Women’s Urban Cycling in Santiago: Affect, Agency, and the Right to the City
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29393/UR21-4CUVM10004Keywords:
urban mobility, gender, affect; cycling, right to the cityAbstract
This article examines how young women cyclists in Santiago experience, interpret, and inhabit the city through their affective relations. While existing research on women’s cycling has largely focused on risks, barriers, and forms of violence, this study explores the positive dimensions that sustain cycling in urban environments perceived as hostile. Drawing on a qualitative, interpretive, and phenomenological approach, and using in-depth interviews and photovoice, the study analyzes the embodied experiences of ten young women cyclists. The findings reveal four affective nodes —freedom, pleasure, calm, and self-confidence— that shape mobility decisions, generate wellbeing, and enable forms of urban presence that challenge androcentric imaginaries and practices. These affects not only coun-terbalance fear but also reconfigure the relationship between body and city, turning everyday routes into spaces of agency, self-care, and claims to the right to the city. The results show that women’s urban cycling constitutes a political practice that combines resistance, pleasure, and care, and highlight the need for urban design approaches that incorporate affective, sensory, and embodied dimensions to foster more just, inclusive, and emotionally sustainable mobilities.
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