Spaces & Flows: Ninth International Conference on Urban and ExtraUrban Studies

Abstract

This paper is interested in the relationship between pedestrian mobility and urban places in highly dense urban areas. This relation is explored from the concept of place attachment and the activity of daily pedestrian mobility. The attachment is “a bond between an individual or group and a place that can vary in terms of spatial level, degree of specificity, and social or physical features of the place, and is manifested through affective, cognitive, and behavioral psychological processes” (Scannell & Gifford, 2010, p.5). The place of the attachment could not only be related to a static, delimited or closed space, it can also exist through movement. A place understood as an event that subsumes some processes and goes beyond a thing (Massey, 2005). The objective of this research is to understand how people attached to highly dense urban areas through walking and the role of urban configuration in this process. The zone of interest is the center of Santiago de Chile, one of the densest urban areas in Latin America. The methodology includes ethnographic approaches using different techniques for the compilation of information. Also, it comprises spatial analysis in order to reveal the integration, visibility, and morphology of the space. The sample includes only adult people who walk from their homes to their jobs daily. The presentation shows the preliminary results of doctoral research.