Urban outreach and the polyrhythmic city

Using an ethnographic approach to urban daily mobility practices in Santiago de Chile, this chapter analyses the everyday generation of mobile places. It argues firstly that place making can be generated on the spaces encountered in mobility that is those spaces travelled on, in, by, through or within: buses, Metros, cars, bicycles or foot, become mobile places. The chapter explains that the space inside can indeed is appropriated and signified; that is, the train, aeroplane or automobile can become meaningful spaces in themselves. Travel time is experienced differently by different people, and not everyone experiences it as dead time; on the contrary, for many the moments spent on different transport modes are crucial to their everyday existence. Consequently, it also involves creating new methods to capture these mobile practices in timespace and representing them in innovative ways, including methods like the mobile ethnography presented here.