Meaningful Mobilities: The Experience of Underground Travel in the Buenos Aires Subte (1913-1944).

DHAN ZUNINO SINGH

journal of transport history

Manchester University Press

Lugar: Manchester ; Año: 2014 vol. 35

0022-5266

The paper explores, from an historical perspective, the experience of travelling on Buenos Aires Underground Railways (Subte) during the first decades of the 20th century. Reconstructing both representations of passengers and their experiences, through visual and textual sources, the paper shows how this underground mobility was a meaningful practice that expressed ambivalent sentiments towards progress and the rhythm of modern urban life. On the one hand, there was a popular fascination with respect to new technologies as well as a celebration and exaltation of this encapsulated mobility as a rational organisation of space in relation to time and, on the other, a critique of the underground railway as a form of regimentation and dehumanisation which turns passengers into automatons.