The becoming of space: a geography of liminal practices of the city of Antofagasta, Chile

Abstract

In this thesis I endorse and put forward the idea that space is a practical category; that is, not a place or setting where we stand and do things, not even - or not solely - somewhere that can be variously signified by our actions and therefore symbolically constructed or evoked, but an action itself. Space, I contend, is something that we do or that other people or even things do. The argument that I hold is that we create spaces as we cope with the world that we live in. Our act of ‘coping’ is a spatial act, a mode of comportment through which we lay out what we want or do not want to do with and in the world. Space is but another mode of expressing agency, another way to bestow, obtain or elicit meanings from the world. In this context, I prefer to speak of space as a capacity: an instrument and idiom that we use to obtain things. This quality of space brings forth and illuminates its inherent political dimension. I support this reading of space on an ethnographic account of the dimensions through which urban space in the Chilean city of Antofagasta is constructed; specifically, the socio-spatial rhythms through which ideas about the house, the street and certain landscapes of consumption - a high street, a number of supermarkets, a shopping centre, a boulevard, a street market - are given social form. The ethnography shows the local people to refer their spatiality to the flow of social relationships and not to the material setting of the places they occupy (people talking of doing things somewhere rather than going somewhere to do something). My argument is that, in this light, space, far from a transparent medium, becomes the idiom or dimension through which certain people effect their agency.