Negotiating the everyday city; women’s mobilities and public transportation in Saltillo, Mexico.

Access to public transportation can have a significant impact on many people’s quality of life and opportunities. It can affect access to education, jobs, and social life, and it can also shape a person’s potential for social mobility and development. Women’s urban experiences can reveal complex mobility patterns due to gender related factors. Fears of sexual assault, feelings of vulnerability, and the strain of having to juggle paid work and (often unpaid) care and household work shape women’s mobilities and these difficulties can be exacerbated by inefficient transport systems.
This thesis examines the current transportation system and its associated infrastructure in Saltillo, a city in northwestern Mexico, by implementing a mixed-method approach that combines 1) ethnographic shadowing, 2) transect walks, and 3) urban audits of bus stops. I explore the ways in which care work and gender-based violence shape women’s mobilities and how the transportation system in Saltillo and its associated infrastructure shapes their urban experiences. My research approach draws on feminist theorisations of the production of space and feminist urban geography, problematising the concept of the ‘neutral city’ through an intersectional lens.
I present a thesis-by-papers structure that delineates how the public transport system and its associated infrastructure exacerbates women’s financial, spatial, and temporal constraints (Paper Two) and how the physical characteristics of the transport infrastructure shape women’s perceptions of vulnerability (Paper Three). I also elaborate on my methodological approach rooted in a feminist-informed understanding of sentipensar (Paper One) and reflect on my fieldwork journey and positionality as a woman researching women’s mobilities in Mexico (Paper Four). This thesis also includes Chapters dedicated to the introduction (Chapter One), literature review (Chapter Two), context of the study (Chapter Three) and methodological framework (Chapter Four).

1 Sentipensar is a term in Spanish that stems from the words: sentir/to feel and pensar/to think.