it examines how children and parents negotiate risk, absence, and structural neglect in their efforts to sustain relational life. In dialogue with Science and Technology Studies, it shows how care emerges through friction, improvisation, and fragile attachments rather than stability or consensus. In doing so, the article challenges dominant understandings of childhood and parenting, revealing alternative, situated ways of inhabiting and caring for the city and its everyday worlds.

Keywords

urban segregation care parent-child relationships agency precarity

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