Woman, Space and Power: City and Public Transportation as Excluder Devices. Reflections from Cali.

This work presents the results of a case study about informal transportation in the 15 and 18 communes from Cali City. Informal transportation has been working as a constant in Latin American cities. In the literature this phenomenon it is related either as an effect of neoliberal politics of the transportation systems privatization or as an evidence of the state and the public administration incapacity to take care of their own sovereignty space. This work problematizes these diagnostics and suggests a new way to address this situation. Using ethnographic techniques to observe the social places that were mentioned, this works shows how informality is a space socially constructed that evidences three main characteristics: (i) persistence of men providing the service and women users, both supportive of each other in order to resist an official system that excludes them; (ii) the massive use of this kind of transport by women from lower strata, that need to be mobilized in areas away from production centers, in a flexible and economical way, because they are excluded from the designs transportation routes; and (iii) the bureaucratization of the practices associated with the provision of informal services, that in this specific case is functional for the playback of the male privileges in the public space (control, domination, security). These findings show that, in the Cali case study, the urban spaces are social construction constituted by power vectors. As one of this vectors, gender portrait the female and male experiences of the city as different. There is a different city for a woman.