Circuits and Borders: Everyday Mobility Practices from the Peripheries of La Plata, Argentina

Abstract

This article analyzes everyday mobility practices from two contrasting peripheries of the city of La Plata: Los Hornos and City Bell. Using a qualitative methodology, and understanding that mobility not only connects places but also produces and re-signifies them, it explores unequal circuits and the production of boundaries derived from differentiated uses of urban space. In Los Hornos, a periphery linked to working-class sectors, mobility is primarily instrumental, with stratified uses of public transport and the automobile to access goods and services in the urban center. In City Bell, by contrast, linked to middle-class sectors, automobile use predominates along with a bifurcated connection toward the center and Buenos Aires. The article concludes that urban hierarchies are expressed in the possibilities for movement and appropriation of urban space, revealing stillness as a class privilege and the differential management of boundaries as a central dimension of inequality.