CONCLUSIONES

Let me introduce some of the collages made by the research participants showing what they like and dislike about their journeys. These help explain my decision to make sense of their walking practices by picking two specific materials to lead the reflections: greenery and garbage.¹⁵ Opening the empirical chapters with these images and reflections from my participants allows me to foreground immediately their voices and ideas:

15 For a complete dossier of participants’ collages, please go to ‘Collages’ in:

https://thesisappendices.wordpress.com/

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Figure 4.1 Participant’s collage: Things Trinidad likes about her journeys on foot, February 2016.

‘What can I tell you? The colours, the trees, the beautiful houses, the green and the different painted colours of the wall, and the little shops with plenty of colours that draw your eyes. The sidewalks are clean…’.

Low-Income Areas

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‘There is not much to contemplate here. I mean, there is a lot to see but nothing to contemplate. I enjoy contemplating. I do not find any picture showing flowers; there was one, but it was behind a fence, it could not be seen clearly’. Figure 4.2 Participant’s collage: Things Trinidad dislikes about her journeys on foot, February 2016.

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Figure 4.3 Participant’s collage: Things Belisario likes about his journeys on foot, April 2016.

‘The green… here you can see the green. It looks nice there. Yeah, there is grass there. That is the little green still remaining because it used to be greener here some time ago’.

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‘Yeah, and there is filth too. Here it is all concrete and filth. Yeah, and it lacks some green, something that gives life to the street’. Figure 4.4 Participant’s collage: Things Belisario dislikes about his journeys on foot, April 2016.

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‘First, I love the green. Look, here, those bikes in the park turned out so nicely! There is shade, the sky... It was a beautiful day! The animals, the sidewalks with some water, that shade there… the flowers. Yes, I liked that. And here, well, there are more details of the mural on the wall . . . . These houses are beautiful, big, historical and clean, clean! . . . . It is a pleasure to walk through places like these… those sidewalks next to the grass and those little flowers there, I love it!’.

Figure 4.5 Participant’s collage: Things Rafaela likes about her journeys on foot, February 2016.

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‘In fact, the other collage is nicer, better arranged. This one I just did it [without really caring], it did not interest me’.

Figure 4.6 Participant’s collage: Things Rafaela dislikes about her journeys on foot, February 2016.

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Figure 4.7 Participant’s collage: Things Felipe likes about his journeys on foot, May 2016.

‘That is why I put that kid there, to show that the act of walking should happen, hopefully, through green environments, clean, with trees . . . It reflects the natural within the built environment a little and it is my backyard! (he laughs). The colour of the trees, the nature alive. After all, those are utterly natural hills’.

High-Income Areas

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‘There are natural conditions such as the treetops or the wide space in front of a building which is ugly—but that does not matter—if they prefer to use it to park lots of cars and nobody walks there, then it is lost space . . . Look where the car is parked –what is this person doing there? And also this one [picture], that part is so ugly with the cables, the utility poles, they blot the background landscape. You can see the cordillera in the background, well we did not have a bright day, but maybe they could clear it up which would permit us to have a more beautiful sky and landscape’.

Figure 4.8 Participant's collage: Things Felipe dislikes about his journeys on foot, May 2016.

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The collages you have seen show similarities in what people enjoy or do not enjoy when walking across the city and through different socio-economic conditions. Vegetation, light scattering through trees’ branches, flowers, clean and even sidewalks, colours, among others, are seen in the collages of things which participants value. Among unpleasant things, we observe uneven and cracked sidewalks, fences, garbage, traffic, concrete or spaces lacking colours and vegetation. At the same time, collages show the variation of the qualities of materials from low-income to high-income neighbourhoods: the lushness of vegetation increases, sidewalks are wider and cleaner; however, fewer people can be seen walking on the streets.

Considering that the presence and quality of some materials are related to the socio-economic conditions of the areas people live in and move through, telling stories about walkers’ relationships with materials allows me to understand how urban inequality is experienced while walking in terms of what the environment affords to the pedestrians. I do this by answering the question: What do materials do to people’s lived experiences of walking? Having defined walking as a place-making practice (see section H.P), this question means understanding people’s lived experience of the materials they encounter as much as understanding how materials compose places people walk through.

The materials involved in social practices are key to understanding them. In this sense, I agree with Latham and McCormack(HIIX, aI[) in their paper about urban materialities when they say that ‘to argue for the importance of materiality is in fact an argument for apprehending different relations and durations of movement, speed, and slowness rather than simply a greater consideration of objects’. I tried, then, to think together with my research participants about the relationships they created with materials in their movement. In the case of walking, materials that make-up places are particularly relevant as walking is a practice embedded in places. Christopher Tilley (HI"H, "a) highlights the

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bond between walking and places stating that ‘a walk is . . . a material journey and a temporal narrative. A walk gathers together the landscape in relation to my body’. The materials people encounter on their walks configure their experiences in a fundamental way so that we cannot talk about walking as a thing separated from the path that is being walked: researching everyday urban walking implies researching the everyday experience of materials of the city. The materials of the journeys cling to people’s bodies; there is a sensible dialogue that occurs, even if people’s awareness or attention is not focused on the environment all the time.

In the last two decades, materiality, objects and things have gained attention in social sciences. Urban studies have been a prolific field in which to reflect about materiality and materials due to the hybrid and complex entanglements of materials that compose cities, from infrastructure and buildings to bodies, vegetation and animals (Latham HI"a).

Relational understandings of materials make us aware of their constitutive role and action within social life relationships. In Latham words, the material world ‘is not just the background for the action of social, economic and political life. It is the very stuff through which these elements are produced and reproduced’ ("gX-"g[). In the same vein, I explore how the materials of the paths people walk create ways for them to participate in places in certain ways.

Following Ingold’s (HI"", PI) argument, I chose to speak about materials instead of materiality. He highlights materials’ qualities as relational and processual, something that the concept of materiality tends to neglect. In this case, it is also a matter of simplicity. To speak about materiality feels too abstract; instead, materials is a much more tangible concept to explore and write about. I think that to learn about social life and, especially, to learn about the practice of walking I need to maintain the concepts I use as near to the ground as possible.

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Here I focus on ‘greenery’ and ‘garbage’. I chose to explore the stories around these two particular types of materials based on my experiences of walking with the participants and on their reflections, such as those sparked by collage making. This does not mean these are ‘the’ ultimate materials involved in the practice of walking in Santiago. Instead, these materials were mentioned by most of the participants and triggered general reflections about the city: its needs, its minimal living conditions, and its inequality. Greenery and garbage comprise the materials that appeared to be relevant for understanding the uneven conditions that affect pedestrian practices.

The way I explored these materials was through participants’ narrations about their relationship with materials’ qualities and agencies. As I show next, those were stories about good and bad feelings, welcoming and exclusion, taking care and neglect, life and lack of life. They were not limited to the depiction of how enjoyable or annoying was the experience of some materials. Those stories also involved actions of other people in relation to the materials: those that maintain places, those that damage places, those that forget places (such as administrative institutions), those that fight for transforming places, etc. This concurs with Ingold’s (HI"", PI) suggestions about the properties of materials that ‘are neither objectively determined nor subjectively imagined but practically experienced. In that sense, every property is a condensed story’. In the following sections I detail these stories that tell about how walkers experience materials on their journeys and how those experiences are part of social relationships.

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