La ciudad en movimiento: Estudios históricos sobre transporte colectivo y movilidad en Santiago de Chile, siglos XIX y XX [The city on the move: Historical studies on public transport and mobility in Santiago de Chile, nineteenth and twentieth centuries] ed. by Simón Castillo and Marcelo Mardones (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• La ciudad en movimiento: Estudios históricos sobre transporte colectivo y movilidad en Santiago de Chile, siglos XIX y XX [The city on the move: Historical studies on public transport and mobility in Santiago de Chile, nineteenth and twentieth centuries] ed. by Simón Castillo and Marcelo Mardones
• Rodrigo Booth (bio)

La ciudad en movimiento: Estudios históricos sobre transporte colectivo y movilidad en Santiago de Chile, siglos XIX y XX [The city on the move: Historical studies on public transport and mobility in Santiago de Chile, nineteenth and twentieth centuries] Edited by Simón Castillo and Marcelo Mardones. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado, 2021. Pp. 282.

The circulation of people, goods, ideas, information, and energy has conditioned the modern urban experience and has defined the use of time among its inhabitants and their spatial location in the city. We can understand the modern city as a system of transportation and mobility networks. Its historical study allows us to delve into the relationship between technology and social change. This is one of the objectives of the book La ciudad en movimiento, edited by historians Simón Castillo and Marcelo Mardones.

The accelerated metropolitanization experienced by Latin American cities generated many frictions in the urban experience that have not yet been resolved. In the period of study covered by this book—that is, between 1860 and 1970—the population of Santiago grew from 115,000 inhabitants to more than 3 million, becoming one of the largest Latin American metropolises by the end of the twentieth century. The urban area, which was walkable in the mid-nineteenth century, required mechanized transportation at the beginning of the following century. In the last third of the twentieth century, it was necessary to use a lot of time and resources, combining means, to cover it completely. The urban segregation of Santiago is related to the difficult access to transportation. This book sets out to study how the introduction of successive transportation and mobility technologies sought, possibly unsuccessfully, to respond to these conflicts in the capital of Chile.

The editors of this book, together with Waldo Vila, author of one of its chapters, have been studying the history of urban transportation in the main Chilean cities for several years. Their approach has focused on the perspective [End Page 675] of urban social history, from which they have analyzed the visual history of public transportation in Valparaíso and Santiago, the establishment of the first state-owned public transportation company in the 1940s, the role of workers in technological companies, and the conflicts between means of mobility that have coexisted with difficulty in Chilean cities, such as the railroad or the electric tramway with pedestrians or automobiles. Well-versed in the urban history of Santiago's transportation, the editors have brought together an interesting group of researchers to study, from a historical perspective, the transportation and mobility of Santiago in relation to the urban and social development of Chile's capital, emphasizing issues of infrastructure, technology, planning, and its sociopolitical scope.

The results appear in seven chapters in the book that study various aspects of the history of transportation and mobility in modern Santiago. The text includes a historiographical balance on the subject, written by the editors of the book; a study on the circulation of foreign capital, mainly German and British, interested in the electric tramway business and the nationalist reaction to its malfunction during the years of World War I (Elisabet Prudant); a work on the place occupied in the second half of the nineteenth century by the Central Railway Station of Santiago, as a monument to transportation technologies (Carlos Sotoroff Neculhueque); a chapter that addresses the construction of a "cable city" that manifested itself in the process of expansion of the electric tramway system in Santiago and the relationship of these infrastructures with technological segregation in the peripheral areas of the city in the first two decades of the twentieth century (Yohad Zacarías); a study of urban cultural history referring to the paseo de los huerfanitos (promenade of the orphans), a charitable activity organized by the union of bus company workers, which contributed to the slow process of the...