From the civic center to the mall: the transformation of subjectivities in the Concepción metropolitan area

Abstract

This article analyzes how neoliberal modernization implemented during the Chilean dictatorship (1973–1990) reconfigured urban subjectivities in the Concepción Metropolitan Area. It argues that the transition from an industrial city to a polycentric metropolis consolidated a territorial hegemony that reorganized infrastructures, norms, and ways of feeling, internalizing itself as an affective grammar of fear, acceleration, and consumption. A qualitative-interpretive design was used, with a socio-hermeneutic approach to discourse, based on six in-depth interviews and a focus group. The findings show a spatial and subjective shift from the historic center to extracentric commercial nodes, where the Mall del Trébol functions as a new centrality that concentrates security and services and reorganizes daily routes. This shift modifies the temporal and spatial coordinates of living. Repression and deindustrialization eroded sociability and accelerated consumerism, translating into new patterns of perception and urban practices in the post-dictatorship era and in the metropolitan landscape.