Relearning to travel in Santiago: the importance of mobile place-making and travelling know-how

Introduction

Cities today are experiencing constant, significant and abrupt infrastructural and spatial transformations. This is particularly evident in Metropolitan cities and, more specifically, in cities in the Global South, such as Santiago de Chile. Over the last decade, the implementation of Transantiago – a new public transport system – created greater awareness about the relevance of mobility practices in people’s everyday life. The intervention generated general unrest and particular daily challenges for Santiago’s residents requiring them to suddenly adapt, relearn and create ways of making sense of the complex situation that took place. It also generated major challenges for Transantiago implementers, who had to quickly learn the importance of everyday mobility experiences and improvise solutions in order to respond to travellers’ unrest.

In this context, the concept of mobile place-making becomes crucial to understanding how this adaptation occurs as well as how cities are lived and experienced. This is particularly relevant for two reasons. First, travellers become aware and reflexive of their city and of the relevance mobility experiences in their everyday life. Second, policy makers are required to take notice of people’s experience and, with much criticism and cost, to reformulate their top-down implementations, making a move towards an improvised experience-based intervention.

This article presents ethnographic material based on shadowing mobility practices in Santiago de Chile both prior and after Transantiago implementation. It presents the idea of mobile place-making as well as some of the strategies urban travellers develop to adapt themselves to the changes and to create new ways of making sense of the city on a daily basis, as it transforms. Although many strategies can be detected, the main ones observed include cocooning, camping and trace-making.

The results inform how travellers creatively learn or relearn to use new mobile spaces: the more they practice, the thicker the travelling experience becomes. This provides travellers with new possibilities within these places on the move and forces policy makers to understand the relevance of mobile place-making in mobility related interventions.

Transantiago

On 10 February 2007, the city of Santiago underwent a radical transformation of its public transport system^1,2 through the implementation of Transantiago; this significantly modified mobility practices in a city with over 7,000,000 inhabitants. The introduction of the new public transport system caused most Metro lines to really struggle from the excess demand from passengers, mainly due to the sudden and complete transformation of the existing public transport system without adequate preparation. The transformations included: the introduction of a trunk-feeder system, which involved reformulating all bus lines and considerably reducing the bus fleet by almost half; bus and Metro integration; fare integration through a smart prepaid BIP! card; new infrastructure in terms of corridors, bus stops, interchange stations, roads and so on; a new public transport communication strategy; the professionalisation of the transport business through a public bid and a new contract system, among many other changes.

Aside from the serious technical errors caused by a miscalculation of the transport model ³ and many other issues that have been broadly discussed elsewhere, ⁴ the two most important aspects that contributed to the collapse of the system were first, that the system itself was not ready to be put into operation and second, that it did not recognise the importance of everyday life, and particularly everyday mobility, in people’s life and in the city.

February is generally a quiet time in Santiago due to summer holidays and most students are still on vacation. That is why this time of the year was ideal to implement Transantiago. However, the first of many failures in the initial days was due to insufficient buses, uninformed routes, Metro overcrowding, and bus drivers not knowing where to go. Millions of workers were unable to make it to work, and they had to find alternate routes. By March, when students returned to school, the chaos continued. As implementation progressed, it became evident that great levels of improvisation were in place, as well as complete ignorance of the huge impact mobility practices had in the functioning of the city. It would take months for the system to start improving its operation, and years for it to incorporate the many changes required. Over the years, it came to be known as Chile’s worst implemented public policy and as a joke in terms of how not to implement a new intervention. By 2015, Transantiago is still not functioning with the originally promised quality and its implementers have had to constantly change and improve the system. Despite the problems, today Transantiago is considered one of the best transport systems in the Region; ⁵ however, the costs to achieve this have been extremely high, particularly in social, economic, technical and political terms.

More than discussing the technical, economic or political dimensions of the implementation of the transport system, this article aims at emphasising on how this process evidenced the importance of mobility experiences in the running of the city of Santiago. The intervention generated an overall awareness of how central urban daily mobility is to people’s lives. It also showed the importance of considering mobility experiences as a relevant aspect to consider in urban and transport planning, in light of the fact that planning tools such as origin–destination surveys and other relevant movement and flow models managed by transport engineers were insufficient for the endeavour at hand.

To sum up, new mobility practices from Santiago’s daily urban travellers have developed over the last decade as a consequence of the new public transport system. Santiago residents have had to relearn how to travel; in this process, mobile place-making played a crucial role in enhancing travellers’ capacity to create significant interactions with the city they live in. Additionally, policy makers have slowly recognised the importance of mobility experiences and mobile place-making, though its formal application is still unclear.

Place-making

Considerable discussion has taken place over whether making place may lose its significance and its characteristics in today’s fast changing world or if place continues to be a constituent element of social life and of historical changes.^6–8 Massey believes that if the social organisation of space is changing current ideas regarding place, this concept should be rethought altogether^9,10 and move towards understanding it as the location of particular sets of intersecting social relations and intersecting activity spaces ¹¹ in time.

The multiplicity of changes in space and time in speed, forms and encounters generate what Massey ¹² refers to places as events, a constellation of multiple and not necessarily coherent trajectories and processes. The event of place requires negotiation and poses a challenge as to how encounters with ‘Others’ (including other things) “will take place, how we are going to get in this conjuntiality”. ¹³ Places as events cannot be predetermined or anticipated; they emerge as relations occur in time and space.

This article intends to delve on this reconceptualisation by presenting the idea of mobile places within the practice of urban daily mobility, particularly by examining mobile experiences in Santiago de Chile. It proposes that mobile place-making can be observed through the various strategies individuals deploy in space, including cocooning, camping and trace-making. Moreover, the possibility of place-making becomes enhanced as knowledge of mobility practices increases, and the more the mobility is practised, the more the travelling know-how increases or thickens. This means that as travelling practices became disrupted when Transantiago was implemented, old practices had to be replaced, relearned or adapted. As new mobility practices became embodied, new aspects of the system were appropriated, and new strategies developed to circumvent the multiple challenges faced. With time, these strategies become collectively embodied and common among mobility practices, thus creating a practical understanding ¹⁴ and providing greater possibilities of place-making as more people know and practice them.

This article looks at mobility practices and the place-making strategies that emerge while travelling through the city under new mobility conditions, using ethnographic material from research on mobility experiences prior and post Transantiago implementation. It presents the notions of mobile places and transient places, and explains how these places are shaped as travellers develop a travelling know-how, or embodied mobility strategies that thicken mobile place-making. The thickening of mobile places refers broadly to Jensen’s possibility of thinking mobility spaces as sites of (potential) meaningful interaction, pleasure, and cultural production. ¹⁵ Nevertheless, here it is specifically treated as the process by which travelling know-how is embodied; therefore, the more people travel and understand the new system the more their bodies perform a sort of choreographic understanding of how to be in place, thus thickening mobile places through the interrelation that emerges from individual bodies and their knowledge of mobility practices.

Despite international recognition from a mobilities point of view of the relation between experience, mobility and meaning in the city, ¹⁶ the importance of this triad has received little attention in formal transport and urban studies in Chile. Mobile place-making and mobility experiences are considered ‘light’, ‘soft’ or ‘useless’ data to be incorporated into transport models. However, in practice, most modifications to the original Transantiago intervention have been adjusted in response to the multiple complaints from users based on their mobility experiences, including routes, infrastructure, machines and even contracts. Transantiago implementers in Chile have started to introduce this perspective in a reactive manner, as a way of sorting through the challenges of the system.

Place-making in motion

Daily travelling is one way of constructing a relation with the city; therefore, it is a relevant dimension of everyday life. In daily journeys, leaving the house, commuting to work or study, visiting friends or shopping, travellers are disposed to interact with their environment, with other travellers, messages, objects, and a broad range of stimuli that shape their experience of urban space. In this process, what becomes relevant is not much the efficiency of the trip and the consequent calculation of the resources involved in fulfilling this objective, but the trajectory as a place of experience (See Note 16) ¹⁷ where mobility^18–21 plays a crucial role in the spatialisation of this experience.

The dichotomy, overlap, similarity and juxtaposition of place, space and time have been a major topic of discussion in the broad field of geography and urban studies. ²² Place always refers to a location, a locale and meaning, ²³ and involves a signification and transformation of space and nature, which is inseparable from the reproduction and transformation of society in time and space. In this progressive sense, place is open, permeable and always in construction, and it is constituted through reiterative social practices, which make and remake place on a daily basis. As asserted by Cresswell, ²⁴ places are never complete, finished or bounded, but are always becoming – in process. Places are about relationships, about placing (or displacing or replacing) people, materials, images, and the systems of difference they perform (See Note 9). Place is both the context for practice as well as a product of practice; thus, the relationship between places and practices, particularly those which take place on a daily basis, are extremely relevant in contemporary urban life.

As socially produced movement, mobility implies giving meaning to the practice of moving from one point to another and suggests the possibility of signifying and transforming places in motion, generating mobile places and transient places. ²⁵ The first term refers to places to which people ascribe meaning while they are travelling in them, for example, automobiles, buses, trains, cable cars or subways. In the area of transport and urban planning, the time spent on these transportation modes is generally considered ‘dead time’,^26,27 and interventions aimed at these attempt to reduce the travel time and improve connections in order to make them more efficient. Mobile places can be appropriated by people for reflection or contemplation, socialising, making friends, feeling independent, being distracted or escaping, among others, while being in motion. As will be exposed, different people experience travel times in different ways; however, as asserted by Jain (See Note 26), not all experiences are considered dead time; on the contrary, for the majority of individuals, the timespace spent while travelling in various modes of transport is crucial for their daily existence.

Transient places, the second form of place generated in motion, refers to fixed spaces that are important for people while moving through them. These are not places of permanence but places of transit and transition, regardless of the amount of time spent in them and how they are signified. These places vary in type, form, and possibilities of permanence, and on occasion, they are considered public spaces or spaces for public use. Some of these places have received greater attention including markets, bus stops, petrol stations, airports, parks or streets.^28–30 These places have been considered ‘non-places’, ³¹ that is, spaces constructed in relation to particular purposes (transport, transit, commerce, leisure). According to Kaufmann, Augé does not use this term pejoratively but rather in a descriptive way to determine a type of place that introduces a new sense of thin or abstract identity. ³² On the other hand, Agnew indicates that places such as strip centres, new towns, the international architectural style, or tourist landscapes, among others, are current manifestations of ‘non-places’. ³³ Nevertheless, this research reveals that these non-places are not static and that the lack of place, as suggested by Agnew, ³⁴ is in the eye of the beholder, and shopping malls, markets, Metro stations or bus stops are not only objects that appear on the road but also structures that have important meanings within the daily experiences of people. Transient places, then, are fixed spaces through which intense mobility takes place and are ascribed importance through convenience, leisure, distraction, socialisation or recreation, among others. ³⁵

Thickening mobile place-making through travelling know-how

Modern metropolitan travel systems like Transantiago assemble a series of devices that people combine in order to make their journeys possible. Within this system, bus stops, interchange stations, Metro stations, platforms and stairways are presented as transient places while buses and Metro trains are seen as mobile places.

When observing the way people orchestrate mobility practices to various rhythms, the complexity of transport systems emerges. Along with travellers’ bodies, these rhythms unveil the presence of Others, the materiality of the system, the various objects people carry, individual or collective strategies; all of which help people create a travelling know-how, a certain travelling grammar ³⁶ or travel competencies or skills, ³⁷ that provide meaning and generate a possibility of place-making, through their repeated enactment.

Schedules, routes, line exchange stations, fare systems, the diversity of train and bus models, among other factors imply restrictions that require constant decision making by travellers. Locating oneself strategically on the platform in order to be able to board a train, manage a seat, or emerge close to the exit on the arrival platform are strategies that shape travel know-how. This repertoire also includes the selection of preferred spaces inside the train: standing next to the door or at the centre, resting on the railings or grips, or supporting oneself on the spaces connecting two trains. These practices, based on repetitive experiences of the past, and future expectations, offer know-how for obtaining a protected space with respect to other bodies, capturing fresh air that enters the windows, or simply observing.

In the context of Transantiago, insufficient adequate information obliged travellers to learn on their own how to navigate through a new complex system, including the informational, spatial, human aspects of the system, in order to organise their daily trips. Learning to travel allows for the creation and transformation of mobile places. ³⁸ As travellers interact with their environment in motion, they signify it and develop a process of mobile place-making, increasing their attachment and signification the more they ‘own’ the system, appropriating it through their embodied knowledge.

Through travel know-how, travellers give meaning to space and time, signifying both simultaneously in various ways, which can be classified according to the body’s relation to the environment, Others and materiality. Using Ito et al.’s ³⁹ classification of genres of presence in urban space according to use of technology, this article adapts these to overall use of transport spaces through mobility practices, by analysing strategies for: isolation (cocooning), physical linkage to the environment (camping) and recognition of others to incorporate the environment (trace-making). These three strategies carried out by urban travellers are identified as ways of mobile place-making. Upon abrupt changes like Transantiago, a new way of travel know-how emerges; this know-how becomes increasingly embodied and places become meaningful to travellers, and a certain thickness of place begins to take place, not just individually, but also collectively.

Methodology

This article is based on two ethnographic research works on mobility practices. The first research was conducted between 2005 and 2007, prior to the implementation of Transantiago, and relates to mobility practices of 12 families living in the South Eastern part of Santiago. The second research took place between 2009 and 2012, post Transantiago, and it shadowed mobility practices of 76 cases throughout the city of Santiago.

The ethnographic approach in both cases involved the use of shadowing as a technique of apprehending everyday mobile experiences. ⁴⁵ Shadowing mobile practices consists of accompanying participants in their daily journeys for a whole day. This mobile method draws from anthropological methods such as ‘deep hanging out’ ⁴⁶ during mobility or multi-sited ethnography^47,48 and from the various developments in mobile methodologies including methods to capture multiple forms of mobility, ⁴⁹ or methodologies that privilege researching everyday landscapes, ⁵⁰ including go-alongs, ⁵¹ geographic mobile trajectories through diaries and photography^52–54 or biking experiences through video ⁵⁵ .

In both research works, participants were interviewed prior to the shadowing process, in order to gain an understanding of their potential journeys and also of their contexts in relation to household characteristics, social, economic and cultural aspects. Although there are indications of what the journeys would be like from the interviews, the actual journeys are often very different, particularly in terms of the precisions of time and coordination in executing them. Once the daily routines were over, participants were accompanied and shadowed back home and the shadowing ended once they confirm that they would not be making another journey that day. ⁵⁶ The technique required being on time, so as to not delay participants and at the same time being flexible in adapting to their daily rhythms. In order to capture the various spatial and social interactions from the perspectives of different household members, different individuals from the same household were shadowed on different days.

The ethnographic material which emerged from the research works was used as data to be analysed collectively among different researchers and comparatively in order to understand both mobility experiences as well as the significance of the journeys. The mobility practices of Bernardo and Claudia are respectively presented in two different shadowing periods, the first one prior to the implementation of Transantiago, and the second after its implementation, once the system had already been running for at least 3 years. The cases were chosen because both of them express, in their particular manner, changes in daily mobility practices due to the implementation of Transantiago, not so much in terms of their routes or travelling distances, but in their travelling experience.

Displacing mobile place-making from the bus to the bus stop

When we first met Bernardo in 2006, prior to Transantiago, he lived in the South Eastern part of Santiago, in a social housing unit along with his wife and three children. He worked at a print shop downtown, and left early in the morning to be able to catch his almost empty bus at the bus terminal and manage to get a seat. Very soon the bus filled up and he began to enjoy the ride. His friend Clara would get on the bus and stand next to him while he carried her bags. They talked about their lives, the driver’s life, or the man who had just gotten on …, as though they were sitting in their living room, camping. Although not everyone knew each other, a certain feeling of trust could be sensed. For instance, those who hopped on the bus from the back door would pass their fare money to the passengers in front, who in turn would pass it from hand to hand until it reached the driver, who would then send the change and ticket back. As people pushed their way through the aisle, Bernardo would nod hello to many of them; some he knew from his football matches or from parties that he had been to; others he had met on the same bus, taking the same route for many years:

Sometimes friends or acquaintances get on the bus, but there’s also people I don’t know, they get on and since we see each other often, on a daily basis, we talk. […] Maybe it’s because I’m an extrovert, I never miss a chance, when people ask me for the time, I start talking, things come up, it’s not complicated, it makes the trip shorter, I don’t even notice, travelling by bus doesn’t affect me, I sit all the way and talk. No problem. (Bernardo)

He would not look outside: ‘what for?’ he would say,

it’s the same ugly scenery every day, it’s better to leave the curtains closed, that way you don’t see the same ugly streets every day, and just concentrate on the bus. I know the outside, so I prefer to see what happens inside, usually talking.

Those with very long journeys try to get a good seat,

they accommodate well and sleep all the way, making up for the time they don’t sleep at home in order to get up early […] I sometimes sleep, but not too often, as I have fallen off my seat with the sudden brakes. (Bernardo)

The bus in the morning and in the evening became a mobile place for Bernardo and it offered him the possibility of encountering other people, of connecting to others in co-presence, even if they did not talk, but their presence left traces. Bernardo would not change his job for one closer to home; he used to say that he ‘doesn’t really mind the ride, something always happens’. Bernardo’s personality contributed to his enjoyment of the trip, the bus became a place for socialisation, even under overcrowded conditions, and it became a place that Bernardo found meaningful. He felt socially, economically, culturally comfortable in it using both his camping and trace-making strategies. The route outside was not as relevant as what occurred inside. Those inside were the ones that made the bus his space for socialisation.

The irruption of Transantiago

The changes undertaken by Transantiago in 2007 involved the complete reconfiguration of all bus routes, from a seemingly unstructured and disordered system where most routes crossed the city inevitably passing by Alameda (Santiago’s main avenue), to a trunk-feeder system where all buses would feed the main trunk system, being the Metro system extended by BRT (Bus Rapid Transit)-like bus corridors. This involved the creation of 10 feeder zones, each with multiple bus routes running from various directions within each zone towards the specific Metro station or main bus lines (trunk) crossing the city North–South and East–West. Under this structure, along with the formalisation of the system, where drivers’ income would derive from a fixed salary and not in terms of the number of passengers carried, buses would no longer stop at any given point as each route had its assigned bus stops, many of which would host multiple lines, some of which consisted of prepaid waiting zones. Additionally, with the introduction of Transantiago, many buses would reach interchange stations where passengers would have to wait for the next bus that would take them to the trunk system.

In practical terms, this meant that passengers would no longer spend long hours on the same bus, and as a consequence, they would have to hop on and off different buses and make more use of the Metro, that now had an integrated fare with the buses and, because of the trunk-feeder system, most buses would reach Metro stations. This generated most Metro lines to collapse with excess demand from passengers particularly coming from the lower income and more populated areas of the city. For Bernardo, this meant modifying his daily mobility practice and relearning to travel; it also implied relocating his socialising spot, from the bus to the bus stop.

Upon a new shadowing experience with Bernardo 4 years later, we found out that he still works at the same print shop and still lives in the same housing unit with his family. However, given the changes in Santiago’s transport system, he no longer goes to the bus terminal to access the bus, but waits by his nearest bus stop with his BIP! prepaid smart card in hand to touch the payment device upon ascending the bus.

Although Transantiago intended to renovate the system’s bus fleet, most old buses remained and became ‘enchulados’ (Enchular means to significantly improve the physical appearance of something or someone) or pimped up, that is, fixed up and repainted, with all informal traces removed (driver’s family photos, music, decorations, food, money box, etc.) and replaced by new signage, new doorbells, revolving turnstile, payment touch devices, and some even include TV screens. Bus drivers are now isolated by a bullet-proof glass cage and no longer have to deal with cash or passenger nuisance; they actually barely talk to passengers now, except for an occasional good morning. This also means that passengers often evade payment upon entering the bus, and bus drivers simply ignore the situation.

At 7:00 am sharp Bernardo leaves his house for the bus stop, a few streets away. He knows all the other passengers waiting at the bus stop and nods hello. He touches the sensor with his Bip! card and enters the old but enchulado bus, looking for a seat in a bus he knows well, ‘it has almost twice as many seats as the new ones’, he says. He sits by a much-scratched window, barely able to see the scenery outside. The first part of the journey is slow and quiet, as if people were sleeping on their seats. No conversations, no radios, no noise.

By the Metro station most passengers get off, and new passengers get on. The new ones are hyperactive in comparison to the descending ones; they move more, breathe heavier. The bus gains speed, and soon starts its speeding and breaking rhythm. At the National Stadium stop Bernardo mentions: ‘a singer used to get on here, playing “cueca” (Chilean traditional national music), a real guitar master’. With the formalisation of Transantiago, informal clowns, singers and merchants are no longer allowed on buses, making the journey less interesting, says Bernardo.

At the next stop, we get off and wait for the next bus. Here, we find a big crowd waiting for the many different buses that will come to the multiple stops scattered along the semi covered platform. Amidst the crowd, Bernardo starts nodding to people, and heads towards the set of carts lined up along the platform; these are informal spots selling multiple fast foods, including sopaipillas (A popular Chilean fried pumpkin dough, often served with mustard, chilli or ketchup), tea and coffee, sandwiches, fruit, juices, sweets, cake, among many others. Bernardo buys two sopaipillas and a cup of tea, ‘this is my breakfast’, he says. While waiting with his breakfast in hand, he stands next to other men, making various conversations with strangers while eating his meal, as a camping strategy. The topics range from Sunday’s football match to the by now typical complaint of Transantiago or Transantiasco (transdisgusting) as many call it. Bernardo also takes this opportunity to chit chat with some of the women waiting for the bus.

We wait for at least 15 minutes for his bus; although many have passed, none have stopped to pick up passengers as they are all too full. We watch them go by, until finally an empty one arrives, he queues to get on, a practice he says he never had before: two lines are formed on opposite directions, one for those who want to sit on the bus and another for those who want to stand. In an almost scholarly fashion, all passengers respect their turn, when the spots for those seating is full, the standing up queue advances. No one argues or tries to cut in; Bernardo mentions that one of the things Transantiago has generated is order, a sort of disciplining of bodies to move along the mobility devices made available. Bernardo queues on the standing line. He says the remaining journey is relatively short, so there is no need to sit; he says he already enjoyed his morning conversation at the bus stop.

The second half of the journey is straight, no turns, a few stops, no one talks to anyone, no one makes any jokes, and many are either sleeping or looking at their phones. He stands looking out, until we get off close to his print shop. He walks to work on the same streets he has walked on for years. Nothing from that part of the journey has changed.

Reflecting on the Metro: from camping to cocooning

Santiago’s Metro system started running in 1975 and its lines have been continuously extended since, with under and over ground lines running North, South, East and West of the city. It is considered an important symbol of Chilean modernity due to its speed, efficiency and cleanliness. Prior to the implementation of Transantiago in February 2007, the cost of using the Metro was higher than that of public buses; therefore, its use was limited, underused and seldom crowded, used mainly by higher income groups. In the midst of contemporary harried lifestyles, Metro’s reliability and comfort made it a refuge for some, or a place for reflection and introspection, as Claudia’s experience in 2006 illustrates:

Claudia is a 30-year-old dentist; she is single and lives with her parents in the Southeastern part of Santiago. She works at a public dentist clinic in Independencia (A centrally located borough in Santiago) and has just started a postgraduate specialisation on Orthodontics and will continue working part-time for the 2-year duration of the course, 2 days a week and Saturday mornings. Fortunately, she says, both her job and the University are located downtown.

Her routine varies daily, between her University and work. She leaves her house at 8:00, walks to the colectivo (A type of taxi that follows specific routes; they charge fixed rates according to the distance travelled. Their routes start at colectivo stands or Metro stations, once the minimum number of passengers is seated, but stop wherever requested) stand, and within 20 minutes she is at the Metro station, where she begins a journey she enjoys. As she looks out the windows, she points at the different things she sees outside: new restaurants, the women’s jail, a new building, ugly spaces and attractive areas. The whole Metro ride lasts approximately 45 minutes; the first part is mostly over ground. She then switches lines and meets a woman she used to work with and they catch up for two stops. She gets off at her stop and walks a few steps to her University, where she stays until 5:00. She leaves school with her classmate, Sandra, who takes the same Metro line. When Sandra gets off, Claudia goes back to her reflection mode, to thinking about her day, how it went. When she reaches her stop, she walks to the colectivo stand and waits in a long queue for the one that takes her home in heavy traffic.

For Claudia, so long as she is using the Metro, travelling is fine. Although she owns a car, she loathes using it because she feels bullied by other drivers who ‘honk at me to hurry up’, fears being robbed in the car, and hates looking for parking. For her, travelling on the Metro is definitely not dead time. She says that it is her place of reflexion and amusement, a break from her demands at work and school; a way of reacting to what is happening elsewhere, it opens her to other social realities. Claudia enjoys the ride and plans her day while riding the Metro, or reflects on what happened to her during the day:

The time on the Metro is definitely my reflection time; it’s where I think. I plan everything on the metro, or if I need to think or solve something, I do it on the Metro, I hold it until I reach the Metro. It’s never lost time, it’s my moment, from work to home, I forget about my work stuff, the things that happened, I disconnect, and I start thinking about other stuff. (Claudia)

She enjoys looking at other people; she finds it relaxing. She enjoys eavesdropping. She listens to other people’s conversations and although she knows it is not polite, she wishes she could comment on others’ conversations. She’s amazed by what people do on the Metro, from nail clipping to applying make-up:

In the morning, you see a lot of women putting their make up on […], they take out their make-up kit and […] they go all the way, liquid eye liner, foundation. I used to think it was awful, why don’t they do it at home? I thought, but then of course, they barely have time, if they are mothers, they probably had to prepare breakfast for their kids, wash the dishes, tidy up a bit, obviously, when do they have time for make up?! (Claudia)

She knows the Metro well, the food stalls, the vending machines, which stations have Wi-Fi, what people watch on the TV screens. She observes how the scenery changes from the over ground Metro lines, the new buildings or the demolished ones. The spaces travelled by, the spaces she encounters, leave traces in her.

Prior to Transantiago, Claudia’s Metro experience was relatively comfortable (less than 7% of all trips made in the capital were by Metro ⁵⁷ ), enough for her to feel adequate to relax and reflect on her life, work and personal issues. The Metro ride expanded her world and made her see more of what she would normally experience in her place of residence or work; it complemented her possibility of encounter with others different from her and also similar to her, leaving traces in her. In Claudia’s case, using Kaufmann’s ⁵⁸ concept of reversibility, the journey is irreversible since not only does the journey leave traces in her mind about her own thoughts, but also it left traces about other people’s lives and about the spaces she embodied.

In 2010, Claudia was shadowed again, trying to observe how Transantiago had affected her. Her opinion of Metro Santiago had completely changed. For her, Transantiago ‘ruined Metro’. She says it is now impossible to travel by Metro. The queues to enter the station are huge in the morning rush hour, and Metro stations often have to close down, until passengers are able to board the wagons, as queues can run even outside the stations. She tries to avoid it, but she still needs to use it on a daily basis. She has thus had to device different strategies, leaving much earlier or later than before, getting on two stations before hers, or taking the bus to a different line than the one closer to her house.

Due to the overwhelming demand of Metro, the Express System was implemented in three of most congested lines: Lines 2, 4 and 5, where at peak hour, following a red/green colour coded alternate stoppage system, one train only stops at red stations while the next one only stops at green ones. This makes trains less full but stations more crowded, making passengers behave more orderly and alert as to where to stand on the platform in case their colour train comes first. Claudia’s nearest station is red; she says it took her a while to understand the system, but she now follows it.

As to the Metro being her place of reflection and observation, she mentions that she no longer eavesdrops or listens to other people’s conversation, except when she travels after 10:00 a.m. or before 5:00 p.m. At busy times, she, as most passengers, is cocooned in her mobile phone world (According to Pew Research Center Survey carried out in 2013, in Chile 91 per cent of those surveyed use mobile phones and 34 per cent of those phones are smart phones. ⁵⁹ ). With the widespread increase of smart phones, most passengers are either playing games, chatting, emailing, twitting, reading the news online or simply checking their Facebook. She says having access to her phone makes it possible to catch up with her friends by chat, subsumed in her own world, cocooned. She mentions how she has slowly gotten used to it and now holds her conversations all day, until she reaches the Metro in the morning or afternoon. The possibility of place-making is still there, but in a more individual cocooned way.

Although she recognises that many practices have changed, she still feels Metro as a safe place, and new possibilities have emerged. She mentions how she has started purchasing clothing and decorating items on Facebook. One way Metro has helped is that, because these are informal transactions, merchandise exchange is carried out at Metro stations. Some Metro stations are better for this than others; the busy, yet not so busy ones in Line 1 are the most used ones, and purchaser and seller give each other specific identification tips, and then hand each other the purchased goods. She says this is something new for her, but loves being able to shop online and receiving her packages in a safe place she knows well, a place where she can camp.

Both cases exemplify the way urban travellers adapt to the abrupt and sudden implementation of Transantiago, as a result of the modification of their daily mobility routines. The irruption of Transantiago did not modify the origin and destination or distances travelled, but the experience of the trip. This generated a transformation of control over space, and modification of mobile and transient places. As can be observed, what travellers value most is not so much the decrease in travel time, the main argument presented to implement Transantiago in the first place, but the interaction with the system and all its parts, buses, trains, bus stops, platforms, other travellers, the closeness of bodies, or loss of contact with old travel companions. As ethnographic evidence shows, for travellers, their mobility experiences show an awareness of a before and after Transantiago.

Conclusion

This study intends to move forward the discussion regarding the reconceptualisation of place, introducing the idea of mobile places in the framework of the practice of everyday urban mobility. It provides elements for revealing the manner in which the recreation of mobile and transient places is possible within the practices of everyday mobility. This process manifests itself in two ways: through mobile places or through transient places. Of course, not all urban travellers experience these places in the same way because the experience that each person has regarding urban spaces is different. However, the possibility of identifying with these places exists, and therefore, the practices of moving within or along them enrich urban experiences, making them irreplaceable; consequently, these spatial practices deserve to be analysed.

The experience of travelling in Santiago’s new public transport system provides an understanding of the way in which its travellers interact with the city, and despite the profound transformations, they still manage to adopt new travelling practices over time, while still carrying out old practices, by reinterpreting them and producing new mobile places at the same time. Travellers are faced with the restrictions imposed by Transantiago and forced to adopt a new travelling know-how. Based on the creation and repetition of mobility practices as well as on the experience these practices generate, a certain travelling know-how is developed. This generates strategies that are incorporated into their daily embodied interactions with space in movement.

This travelling know-how allows for developing various degrees of signification, which over time helps to thicken the experience of mobile place-making. The heterotopic condition of the city emerges as contemporary spaces of high interaction; moreover, within this complexity, strategies of signification are developed including cocooning, camping and trace-making.

As time progresses, the experiences become richer thus thickening the possibility of mobile place-making. The relevance of delving into these embodied strategies in cities like Santiago is that these ‘new’ forms of creating places are increasingly significant both in people’s lives and in the way the city is intervened.

The irruption of Transantiago in travellers’ daily lives evidenced the importance of daily mobility experiences, not just as fleeting moments, but as important place-making possibilities. These mobility experiences also provided Transantiago implementers with much previously ignored information, making them aware of the many missing aspects present upon implementation. Over the years, Transantiago has had to constantly accommodate many of the pitfalls originally present, and although incorporating mobile place-making experience in not yet by any means a formal method in transport planning, many ideas emerging from what people experience while travelling have been used in a subtle, reactive yet significant manner.

Despite worldwide recognition of the new mobility paradigm, a common trait in incorporating mobility into transport and urban policy and programmes today is to replace the term transport for mobility, without fully understanding the profound implications of mobility. This mobility shift involves a profound rethinking of the way transport and spatial interventions take place, not just in terms of spatial design, but in every aspect of urban and transport planning, including intermodality, programming, participation, norms and so on. The many problems present in the Transantiago experience could provide ideas as to how to include mobility practices in the design and implementation of new transport interventions, at least by recognising the importance of mobile place-making in the life in cities today.