Stories of space: narrations, mobilities and ways of dwelling the metropolis

Abstract

The article presents the methodological strategy developed for the anthropological analysis of the metropolitan experience in the southern corridor of the Metropolitan Region of Buenos Aires. The article describes: the analytical criteria implemented for the definition of the theoretical sampling that guided the field work; the construction of socio-urban types to capture the heterogeneity of the metropolitan space; the criteria for the preparation of the observation protocol and the interview guide; the operations to build “space stories”; and the analytical operations carried out with the data produced. The article reflects specifically on the productivity of the “space stories” to know the practices of space, the (in) mobilities and the resulting (and differential) ways of dwelling the metropolis. In this sense, while recognizing the impossibility of “space stories” to capture the multiplicity of dimensions involved in mobility understood as practice, meaning and experience, the article emphasizes the quality of stories as trips, narrative productions in which intersecting ways of doing and ways of believing, simultaneously informing about the practices in the metropolis and the way of meaning life in metropolis.