Women between freedom and obligation. Daily mobility practices in Great Buenos Aires

Abstract

In the last decades, the suburb of Buenos Aires was shaping up as a juxtaposition of mono-functional low density areas which do not form a compact city. This process focus on the growth of gated communities, country clubs, farms, and other urban residential forms; and also in commercial and employment uses, such as shopping centers, supermarkets or industrial districts, all of them forms that share a mono-functional land use bias and a “car intensive” mobility. But the suburb maintains mono-functional areas also within the compact ciyt. They are not always low density or “car intensive” ones. They are neighbourhoods with poor equipment, functions and urban services, including transport. The inhabitants need travel to other neighborhoods to access goods, services and activities of the daily life. This work explores the daily mobility of women living in poor neighbourhoods, seeking to relate the different factors that make socio-spatial inequalities, both subjectives and materials ones, related to the distribution of land use, infrastructure and urban services and transport, and integrating them into a dynamic whole. It studies the mobility practices of women at working age living in Moreno, district located in the west of Buenos Aires, about 40 kilometers from the central city (Buenos Aires). Daily mobility is understood broadly, including daily and eventual trips to different motifs as part as daily life. Mobility practices identify gender biases associated with the many activities that women perform in their dual role in public and private sphere.