Mobility, gender and urban inequality: ethnographic insights from Santiago’s public transportation system

This article examines how gender, age, and urban inequality intersect to shape experiences of insecurity in Santiago’s public transportation system. Drawing on ethnographic methods—including semi-structured interviews and shadowing with diverse users across the Metropolitan Region—the study analyzes how structural and symbolic vulnerabilities impact mobility practices. While Santiago’s public transit is formally universal, our findings show that it operates as a fragmented system where access, security, and dignity are unequally distributed. Through five cases, we develop a typology of mobility precarity based on two intersecting axes: Territorial Precarity and Identity Vulnerability. This framework distinguishes four ideal types—Privileged Mobility, Identity-based Precarity, Territory-based Precarity, and Intersectional Precarity—highlighting how different users navigate risk and exclusion depending on their spatial and social positioning. The study contributes to mobility justice literature by centering users’ situated experiences and proposing an analytical tool that is adaptable to other fragmented urban contexts. Ultimately, it calls for reimagining urban transport not only as infrastructure, but as a political and relational space where rights, risks and inequalities are made visible.