The Shelter that Wasn't Ther: on the Politics of Co-ordinating Multiple Urban Assemblages in Santiago, Chile.

• Autores: Sebastián Ureta Icaza
• Localización: Urban Studies, ISSN-e 1360-063X, Vol. 51, Nº. 2, 2014, págs. 231-246
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • The concept of assemblages has gained an important degree of momentum in urban studies claiming to offer a new ontology for understanding cities as emergent and fluid concatenations of multiple elements. Such a conception, however, has also been criticised in relation to its supposed failure to deal effectively with the issue of power and inequality in urban dynamics. This paper contributes to this on-going discussion by exploring in detail the way in which power was embedded in one particular case: a bus stop shelter located in front of the Biblioteca Nacional in Santiago, Chile. In so doing, it analyses the controversy arising when two large and complex urban assemblages share component/s that each of them claims as exclusive. This situation made necessary practices of co-ordination in which a hierarchy was established between the competing assemblages, involving important transformations in some of its components.