Quotidian Practices: Mapping the Gendered Mobilities and Spatial Imaginations of Young Adults in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic

• In Event: Urban Mobilities and their impact on urban practices 2

Abstract

This article reflects on a 10 month ethnographic dissertation that examines the socio-spatial mobilities of young adults living in the informal settlement of La Zurza, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. My project builds on the postcolonial critique of the state’s role in perpetuating economic and spatial informality, but centers the lived experiences of young adults, aged 18-27, by asking how young adults’ visions for their own future and their ‘spatial imaginations’ (after Upton, 2008) for the city are shaped by their everyday mobilities as well as their relationships to different urban spaces. Focusing on youth’s ‘everyday mobilities’, I suggest that everyday movements and attachment to places dialectically shape a person’s material experiences of the city, their material existence, and their future mobility aspirations.
Using data collected from anonymous GPS activity trackers, interviews and drawings, the article specifically reflects on the ways in which gender is performed by the young adults within a particular set of socio-cultural norms and power relations. In the case of La Zurza, established gender scripts are constantly performed, reinforced, and resisted by young adults as they inhabit and move through their neighborhood and their city. In the article, I re-center the embodied experience as a site of inequality, suggesting that urban planning might learn from the scale of the body in planning the future of our cities.

Author

• Raksha Vasudevan, University of Texas at Austin