An infrastructure of embodied practices: How disabled people become part of public transport in Santiago de Chile

Abstract

This article examines how disabled people become part of public transport infrastructure through embodied and interactional practices. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and video analysis of journeys in Santiago de Chile, it explores how disabled users co-produce the system’s functioning—anchoring themselves in carriages, navigating ticketing processes, or coordinating alighting from buses. Challenging dominant framings of accessibility as material provision or personal independence, the article emphasizes the relational and distributed nature of disability and mobility. It draws on critical infrastructure studies, disability studies, and ethnomethodology to conceptualize public transport as a “coming-together” of bodies and materialities. Rather than merely revealing breakdowns or failure, the analysis foregrounds the everyday labor of care, coordination, and adjustment through which infrastructure is sustained. Disabled people’s embodied practices are shown to be infrastructural in themselves—constitutive of what allows the system to function. This perspective calls for a shift in how urban mobility is conceptualized and designed: not as a neutral system serving passive users but as an interdependent accomplishment involving human bodies, materials, and social relations. The article argues for recognition of this labor, and for planning approaches that value, rather than seek to eliminate, embodied interdependence as part of more just, inclusive urban transport.